Coptic Light [REPOST]

Morton Feldman - Coptic Light

Performers:

New World Symphony Orchestra; Michael Tilson Thomas - artistic director
Alan Feinberg - piano [Piano and Orchestra]
Robert Cohen - cello [Cello and Orchestra]

Recording location: Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Recording dates: January 9 and 10, 1995

For a composer to be recognised and to win some kind of following, he [or she] needs to create an identity. Sometimes that comes about by association, and Feldman was first known, in the 1950s, by association with John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. They were not very alike as composers, but they did share an interest in allowing aspects of their work to be indeterminate. Feldman said he did not wish to organise anything. Like many of his statements, it's a flash of insight which shouldn't be applied too rigorously; even so, throughout his life, Feldman remained an intuitive composer who was unimpressed by systems or mathematical games.
He was, above all, an aesthete, with strong, inspirational friendships among New York painters like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. The new painting made Feldman was a more direct, immediate and physical sound-world than already existed. But he wanted it to be anonymous. Even a pioneer 'liberator of sound', Edgard Varese, whom Feldman greatly admired, was for him too personal, too 'Varese". Speaking about one of his own early graph pieces, Projection No. 2, Feldman said his idea was not to 'compose', but to project sounds into time, free from compositional rhetoric.
Feldman is far from being the first composer whose avowed aim is agreeably contradicted by his work. Far from being anonymous, his music is readily recognised, and it became more so as Feldman grew older. For him, the impetus of a composition was in its vertical quality, and in that sense, its lack of impetus. He even wrote a series of pieces in 1963 called Vertical Thoughts. Feldman's titles reveal a good deal about his musical aims. Many of them are like the functional-sounding descriptions often given to still-life paintings, listing or abbreviating the 'objects', or in Feldman's case, the instruments, as in Cello and Orchestra and Piano and Orchestra. Hearing Feldman talk about his ideas on one occasion, Earle Brown protested that there was surely more to composition than choosing the instruments, to which Feldman answered: 'Not for me'. He later retracted that rather hasty retort. Yet one knows what he meant: for each of his pieces is an exploration - or perhaps a contemplation - of the colouristic possibilities in a particular combination, similar in selective concentration to the immense, throbbing patches of paint that hover on a Rothko canvas, which are not only non-figurative, but without any signs or graphic gestures at all.
Like most generalisations, these observations need qualifying. In 1970 Feldman wrote a series of three pieces called The Viola in My Life, featuring that instrument and inspired by the playing and friendship of Karen Phillips. Two of these introduced a modest melodic element - more apparent than in Cello and Orchestra. Then, in the early 1980s, in immensely long works like Triadic Memories for solo piano, and the Second String Quartet, Feldman extended himself on a vast scale with short, repeated modules or groups of notes, meticulously notated to avoid any sense of a regular beat, suspended or placed with fastidious care, and almost Debussian in their delicate sonorous hues.
Feldman liked his sounds to be without apparent source, which meant, very often, without 'attack'. The impossibility for musicians to achieve what he wanted was the very thing that held his interest. Cello and Orchestra is typical in being 'extremely quiet' (the marking at the top of the score). The cautious, stepwise and virtually rhythmless motion of the solo part is occasionally relieved by pizzicato, and the patches of orchestral colour against which it is set are momentarily broken by semitional oscillations on two trumpets, marked quintuple piano, without mutes!
Piano and Orchestra, again marked 'extremely quiet' and also 'without the feeling of a beat', is more varied in its manner of creating sonorities - for in Feldman's music it's not really appropriate to talk of harmony or rhythm, even though what we hear together, and when we hear it, are crucial. The proof of both being answerable to the composer's judgement lies in the lack of monotony and the sense of organic renewal. Our ears are constantly refreshed. Basically, the sounds occur like tolling bells, though towards the end, a trio of oboes sustains a tangle of conflicting semitones for several seconds. The pianist has to encompass enormous stretches and must balance the widely spaced notes exactly and without spreading them. As if this unobtrusive and almost inaudible virtuosity weren't sufficiently self-denying, he is echoed by an orchestral pianist sharing much of the same material, so it's impossible to tell one from the other without a score. By way of surprise, this is one of Feldman's very rare pieces to include one or two outbursts of triple forte.
The title of Coptic Light requires some explanation. Feldman was a connoisseur of oriental carpets, and here the reference is to early Coptic textiles which he saw in the Louvre. Feldman's own comments are rather cryptic: 'What struck me about these fragments of coloured cloth was how they conveyed an essential atmosphere of their civilisation. I asked myself what aspects of music since Monteverdi might determine its atmosphere if heard two thousand years from now'. Certainly, the New York Philharmonic, for whom Coptic Light was written, can never have had a less showy vehicle. Yet the effect of these constantly reassembled, rearranged sounds, like quiet breathing or lapping water, is magical. Feldman used to compose at the piano, and he liked to recall what Sibelius once said about about the orchestra, which was that unlike the piano, it had no pedal. He said that in Coptic Light he had tried to create an orchestral pedal, continually varying in nuance; and we can imagine him, seated like Gulliver over some hundred-odd Lilliputian musicians, planting his huge hands very gently over their instruments, listening as he levered his right foot up and down, letting some sounds go while others yet linger. (Adrian Jack)
Tracklisting:

1. Piano and Orchestra {22:49}

2. Cello and Orchestra {21:05}

3. Coptic Light {29:42}

(1)