Doris Hays (Plays Various Artists)-ADORATION OF THE CLASH (Finnadar 1979)

Doris Hays- ADORATION OF THE CLASH

Notes excerpted from the cover (enclosed) by Doris Hays:

Tone clusters: ideal rebellious gesture to topple the sacred Western muse off its sacred pedestal. A forearm bangs, and the tedium of linearity is broken, its intractable logic punctuated by the rude rough mass of second intervals- fingered, palmed, armed, and fisted for the clash.

Doris Hays: Sunday Nights (1977)
...Sunday Nights in Rossville, Georgia, at McFarland Memorial Methodist Church, when I was a teenager, and Mr Hudgeons led the hymn singing with his fist and the bass line. Sunday Nights is a recollection of those 4th and 5th intervals and tune fragments and a memory of the boredoms , tyranny and uncertain promise of church religion.

Henry Cowell: Piece For Piano Paris 1924
uses strumming, plucking, damping, and hitting the strings inside the piano (hence his term "string piano') in addition to fist, forearm and palm clusters.

Russell Peck: Suspended Sentence (1973)
Peck's own ideas about Suspended Sentence:
"...of desperate flight, a trip down blind alleys, trying to get started but can't get started. I was trying to write a piece that was purely pornosonic, had no structural coherence whatsoever. Hopefully this is not achieved. Definition of pornosonic: titillation of the senses without any deeper significance."

Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926) has written much music for traditional instrumental, as well as his better-known electronic music, which often contains collage, thick texture,overlay of different musical events. A surprise to those who know only the latter, his music for piano, string quartets, etc, is characterized by lyrical line and an expressive quality not often associated with composers of electronic music. Rosa reflects in its title and expressive intensity, as do all his compositions, Mimaroglu's deep passion for personal action towards the changing of society.

Morton Feldman: Vertical Thoughts IV; and Piano Piece (to Philip Guston) both composed in 1963. Marked extremely soft, both pieces record louder than they might be heard in live performance. Even at very soft dynamic levels, the minor seconds in this fingered cluster harmony prick the ear, often not lasting long enough to mellow out before the next vertical aggregate is quietly piled into place.

Leo Ornstein: Impressions De Notre Dame, I and II
Ornstein began his life as a piano virtuoso, but left public performance fairly early to give his time to writing music. His performances in the teens and twenties caused much excitement because of the music's dense harmonies, ferocious in loud passages; particularly one piece for which Ornstein is well known- Danse Sauvage or Wild Man's Dance.
In the past several years his music has been again brought to the attention of a larger public with frequency in performances of his keyboard music, notably his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra performed at Yale University in 1976.
Born in 1892 (or 1894) in Kremenchug, Russia, Leo Ornstein lives with his wife in Brownsville Texas.

(Addendum: Ornstein died Feb 24th 2002, aged 108 or 110 years.)
























Doris Hays-Adoration Of The Clash (Finnadar 1979)

Side One:
1- Doris Hays– Sunday Nights (5:17)
2- Henry Cowell– Piece For Piano Paris 1924 (5:32)

Side Two:
3- Russell Peck– Suspended Sentence (9:24)

Side Three:
4- Ilhan Mimaroglu– Rosa (5:10)
5- Morton Feldman– Vertical Thoughts IV (1:30)
6- Morton Feldman– Piano Piece (To Philip Guston) (2:52)

Side Four:
7&8- Leo Ornstein- Impressions De Notre-Dame (11:41)
7 – First Impression (5:09)
8– Second Impression (6:32)


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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}

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Feldman Chamber Music

Morton Feldman - Chamber Music

Performed by Ensemble Avantgarde:
Kerstin Klein - soprano (track 1)
Markus Kohler - baritone (tracks 2, 3 and 4)
Ralf Mielke - flute (track 8)
Matthias Kreher - clarinet (track 8)
Johannes Winkler - horn (track 1)
Jochen Pleb - horn (track 5)
Stefan Stopora - percussion (tracks 1, 3, 5, 7 and 8)
Winfried Nitzsche - percussion (track 8)
Steffen Schleiermacher - piano/celesta (tracks 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8)
Andreas Seidel - violin (tracks 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8)
Ivo Bauer - viola (track 4)
Matthias Moosdorf - violoncello (tracks 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8)
Direction - Roland Kluttig (track 8)

I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important. What the American painter Franz Kline (1910-62) said about his paintings - brusque, black brush gestures on a white background - can be applied equally to Morton Feldman's composition. Composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the "black" of the notes as, ex negativo, with the "white" silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman's music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early - nonfigurative - paintings of his painter-friend Philip Guston (1913-80): the complete absence of gravity of a painting that is not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves, as Feldman once wrote. Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts: Stasis, as it is utilized in painting, is not traditionally part of the apparatus of music. [...] The degrees of stasis found in a [Mark] Rothko or Guston were perhaps the most significant elements that I brought to my music from painting. (Peter Niklas Wilson)

