Feldman Edition 4–The Straits Of Magellan – Indeterminate Music

Morton Feldman
Three Clarinets, Cello, and Piano.¹ Bass Clarinet and Percussion.² Clarient and String Quartet.³
Carol Robinson  (cl & bcl). Pierre Dutrieu and Olivier Voize (cl), Elena Andreyev (vc), Vincent Leterme (pn);¹ Frnaçoise Rivalland and Peppie Wiersma (perc);² Quatuor Doitoma [Eiichi Chijiiwa and Nicolas Miribel (vn), Franck Chevalier (va), Pierre Morlet (vc)].³
Mode 119 CD (67:23)

Morton Feldman
The Straits of Magellan
Two Pieces for Six Instruments. Projections. Durations.
The Turfan Ensemble (Philipp Vandré and Thaddeus Watson, dir.)
Mode 103 CD (62:17)

These two Mode releases present a beautifully balanced portrait of the arc of Morton Feldman’s career. By now recognized as one of the most important American composers of the second half of the century, Feldman occupies a position in relation to his mentor Cage somewhat analogous to that of Berg in relation to Schoenberg, i.e. a “disciple” who received a radical re-imagining of musical practice and adapted it to his own personal ideal of sonic beauty. Feldman found particular inspiration in visual art, both the abstract expressionists and color-field minimalists. Mark Rothko and Philip Guston were important friends and influences. While for decades typecast as the composer who wrote slow/spare/soft music, it’s becoming increasingly clear that his music has enormous range, albeit disguised by the subtlety of his craft. These discs help to expose that diversity.

The second disc in the headnote deals with early works. The Two Pieces date from 1956 (and are a first recording), and have a distinctly Webernesque feel. Projections is from 1950-51, and exists for five combinations (solo cello; flute, trumpet, violin, cello, and piano; two pianos; violin and piano; three flutes, three cellos, trumpet, and two pianos). These are among Feldman’s indeterminate works, which involve beautifully rendered graphs, indicating the range (high/middle/low) within which a composer may choose a note. (While spatial rather than metric, rhythm is still precisely indicated, as a function of duration.) The result is a perfectly “neutral” music—without any evidently intentional “expression”, like changing patterns of weather. And as such it has a “natural” beauty that is more closely akin to Nature than many works which seek consciously to evoke it.

The Durations are from 1960, and despite a surface similarity, are quite different. (And again, they fall into different configurations: alto flute, violin, cello, and piano; cello and piano; tuba, violin, and piano; violin, cello, and vibraphone; violin, cello, vibraphone, celesta/piano, and harp. One sees in the instrumentation Feldman’s taste for distinct, unlikely, and magical color combinations.) By this point Feldman had moved to precise notation of pitch, but had loosened up the rhythmic grid, so that the music was open to the performers’ rubato. And this music is more like the Feldman we have come to known, as his exquisite ear for the intersection of timbre with harmony comes into its own. If I compared the Projections to a natural phenomenon such as weather, the Durations are like a set of natural objects, such as a sprinkling of precious gems over a desert.

Finally, there are two shorter works for larger ensemble. Two Pieces for Six Instruments dates from 1956, is precisely notated throughout, and has a distinctly Webernesque feel. The Straits of Magellan, on the other hand, is another indeterminate piece, from 1961 for a mixed sextet, and at least in this rendition, has a skittery quality that suggests Feldman was not immune to the bebop and emergent free jazz percolating around him in the New York scene (an impression reinforced by the cover photo showing the composer at the piano, omnipresent cigarette dangling from his lips, topped with porkpie hat.)

The second disc takes up almost where the first left off. By the 1971 Three Clarinets, Cello, and Piano, Feldman had perfected his mature language, consisting of isolated blocks of sounds, floating in time’s amniotic fluid. This work is austere, and largely non-repetitive, even though it is highly static. A decade later in Bass Clarinet and Percussion (1981) and Clarinet and String Quartet (1983) the music has advanced a step further, in that now slowly repeating textures are allowed, and its scale is expanding. The work with clarinet is not on the level of the gargantuan Second String Quartet, but its more-than-forty-minutes duration certainly evokes an image of timelessness. And the work for bass clarinet is quite simply a masterpiece, suggesting a deep mystery in its dark rumbling sounds, its barely audible whispers from the clarinet, and its periodic delicate “tickings”. One thing that emerges from these pieces is that by this point (near the end; the composer died in 1987 at the too-early age of sixty-one), is that Feldman had become a master in his manipulation of motive, which ironically links him with the great German tradition through Schoenberg, Brahms, and Beethoven. The simplest ideas repeat and mutate effortlessly, hypnotizing and drawing the listener through a dream that is the music.

