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February 28, 2010
Feldman Says ...
Morton Feldman held the post of Professor of Composition at the University of Buffalo from 1973 till his death in 1987. During his tenure he gave a series of lectures which have been preserved, transcribed and converted to audio files, all of which may be found here. It's definitely worth a listen and a read. I don't think that these have been reproduced anywhere else, including Chris Villars's wonderful collection "Morton Feldman Says". The most revealing talk was the one where Feldman talks about Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety. Two quotes:"I was consciously attempting to relive my own musical history while thinking of her. Those were the harmonies of my youth. What was unconscious was the significance of putting the tempo at quarter note equals ninety. It was also unconscious that I repeated those falling thirds 87 times, very close to that fated number of her death";
... (digression) ...
I've been thinking about time lately (always, always time), and in the context of reliving one's own musical history, I recently came across a wonderful passage in John Daverio's book Crossing Paths where Daverio argues that the F minor Impromptu of Schubert represents Schubert embodying sonata form, his personal past, in the context of a character piece, music's (then) Romantic present. But I digress ...
And: "The feeling I have about this composition is that I went back as if making peace with a steady pulsating beat, making peace with measured time, a chronological time, that is analogous to life passing by or passing us by. One, two, three, four. It takes very little time in music to count up to 90".
What's curious is why Feldman describes the number of occurrences of the falling third as 87 (three short of the number of Madame Press's death), when it does in fact repeat a total of 90 times (how Feldman weaves the number 90 into the score, not only in terms of the tempo marking - quarter note equals 90 - but in terms of the repeated figure that accompanies our listening, an ironically tender metronome, is beautifully Josquineque or Dufayesque or Bergian). I've been thinking quite alot about time lately, and why time seems to speed up as we get older. A dear friend of mine recently described a theory of his to me about this very phenomena. For him, the perception of time quickens as we get older because we perceive duration only in relation of our constantly lived, constantly renewing present (the part) to our entire past, to our memory (the whole). Hence, for my almost-2-year-old niece, this second year of hers feels long because its exactly the length of her experience of what a "year" means, what it constitutes. But if you're 50, a year is merely 1/50th of your entire accumulated past, and while clocks measure time equally for both 2-year-old and for 50-year-old, its mechanics privilege space over time: it assumes an equal journey for toddler and adult, when in fact we have so many more memories to bring to the surface, to confront, and to re-experience. Feldman's Madame Press then is an essay of a life well-lived and evidently well-loved, but it is also, in essence, an essay about all our lives, its inevitable finitude, and how we perceive the years that tick by, sometimes noticed, sometimes not, the quickening of a pulse, the quieting of a heart.
Originally from Theater of Found Sounds, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Feb 28, 2010 at 06:11 PM