Tracklisting:

1. For Franz Kline {5:12}

2. The O'Hara Songs I {4:53}

3. The O'Hara Songs II {1:45}

4. The O'Hara Songs III {3:49}

5. De Kooning {14:46}

6. Piano Piece to Philip Guston {3:18}

7. Four Instruments {12:21}

8. For Frank O'Hara {15:49}

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The Avant Garde String Quartet in the USA

various artists compilation - The Avant Garde String Quartet in the USA

I'm going to be taking the next few days off for the Memorial Day three-day weekend holiday as I'll be spending some time with relatives. Also, I apologize that there will not be a nature/environmental sounds post this upcoming Sunday.

Meanwhile, here is this 3-LP set of interesting string quartet pieces by notable and interesting composers. This should keep everybody busy for a while as there is over 2 hours of music to digest.

Performed by The Concord String Quartet

Mark Sokol - violin

Andrew Jennings - violin

John Kochanowski - viola

Norman Fischer - violincello

released in 1973

From the liner notes by Lejaren Hiller:

The present album is the third part of a projected three volume survey of the development of the American string quartet from its beginnings in colonial times. The first album, "The Early American String Quartet," already released as Vox Box SVBX-5301, contains performances by the Kohon String Quartet of works ranging historically from a string quartet attributed to Benjamin Franklin to works by early 20th-century composers like George Chadwick and Charles Griffes. A projected second album is planned to fill the gap between that set and the present one, which is a survey of the period since the end of World War II.

There is no doubt that writing string quartets appeals to composers today just as in the past. The number of such compositions written during the past twenty-five years by recognized composers both here and abroad is by no means small despite the fact that the contemporary composer often finds it difficult to persuade established performance groups to extend their repertoires beyond the "classics" - especially if his work is technically or stylistically innovative. The Concord String Quartet, here making its recording debut, is a happy exception among these performance groups because it is currently engaged not only in learning a substantial number of works composed in America since World War II but is commissioning new works as well. The performances of the compositions recorded here, all of which have been worked out with the composers, are a first realization of this commitment.

One of the striking characteristics of the contemporary American string quartet literature is its enormous variety, a feature that will be immediately obvious upon listening to the music in this album. There is not a quartet included here that does not exhibit a strong and independent musical profile. Stylistic heterogeniety and healthy eclecticism have always been characteristic traits of the best American Music and the literature here demonstrates that this continues to be so. The particular quartets recorded here provide a distinguished cross-section of what has been written during the past two decades. It goes without saying that this group of works by no means exhausts the list of first-rate compositions for the medium.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Stefan Wolpe - String Quartet: I. 92 {8:10}

2. Stefan Wolpe - String Quartet: II. 144 {8:54}

3. Earle Brown - String Quartet {11:29}

Side 2

1. John Cage - String Quartet in Four Parts: I. Quietly Flowing Along {4:33}

2. John Cage - String Quartet in Four Parts: II. Slowly Rocking {4:56}

3. John Cage - String Quartet in Four Parts: III. Nearly Stationary {10:17}

4. John Cage - String Quartet in Four Parts: IV. Quodlibet {1:19}

Side 3

1. George Crumb - Black Angels (Images II) for Electric String Quartet {22:10}

Side 4

1. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): I. Theme I {1:13}

2. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): II. Variations {5:23}

3. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): III. Theme II {1:16}

4. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): IV. Variations {7:49}

5. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): V. Theme III {1:18}

6. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): VI. Variations {7:56}

7. Lejaren Hiller - String Quartet No. 5 (In Quarter Tones): VII. Theme IV {1:09}

Side 5

1. Leon Kirchner - Quartet No. 3 for String Quartet and Electronic Tape {17:37}

2. Christian Wolff - Summer {4:30}

Side 6

1. Jacob Druckman - String Quartet No. 2 {18:14}

2. Morton Feldman - Structures for String Quartet {5:52}

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Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time

various artists compilation - Leonard Bernstein Conducts Music of Our Time

performed by the New York Philharmonic

additional performers on "Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists": Don Ellis - trumpet; Barre Phillips - bass; Joe Cocuzzo - drums

released in 1965

Part of the excitement of living in the mid-twentieth century is our fever for exploration. Outer space, inner space, the cosmos, the atom, the intellectual realm of mathematics and the intuitive world of music: all our worlds are expanding with the speed of an interplanetary missle, a speed both exhilarating and frightening.