I don’t believe that the two quintets are among Feldman’s greatest music, but that doesn’t keep me from singing the praises of this extraordinary recording. Part of it is the sound itself—the full sensuous weight of the ensembles’ sonorities comes through with immediate presence throughout. The other factor is the breathtaking artistry of Carol Robinson. (Full disclosure—I knew her professionally early in her career in Paris, more than two decades ago, and had lost touch. I’m delighted to discover how her early promise has been justified).  Her control of dynamics and tone is stunning. And even more importantly, she seems to have an instinctive interpretive understanding of Feldman. This allows her to bring the core musical values of these works to the fore. In her hands, we can actually hear both why they are important, and just how difficult they are! (The latter fact being emphasized by how easy she makes them seem; in Robinson’s hands, the old virtuoso paradigm is renewed and transferred to this seemingly anti-virtuosic music.)

Taken as a pair, these two discs are definitely Want List material, and essential listening.
— Robert Carl, Fanfare, issue 27-2, Nov/Dec 03

Morton Feldman
Indeterminate Music
The Turfan Ensemble
One of Art Lange’s “Top Five of 2002” in the November/December issue of Fanfare year-end review.

Morton Feldman
Edition Volume Four “The Straits of Magellan”
The Turfan Ensemble
#2 in Dan Warburton’s “10 BEST OF 2002” in The Wire

Morton Feldman
Indeterminate Music (Feldman Edition Vol.4)
Mode 103

For the scores of the five “Projections” (1950-51), Feldman abandoned staff notation in favour of graph paper, the vertical axis for pitch (performers choose notes within loosely defined ranges) and the horizontal axis time, the composer providing “time-boxes” (equivalent to standard bars), each containing four icti (beats, if you like), thereby rendering precise rhythmic coordination possible and retaining the feel of tempo – especially in “Projections 2” – without having to notate minute rhythmic details. Note-duration is represented by the length of the rectangle, and dynamics (low) and other aspects of timbre (mutes, mode of attack) clearly specified. Feldman’s aim, quoted in Sabine Feisst’s admirably informative and intelligent liner notes, was “to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here.”

In 1956 he returned to traditional notation for the “Two Pieces for Six Instruments” (this is the first recording thereof), which sustain single pitches from chords to create “interval fields” (Martin Erdmann), both horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic), close in feel both to Webern but also to the predominantly diatonic Cage of the “String Quartet”.

In the “Durations” series (1960: the first written was “Durations 2”, but Feldman’s numbering invites all five to be heard as a cycle, as presented here), staff notation is also used, Feldman specifying pitch but only writing note-heads: instruments begin together but are then “free to choose their own durations within a given general tempo”. The music, played at low volume and with minimum attack, seems to float – Feldman’s ear for pitch is exquisite; notes fall gently on top of each other, like leaves. The sensation of tempo is looser than in “Projections”, but it’s there nevertheless: the division of “Durations 3” into four movements (slow – very slow – slow – fast) is clearly audible. Special mention should be made of David Glidden’s remarkably agile tuba playing, and pianist Philipp Vandré’s mastery of the pianissimo attack (as impressive as Feldman himself on the few recordings that exist of him performing his music).

For “The Straits of Magellan” (1961), whose instrumentation includes “amplified” guitar, adding an almost West Coast jazz splash of colour to the ensemble, Feldman returned to graph paper, specifying the (considerable) number of notes to be played, simultaneously or otherwise, but leaving their placement within the time-boxes and their pitch register much more open. Other details of attack and timbre are meticulously notated, however, and the piece fairly rolls along. It’s fantastically difficult to bring off, but the performance by Vandré and the Turfan Ensemble is exemplary.
— Dan Warburton, The Wire

Morton Feldman
Feldman Edition, Volume 4 – ‘Indeterminate Music’
The Straits of Magellan. Two Pieces for Six Instruments. Projections. Durations.
The Turfan Ensemble / Arndt Heyer
(62 minutes: DDD)