As recently as 1950, neo-classicism seemed to dominate contemporary music. Yet, barely seven years later, Robert Craft could declare that a majority of the youngest West European musicians, having embraced serialism, now characterized their time as "the age of Webern." And that age had hardly been named before it was over. Important serial music continued to be written, of course, but the excitement of exploration shifted to a still newer wave of composers, for whom serial procedures were a stale formula. Electronic music (including musique concrete) and chance music lured a whole platoon of composers. Many explored musical styles in which form and constructive methods lost their importance, and interest shifted to sheer physical sound, acoustical "events," in a striking parallel to the optical "events" of current "pop" art.

It is a striking fact that the three works in this album, by György Ligeti (born 1923), Morton Feldman (born 1926), and Larry Austin (born 1930), were all composed in the year 1961.

In a way, György Ligeti's "Atmospheres" is the most conservative of the three, for it is the only one completely composed by the composer. Commissioned by the Southwest German Radio of Baden-Baden, it was first performed at Donaueschingen on October 22, 1961, under the direction of Hans Rosbaud. Ligeti, who was born in Hungary and now lives in Vienna, writes of his music: "My personal development began with serial music, but today I have passed beyond serialism. In 'Atmospheres', I have attempted to supersede the structural approach to music which once, in turn, superseded the motivic-thematic approach, and to establish a new textural concept of music. . . . This so-to-speak informal music is embodied in a new type of orchestral sound: the sonorous texture is so dense that the individual interwoven instrumental voices are absorbed into the general texture, and completely lose their individuality. This is the reason for the unusual format of the orchestral score, which is noted on eighty-seven staves, since the string instruments are written completely divisi, that is, with an individual part for each player."

Morton Feldman's "Out of 'Last Pieces'" is a more radical work in the sense that it is only partly composed in advance. Such details as pitch and rhythm of the notes are left to the individual orchestral player's discretion. For his new, semi-improvised music, Mr. Feldman had to invent a new system of musical notation. He chose graph paper. "The discovery that sound in itself can be a totally plastic phenomenon, suggesting its own shape, design and poetic metaphor, led me to devise a new system of graphic notation," writes Mr. Feldman. "'Out of 'Last Pieces'' (1961) was written on coordination paper, with each box equal to mm. 80 [or one-eightieth of a minute]. The number of sounds to be played within each box is given, with the player entering on or within the duration of each box. Dynamics throughout are very low. The amplified guitar, harp, celesta, vibraphone, and xylophone may choose sounds from any register. All other sounds are played in the high registers of the instruments, except for brief sections in which low sounds are indicated."

Larry Austin's "Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists" is based in part on the popular American tradition of jazz improvisation and the jam session. Composed in June, 1961, it was first performed in May, 1962, during the first International Jazz Festival held in Washington, D.C. Discussing his aim, Mr. Austin writes: "At strategic points throughout the work are brief moments in which individual performers - at times orchestral, at times jazz, at times both - invent rhythmic designs on given pitches within specified spans of time. I believe this 'uncontrolled' element injects moments of creative tension in the work not readily obtained in a situation completely controlled by the composer. I strive to involve the performer and the listener in active music making." The work is divided into three connected sections: the first based on variants of the traditional twelve-bar blues, the second a slow blues, and the third based on a Charleston-like rhythm.

The most radical of the four pieces on this disc, "Four Improvisations by the Orchestra," was composed at the moment of the recording. In other words, it is almost one hundred percent improvised. "The orchestra and I are going to compose on the spot," said Leonard Bernstein to the audience in Philharmonic Hall, when he and the orchestra first improvised in public. "Nothing has been fixed or decided upon in advance except two or three signals for starting and stopping. Otherwise, every note you hear will have been spontaneously invented by the New York Philharmonic, with its conductor serving only as a kind of general guide, or policeman. Here is the New York Philharmonic's 'Improvisation No. 1,' which has never been played before, and never will be again."

The New York Philharmonic's "Improvisations Nos. 2, 3 and 4" were heard at succeeding concerts at Philharmonic Hall. The "Improvisations" on this disc bears no number. Like the earlier Philharmonic improvisations, this had never been heard before the moment of recording and, by its nature, it can never be performed again. (Edward Downes)

Tracklisting:

Side I

1. György Ligeti - Atmosphères {6:38}

2. Morton Feldman - Out of "Last Pieces" {10:34}

Side II

1. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic - Four Improvisations by the Orchestra: I {0:55}

2. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic - Four Improvisations by the Orchestra: II {1:51}

3. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic - Four Improvisations by the Orchestra: III {1:29}

4. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic - Four Improvisations by the Orchestra: IV {2:19}

5. Larry Austin - Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists {11:51}

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Extended Voices

various artists compilation - Extended Voices

New pieces for chorus and voices altered electronically by sound synthesizers and vocoder.

Performed by The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus; Alvin Lucier, director

EXTENDED VOICES is an apt title for this album, for the simple reason that all of the works here either extend the human voice physically or enlarge the performance situation of choral music.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Pauline Oliveros - Sound Patterns {3:57}

2. Alvin Lucier - North American Time Capsule 1967 {10:11}

(for voices and Sylvania Electronic Systems vocoder)

3. John Cage - Solos for Voice 2 {12:36}

(electronic realization by Gordon Mumma and David Tudor)

Side 2

1. Robert Ashley - She Was a Visitor {5:46}

2. Toshi Ichyanagi - Extended Voices {10:57}

(for voices with Moog synthesizer and Buchla Associates Electronic Modular System)

3. Morton Feldman - Chorus and Instruments (II) {5:02}

(Harvey Phillips - tuba; John Bergamo - chimes)

4. Morton Feldman - Christian Wolff in Cambridge {3:46}

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Morton Feldman/Earle Brown split release

Morton Feldman/Earle Brown - split release

I had to deal with some issues with my computer, so I had to go the past few days without posting. Now I return to regular posting with an LP of music containing beauty and depth. If you have been a regular visitor of this blog, you're most likely already familiar with Feldman and Brown. Feldman's music is on the first side of the LP and Brown's music is on the other side. This was first released by Time Records in the early 1960s then re-released by Mainstream Records in the later half of the decade. There are explanations of their music from the liner notes given by both Feldman and Brown.


Performers:

Durations (1960-61)

Don Hammond - alto flute
Don Butterfield - tuba
David Tudor - piano
Philip Kraus - vibraphone
Matthew Raimondi - violin
David Soyer - cello

In Durations I arrive at a more complex style where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.
In each piece the instruments begin simultaneously, and are then free to choose their own durations within a given general tempo. The sounds themselves are designated.
The pieces, while looking identical on paper, were actually conceived quite differently. In Durations I the quality of the particular instruments together suggested a closely written kaleidescope of sound. To achieve this I wrote each voice individually, choosing intervals that seemed to erase or cancel out each sound as soon as we hear the next.
In the Durations with the tuba, the weight of the three instruments used made me treat them as one. I wrote all sounds simultaneously, knowing that no instrument would ever be too far behind or too far ahead of the other. Through thinning and thickening my sounds I kept the image intact. In Durations IV there was a combination of both. Here I was a little more precise in that I gave metronome indications. I also allowed the instruments to have their own individual color more pronouncedly than in the others. (Morton Feldman)


Performers:

Music for Violin, Cello and Piano (1952)

Matthew Raimondi - violin
David Soyer - cello
David Tudor - piano

Music for Cello and Piano (1955)

David Soyer - cello
David Tudor - piano

Hodograph I (1959)

Don Hammond - flute
Philip Kraus - orchestra bells, vibraphone, marimba
David Tudor - piano, celeste

In [Alexander] Calder, the construction of units and their placement in a flexible situation which subjects the original relationships to constant and virtually unpredictable but inherent change (the movement of the units as well as the movement of the viewer), led me to construct units of rhythmic groups, (with assigned intensities but "open" timbre possibilities subject to an independent timbral-density plan) modify them according to previously mentioned "generative" techniques, and assemble them rather arbitrarily ... accepting the fact that all possible assemblages were inherently possible and valid. This is, in general, the technique used in three "twelve-tone" works, using rows but no other rules of twelve-tone writing, between 1950 and 1952. Music for Violin, Cello and Piano is the second work in this group, the last being "Perspectives" (1952) the title of which refers to the "mobile" concept.
In works from 1952 and 1953, assembled under the title "Folio," the concept of mobility, which previously resulted in one static version of compositionally mobile elements, was extended to include the physical mobility of the score itself and attempts to encourage conceptual "mobility" in the performers approach to the score ... the scores being in different invented notations of a highly ambiguous graphic nature, subject to numerous different but inherently valid realizations. The notation used in Music for Cello and Piano is developed from graphic experiments of "Folio." It is what I have called a "time notation" because of its lack of dependence on any rational metric system and its reliance upon the performers' actions relative to their "time sense" of the graphic spatial relationships. The notation intentionally encourages varying realizations of the given material; between the instruments in any one performance, and from performance while at the same time presenting the performers with an unequivocal basic graphic situation.
There are two very different notations used in Hodograph I. The first is the "time notation" of "Folio" and Music for Cello and Piano, called in the preface to the work, "explicit"; explicit in that frequency, intensity, timbre, modes of attack, and relative duration are given. The second notation is called "implicit," in that it implies the amount and character of activity (all of the above characteristics of sound) by means of line drawings. There are three, fifteen second, "implicit" areas in the score, interrupting the "explicit" areas sporadically.... The juxtaposition of the two notations produces a result which is a spontaneous correlation between the performers individual responses, and the varying degrees of ambiguity and explicitness in the notations. (Earle Brown)

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Morton Feldman - Durations I: Violin-Cello-Alto-Flute-Piano {8:01}

2. Morton Feldman - Durations II: Cello-Piano {6:34}

3. Morton Feldman - Durations III: Violin-Tuba-Piano {8:52}

4. Morton Feldman - Durations IV: Violin-Cello-Vibraphone {4:15}

Side 2

1. Earle Brown - Music for Violin, Cello and Piano {2:57}

2. Earle Brown - Music for Cello and Piano {9:04}

3. Earle Brown - Hodograph I {3:30}

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Triadic Memories

Morton Feldman - Triadic Memories

Excerpted remarks on Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman during a speech made for the American premiere of the piece on March 12, 1982 at Baird Hall, the State University of New York at Buffalo:

...Takahashi appears to be absolutely still. Undisturbed, unperturbed, as if in a concentrated prayer. Kafka writes about approaching his work as if in a state of prayer.