Morton Feldman
Feldman Edition, Volume 5 – ‘Voices & Instruments’
Journey to the End of the Night. Intervals, Between Categories. Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano.  Four Songs to e. e. cummings. Four Instruments. The O’Hara Songs.
Claron McFadden  sop,  Charles van Tassel  bass-bar,  The Barton Workshop,  James Fulkerson tbn
(71 minutes: DDD)

Morton Feldman
Rothko Chapel. For Stefan Wolpe. Christian Wolff in Cambridge.
Kirsten Drope sop, Ulrike Becker contr, Barbara Maurer va, Meinhard Jenne perc, Markus Stange cels, Boris Muller, Martin Homann vibs
South West German Radio Vocal Ensemble, Stuttgart/ Rupert Huber  Hänssler
Faszination MUSf 93 023 (61 minutes: DDD)

Projections, Durations-selected comparison: Barton Workshop, etc  (ETCE)  KTC 3003 Rothko Chapel-selected comparisons, Berkeley Univ Chbr Ch, Brett (10/92) (NALB) NA 039 CD Saarbrucken Radio Sym Ch and Orch, Furrer (3/01) (COL) WWE1CD 20506

Two varied Feldman banquets to tempt ‘gourmet’ and newcomer alike and one to kill the appetite altogether.

The Feldman feast continues, with two more volumes in the admirably planned Mode Series.  The fourth is called “Indeterminate Music” and involves pieces such as the Projections series, where the score is laid out like a graph and the performers choose the specified number of pitches in high, middle or low registers. In the Durations pieces each player has a written part; they start together then proceed independently in what has been called racecourse design.

A good example of this is Durations 3 for violin, tuba and piano. Everything is soft: ‘dynamics are very low,’ Feldman says. The first three movements are slow, with only the higher notes of the tuba protruding like a distant fog-horn. Then the fast fourth movement is a surprise.

It’s extraordinary that both these techniques result in the unique Feldman sound and atmosphere but the players naturally bring a sense of the right style – Feldman once rebuked a student of mine for choosing a minor triad in the graph notation of Projection 2 when, as he put it, she had ‘all the sounds in the world to choose from’.  It’s a good idea to have all the Projection and Durations pieces together, fastidiously played and recorded – plus the more lusciously scored Straits of Magellan and Two Pieces.  However, there’s a three-CD set on Etcetera (listed above) which provides both of these plus the Vertical Thoughts series and much more.

‘Voices and Instruments’, the fifth volume in the Mode survey, is full of delights, including three first recordings. Now we can compare Feldman’s response to e. e. cummings with that of John Cage 13 years earlier. By 1951 Feldman is the more pointillistic, showing the influence of Webern but Claron McFadden is in complete command of the angularities of his extreme tessitura both here and in Journey to the End of the Night, which has a text from the novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Charles van Tassel also feels exactly right in a more subdued role with The O’Hara Songs.

How rewarding to hear Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (a British commission written for Alan Hacker) where every detail, including the plentiful silences, is precise – Feldman’s finesse requires that kind of dedication. Since so much of Feldman is soft and slow, the sole fortissimo in the work is a poised shock. Feldman enthusiasts will continue to buy the Mode series, which benefits from well-informed CD booklets with full texts, and it ought to make new converts.
(portion of the review covering the Hanssler release has been deleted here)
— Peter Dickenson, Gramophone, December 2002

Morton Feldman
Indeterminate Music
Performed by the Turfan Ensemble
Mode 103

For over 300 years, European classical composers devised scores to tellmusicians exactly what to play and how to play it, in order to reproduce asaccurately as possible the music they imagined in their head. But by the1950s, some American composers — most notably John Cage and his circle offriends, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman — looked to breakaway from the ever-more-complex systems of composing that began with ArnoldSchonberg’s patterns of 12-tone organization, led through Anton Webern’smeticulous, microscopically calculated musical relationships, and culminatedin Pierre Boulez’s call for total serialism (a mathematical computation ofevery aspect of the music: pitch, duration, rhythm, and attack).

Inspired to a large degree by the freedoms suggested by the AbstractExpressionist painters that they knew, Cage and the others decided they werewilling to sacrifice complete control over their scores, in order to createsomething truly new and unconventional. They wanted sounds that wouldsurprise them, as well as the audience. By involving the performer in thedecision-making process, they knew that every time the music was played, itwould sound different.