And the painter Philip Gaston also talked about the state similar to this, and marvelled how Piero della Francesca or Montagna could bring it to all their work, as Aki Takahashi does. The effect of her playing to me is that I feel privileged to be invited to a very religious ritual.

And then there is the music itself. Without getting overly technical, the music is made of essentially just two different kinds of intervals: a minor second, a major second which of course is also a minor seventh and a major seventh. And it is by superimposing other like intervals that the chord formations are made. I was always very interested in writing music, where you thought one way and yet it sounded another. And this piece is really no exception

....I just want to make one very important point, actually, because Miss Takahashi keeps the pedal half-down throughout the piece, and I don't want you to feel in a sense that she's one of these pianists that never take the pedal off. And the half-pedal down changes something, it's like a thin jig saw in which the music works very very well with, also it does produce, in a sense, and actually added various problems to the piece; because anyone who knows, or composes or who even plays the piano knows that things tend to get a little muddy or they start to buzz at certain places. And so it was very interesting for me to actually find a new palette that worked very, very well with just this half-pedal down. And now Aki Takahashi.

Tracklisting:

1. Triadic Memories {60:16}

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Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano

Morton Feldman - Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano

performers: 

Rene Berman - cello; Kees Wieringa - piano

Excerpts from the liner notes:

It is useless to debate the question '...Is the music of Morton Feldman "good" or "bad"...' John Cage stated in his book Silence: 'Feldman's music Is...' This is not just another cryptic remark by probably the most famous American avant garde composer of this century. On the contrary, it is one of the most sensible things ever written about the music of Morton Feldman. When listening to his Untitled composition for cello and piano (1981) too, one can be surprised by the feeling that this music escapes a judgement of value. Only those who dare to really listen with an open mind (both a challenge and an invitation) get a chance to understand Feldman's music, a chance to enter a new world of sound.

The concept of 'tempo', as meaning the structuring of time in music, is almost destroyed in Feldman's music: in his music the measurement of time, the perception of metre and rhythm becomes practically impossible. In Untitled composition metre has lost its traditional meaning, it just serves as a tool that makes it possible to determine the duration of the notes. This implicates that the listener has to listen to this music with a different attitude than he is used to do. The concept of music as a language that can be molded into a logical, linear form has been put aside by Feldman. To him composing was no longer the ordering of sounds in time. Feldman's works are about the unfolding of individual sounds in total freedom, not hindered by metre - an instrument to order sound in a time structure.

Untitled composition confronts the listener with contradictions. The piece is long, but no clear musical form can be discerned: the composer uses traditional and wellknown instruments, but in a very different way than usual; the music sounds anonymous, but it unquestionably bears the mark of Morton Feldman's musical personality.

Tracklisting:

1. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.1 {5:35}

2. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.2 {6:32}

3. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.3 {6:45}

4. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.4 {12:03}

5. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.5 {10:48}

6. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.6 {10:17}

7. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.7 {5:31}

8. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.8 {8:09}

9. Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano: 1.9 {6:24}

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Rothko Chapel & Why Patterns?

This one is for Hortense. Morty-time again, with an excellent version of "Rothko Chapel", backed with a spacey sounding "Why Patterns?". Gotta love the beautiful Glockenspiel.

* * *

MF: The Rothko Chapel piece was a very interesting commission because it was the only score where other factors determined what kind of music it was going to be. For example, it leaned very heavily on me that the first time I met Rothko, which must have been around 1962, I remember him standing against the wall talking to me about Mendelssohn. He liked the combination of the youth and the lyricism of Mendelssohn, all the fantastic pieces he wrote as such a young man. Rothko got a big kick out of that. So when I wrote the Rothko Chapel I remembered that Rothko did a lot of paintings with the WPA, social realist, and then I saw the whole life of this guy. So what I decided in the Rothko Chapel was to treat it very - not biographical, but my identity was such that I decided to write an autobiographical piece. The piece begins in a synagoguey type of way; a little rhetorical and declamatory. And as I get older the piece gets a little abstract, just like my own career. Then in the middle of the piece there is one thing that is really at odds with the other parts but which makes the piece a very interesting trip: where I just have the same chords, and I'm tripping for a long time, and it's very monochromey.

GB: Are those the vocal harmonies?
MF: Yes, that is a very monochromey section. It's going on for a long time and that's where I reach this degree of abstraction. Not that I'm imitating Rothko but I'm certainly closer to the late pictures that are in the Chapel in that kind of one hue of a colour, and the piece ends with the memory of a piece that I wrote when I was fourteen.

GB: There are a few features about that ending which are strange: for example, that very tonal extended tune with a very steady, vibraphone accompaniment.
MF: Then there is a tune in the middle of the piece, a dialogue between a soprano and timpani and viola, which was a little Stravinskyish on purpose: I wrote that tune the day Stravinsky died. So it was Stravinsky, Rothko, dead. It was the only piece - and it will never happen again - when all kinds of facts, literary facts, reminiscent facts, came into the piece.
FO: You wrote it for the chapel.
MF: I think the orchestration was to some degree affected by the fact that I was writing it for a big production at the chapel. I went down there and I just walked around the chapel. It is built in a kind of glamorous idea of his studio. Actually the studio was bigger than the chapel, and it just cried out - the octagonal situation - to do something at the sides. That's where the antiphonal chorus came in, and something in the middle, and then they had the benches in the middle and they could bring in others. Visually too the whole battery of percussion looks nice.

From: Morton Feldman Interview, by Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars, conducted in London on 27 May 1976

* * *

Feldman wrote "Why Patterns?" for himself to play with Eberhard Blum, flute(s) and Jan Williams, glockenspiel. The score consists of three completely notated but metrically unaligned parts. Theoretically one could say the notation is thus fixed but in playing the piece many times, one discovers a fair degree of latitude concerning vertical coincidence. The musical material consists largely of differentiated, overlapping ostinatos, hence the title. Originally it concluded when the last player completed their part. This was always Feldman, not only because the piano part is the longest but also because he invariably played the slowest. The present ending (the vertically aligned pulsing with the glockenspiel playing a descending chromatic scale) was added after the first performance. (Nils Vigeland)
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[maybe reposted soon]

Feldman: Elemental Procedures

"All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, selfperception maintains in being. Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescability of self-perception. "

(text for "Elemental Procedures": Introduction to "Film", 1964, by Samuel Beckett)

Morton Feldman:

1 Principal Sound (1980) for organ

2 Words and Music (1987), radio play

for two speakers, two flutes, vibraphone, piano, violin, viola, cello

(Less Words Edit)

script by Samuel Beckett

3 Elemental Procedures (1976) for soprano, chorus and orchestra

"Words and Music"

There are two recordings released of this piece, one of Feldman's last completed compositions. The first one features the spoken text in English and is impossible to get - and I never had the chance to hear it. The second release is rather easy to get. The Ensemble Recherche does a good interpretation of the music. Problem is, tough - this production sucks. And it sucks big time.

Instead of delivering their texts in manners befitting Beckett's words and Feldman's music, the two speakers - stage actors of profession - intone and dramatize like it's the end of the world and they wanna show one last time how uber-dramatic and outburstingly expressive they can do their stuff. Before entering hell. Where they belong for this. Along with the vocal director and producers of this record.

Finding this recording unlistenable, I decided to make my own edit of the record, cutting out the speaker-only segments. And lo, behold! It worked. For me, at least. Judge for yourself. The few remaining kagel-lish vocal snippets (didn't want to leave any of the music out) seem a little irritating for a Feldman, okay. But hearing this rather short piece with its greater number of different patterns and pacings from 1987 is almost like discovering a new side of Feldman, after the large-scale reductionist patterning of works like "Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" (from the same year). I hope you'll like it. "Elemental Procedures"
"... I was given a commission by the Köln Radio, and he thought I fit in fine - it was called the New Simplicity, twenty-five years, thirty years later, there was finally the New Simplicity, and of course my music and Steve Reich, and Phil Glass and the minimal music from Europe. So here he told me the title of the thing, and I got this nice commission, where I could bring in my own soloists, which I did and chorus and orchestra, and write a piece for the New Simplicity. But for some particular reason, that was, being that it was the seventies, and so mid-Seventies, and being that the mid-seventies was, as far as I could see a very - where middle age composers, painters and everybody became very competitive, and very worried, and I was no exception, and for whatever reason, not that I thought I was gonna knock 'em out in Europe, but I found out that the new simplicity was developing into the new complexity. And I wrote, for me, an unusually complex piece. And I was very embarrassed actually the fact that it was on that festival called the New Simplicity ..."

Morton Feldman Lecture, April 17th 1982, Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto, Canada

"Principal Sound"
This exciting piece has a rather strong alienating effect on the listener. Nothing less than "Feldman in Space". And not just on the Moon or Mars, but another Galaxy altogether, with cube-shaped planets and strange creatures that look like organ pipes. Abstract organisms.