“Indeterminate music” occurs when composers provide musicians withmaterial to play or instructions to follow, without knowing exactly what theresulting music will sound like. It differs from “improvisation” in that themusician’s responses are not spontaneously and freely generated, nor is whatthey play intended to interact or align with the other musicians in arecognizable, common or mutually dependent structure. Instead, the musiciansmust each individually create a “realization,” or crafted interpretation, ofthe verbal instructions, drawings, fragmented notation, or othernon-specific material that the composer has provided in the score. This mayinclude choosing their own notes when none are supplied, deciding how longto play certain notes, how loudly or softly they should be played, and howthey should be connected into phrases and shaped into forms. When severalplayers make separate choices at the same time, without knowing what eachother will do, the music becomes unpredictable and constantly changing –like the shifting, elusive structure of a mobile, which alters ourperspective of its shape as the air moves it, and we view it from differentangles as it perpetually re-forms itself.

John Cage spent his lifetime working on ways to break the habits ofperforming and listening with various types of indeterminate scores. MortonFeldman investigated the degrees of freedom available to indeterminatescores for only a few years early in his career, before developing his ownstyle of conventional notation that allowed him to construct music thatranged in size from just a few minutes to several hours. However, the scoresthat he created during those early years of experimentation are especiallyattractive and provocative to performers and listeners alike, because of thechallenges they propose and the malleable colors and textures they provide.Four of these pieces — each offering a different strategy for musicmaking — can be heard on ‘Indeterminate Music’ (Mode, out now), in versionsby the Turfan Ensemble directed by Philipp Vandre and Thaddeus Watson.

One of the reasons why Feldman stopped working with indeterminate scoresis that he came to feel uncomfortable with how much of the compositionalimpulse was left in the hands of the performers. In fact, it is the natureof indeterminate scores (and those that allow improvisation) that the musicwill ultimately reflect not only the composer’s original context, but alsothe personality, technique, experience, and conception of the players. Atfirst, in the ’50s when these scores were new, they were played by eitherNew Music specialists — musicians who were familiar with the scores ofWebern, Stravinsky and Bartok, among others — or by musicians who hadlittle or no experience with modern music or improvisation.

Feldman understood that on the one hand, over-familiarity with new musicwould influence the performers to play things that sounded like what theyalready knew, or on the other hand, lack of experience would cause them tofind awkward or uninteresting solutions to the choices they were confrontedwith. But over the past 50 or so years, new generations of musicians havedeveloped a broader range of training, listening, and performingexperiences, and today are often more open-minded and better equipped todeal with their direct participation in the organization and details of themusic making than many of their predecessors.

Listening to this recording, it’s apparent that the members of the TurfanEnsemble are familiar with Feldman’s “style” — a focus on the quality ofisolated, individual sounds, and an awareness of the effect they have on thesounds around them; detached details that hover or move without alluding toa particular goal; transparent textures, discrete dynamics. Other than byremaining faithful to the context that Feldman has established in each ofthese works, there is no “right” or “wrong” way to play them, and theeffectiveness of each score goes beyond its inherent musicality to areas ofindividual preference.

By way of comparison, the Turfan Ensemble tends to take the five”Projections” (1950-51) slightly slower than do other performers, and thefive “Durations” (1960) much quicker. In the “Projections” (which are scoredon graph paper, with numbers inside the boxes representing notes of theperformers’ choice to be produced in relative registers, and including asolo cello piece, two duos, a quintet, and a nonet), there is a delicatearrangement of details, a fragile web of sounds are suggested, as longertones project out into space, and short attacks puncture it.

The thicker instrumentation of the “Durations” (where all of the notes areexplicitly given, but their duration and phrasing are open to the players)implies a denser fabric, with the overlapping tones woven in amongst eachother. At their quicker pace, the Turfan version replaces gravity withmomentum, losing some of the static, other-worldly quality of Feldman’smusic, but making a generally more comprehensive object.

Also on the disc are the first performance of Feldman’s brief “Two Piecesfor Six Instruments” (1956) — whispered string harmonics, muted horns, airyflute tones that sound isolated from each other — and a careful, moodyreading of the rarely encountered “Straits of Magellan” (1961), in which theinfluence of Edgar Varese’s music is audible in the sound masses whichcongest, evaporate, or bubble up sporadically. In these, and the otherworks, Feldman offers colors and textures like a painter (he said he wantedthese indeterminate scores to be “as precise as Pollock”) which themusicians shape and set into permanent relief; every tonal combination ordisjointed line is a surprise, and each will be different the next timearound.
— Art Lange, Tower epulse 8.14 [indeterminate], April 5, 2002