Compilation and cover by H.C. Earwicker

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Morton Feldman: Three Voices

Edition Michael Frauenlob Bauer
Recorded 1984 at WDR, Cologne

...

This composition from 1982 is scored for three soprano voices. Feldman specified that all parts be sung by one singer, meaning that one voice is performed live, while the other two have to be pre-recorded and played back via two speakers, one for each voice. The words used are from Frank O'Hara's poem "Wind", dedicated to Feldman.

Beth Griffith did a wonderful job on this recording, setting the overall tempo considerably slower than in some of the later released versions. Mediating a feel of unrest, it may not be the easiest listen among Feldman's later, longer pieces, but it's definitely a very interesting and unique one. "The variety of textures - heterophony, homophony, hocket, unison, fauxbourdon, coloratura, and a combination of pedal point with something that might best be described as 'voice-crossing on every note' - holds together an extremely delicate chromatic structure that recalls associations with close harmony as well as with the madrigals of Gesualdo."

- Paul van Emmerik in his liner notes of the LP.

... bad thoughts imprisoned in crystal

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Violin Solo: Feldman, Zimmermann & Sabat

Canadian violinist Marc Sabat with an extraordinary solo program (unreleased radio recordings):

Walter Zimmermann, IMO highly underrated, was Feldman's student in the 80s and has published some essential essays - including texts on Feldman as well as on his own musical concepts. Zimmermann's "Lokale Musik", developed from the late 70s to the early 80s, was based on his own research in the field of traditional German folk songs and dances, mainly from the region of Frankonia. Similar to Cage, but in a more pragmatic way, Zimmermann is also influenced by far-east philosophy. "Die Sorge geht über den Fluss", a composition in just intonation, is based on the 220th fable by Hygin(us). Beautifully picturesque. You'll be hearing more of him here soon...

Sabat's own two studies on Feldman's use of accidentals as means of creating sound/color nuances were written in the "Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation", developed by Sabat with german composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Compared to more conventional - or convenient - intonations, these systems do sound more interesting, but they also require some getting-used-to for the unaccustomed listener.

Morton Feldman, master of orchestration and instrumental color, is featured with two pieces, both discovered postmortem in the Feldman archives in Switzerland. "For Aaron Copland", a rather short and very subtle hommage to Feldman's long-time friend and mentor Copland, opens the set aptly. The second Feldman piece,"Composition", is an unfinished violin solo: It would probably have grown into something considerably longer if Feldman hadn't abandoned it when he started working on "Violin and String Quartet".In fact, this fragment reminds a lot of "Violin and String Quartet": the patterning is similarly careful and searching, and Feldman's use of accidentals provides Sabat with an excellent opportunity to apply his own intonation system (see above). Maximum microtonality, highly recommended.

1 Morton Feldman: For Aaron Copland (1981)
2 + 3 Walter Zimmermann: Die Sorge geht ueber den Fluss I + II (1993/2000)
4 + 5 Marc Sabat: Intonation after Morton Feldman - Study I + II (2004)
6 Morton Feldman: Composition (1984)

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Morton Feldman: "Why Webern?" - H. C. E.’s first Post

Hello. Regular visitors to "A Closet of Curiosities" may have noticed a new name on the contributors-list: H. C. Earwicker. That’s supposed to be me, and this is my initial post here. First of all, many thanks to grey calx for letting me aboard. We’re both looking forward to this collaboration.

I’ll be posting something between two and four recordings per month, somewhere along the line of what you’re already used to on this blog: New, Electronic, and Ethnic Music, plus some borderline stuff - mostly rare, hard-to-get, deleted or unreleased recordings from radio broadcasts.




One of the commentors to an earlier post by grey calx asked for more Feldman, so here we go - with a seldom-performed piece by MF in the recording of its world premiere, taken from a radio broadcast: Morton Feldman - Violin and Orchestra (1979), played by Paul Zukofsky and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, conducted by Christóbal Halffter.
Feldman’s working title for "Violin and Orchestra" was "Why Webern?" and it represents a link between his earlier non-repetetive styles and his later, pattern-oriented "minimalism". It’s one of his first VERY long (60 plus minutes) pieces. He started his series of contemplative and hypnotic large scale works with "Why Patterns?" in 1978 and refined this style of writing continuously to his last composition, "Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" from 1987.
"Violin and Orchestra" was written for Paul Zukofsky and is scored for a big orchestra, featuring two harps, two pianos and a rich assortment of percussion. It is a mesmerizing microcosmos of changing and shifting figures/patterns and colours/shades. The solo part is carefully woven into the orchestral arrangements. One can hear the solo instrument distinctly, but it is always part of the ensemble. Zukofsky’s interpretation of Feldman’s microtonalities is outstanding and marvellous. "Violin and Orchestra" may sound somehow "chaotic" from the surface, but a dive deep into it will surely be most rewarding for the listener.
"I prefer to think of my work as: between categories. Between Time and Space. Between painting and music. Between the music's construction, and its surface."
Morton Feldman, in: "Between Categories" (1969)

Next post; tomorrow: a WERGO LP from 1971, with two essential piano pieces by Christian Wolff, and a kick-ass version of his "Burdocks", played by a veritable All-Star-Band of legendary composers-slash-performers.

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Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman - Morton Feldman

A collection of Feldman composed pieces

From the liner notes (these are quite technical but helpful):

It is therefore not merely of anecdotal interest to document Feldman's
playing and that of his first interpreters, for here it is made clear how
much Feldman's entire oeuvre developed from this approach. He shifted the implicit precedence of artistic realization from a negligible peripheral issue to the center of his focus. From here on, the traditional musical parameters of harmony, form, time, instrumentation and arrangement are stripped of their essential features and in Feldman's playing, are heard again anew. The present recordings, primarily from Feldman's early period, present different solutions to the same problem.

One of the earliest pieces of the series, "Intermission 5" from 1952,
could be regarded as the germ cell for later works. In fact, it is the
opposite of Cage's musical process that Feldman notates here: not
progression, not variation, but the uncovering of something which is at
first hidden by clusters and chord attacks. From an irregular rhythm and density, tone repetitions and ultimately, a figure that recurs 9 times are shed - metaphor of periodic movement within an inner space. The figure itself - comprised of the tones G, G-sharp, A , B-flat in an orchestration characteristic of Feldman, that is, distributed among different octaves - plays with the most extreme reaches of the hands and with the "Fort" and "Da" which creates the basis for the repetition of the self-contained figure, the module.

"Extensions 3" from the same year also reflects this structure. Here, the play of horizontal and vertical symmetries in repetitions and
displacements form the starting point that is not interrupted until the
very end with a gesture encompassing the entire keyboard and all pitches. The octave obtains special significance as an axis of reflection in this performance and therein anticipates Feldman's later technique of "bridge building" between different modules.

In "Piano (Three Hands)", the problem of transition appears to withdraw
completely into the verticality of the sounds and their sequence. The
three "voices" come together in a flexible and unpredictable harmony,
which likewise exhibits unsystematic moments of repetition and
correspondence. The harmony which has disappeared is restored again by the play of position and distance.


"Vertical Thoughts 2 for Violin and Piano" combines a harmonically
conceived texture with an extremely differentiated temporal structure:
freely notated sections, in which the duration of the tone is defined by
the duration of the sound itself, alternate with segments that translate
the inherent tension of the sounds into rhythmic weights. The elastic
temporal structure is a result of the tactile quality of the sound
complexes.

In "Piano Piece 1956 A" and "Piano Piece 1956 B", the sounding tones are surrounded by numerous silently depressed keys which, through the resonances of sympathetically vibrating strings, convey the sound space like a second dimension. Though not sounding themselves, they first define the form of what is to be heard. It is the shadow that first makes light possible. Here too, octaves link tone groups together.

In his Darmstadt lecture "Indeterminacy", Cage defined "Intersection 3"
as an example of an indeterminate music, that is, a music which in
relation to its performance presents indeterminacies. Feldman notated the number of tones to be played on a time grid within the general limits of high, medium and low. The exact placement of the chords within the grid is left up to the performer. Cage's indeterminacy, however, aims more at the abolishment of fixed relations, while Feldman constructs here a sequence of unconnected sonic "weights" - as he himself called them - a oneness of harmony and contact.

Both ensemble pieces, "Four Instruments (1975)" and "Instruments 1",
transfer the experience of the "weight" from the early pieces onto other
instruments: "Four Instruments (1975)" to the reflections between piano and strings whose values articulate time and "Instruments 1", to an almost single-voiced line that is defined by instrumental oscillations.

Tracklisting:

1. Piano (Three Hands) {8:03} [Morton Feldman & John Tilbury - piano]

2. Intermission 5 {3:52} [Morton Feldman - piano]

3. Vertical Thoughts 2 {6:48} [Janos Negyesy - violin; Cornelius Cardew - piano]

4. Extensions 3 {8:05} [Morton Feldman - piano]

5. Four Instruments {8:11} [Edna Mitchell - violin; Harry Zaratzian - viola; Stephen Kates - cello; Frank Glazer - piano]

6. Intermission 5 {2:11} [David Tudor - piano]

7. Piano Piece 1956 A {2:23} [David Tudor - piano]

8. Piano Piece 1956 B {3:06} [David Tudor - piano]

9. Intersection 3 {3:07} [David Tudor - piano]

10. Instruments 1 {24:15} [Eberhard Blum - flute; Nora Post - oboe; Garrett List - trombone; Joseph Kubera - celesta; Jan Williams - percussion]

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