Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
String Quartet (1979)
Morton Feldman’s String Quartet (1979) follows over a
decade of compositional activity where the composer
was constantly occupied with a new piece for orchestra.
In the eleven years before the Quartet he produced
fifteen orchestral works, beginning with On Time and
the Instrumental Factor (1969) up to Violin and
Orchestra (1979). In the following eight years only
three orchestral works were written, The Turfan
Fragments (1980), Coptic Light (1986) and For Samuel
Beckett (1987). With the String Quartet, Feldman’s
attention turned almost exclusively to chamber music,
and particularly, to the long piece. This change,
however, was not made without a certain degree of
uncertainty.
The String Quartet was first performed on 4th May,
1980, by the Columbia Quartet at the Drawing Center
in New York City. The performance lasted well over
one and a half hours, hence the nick-name of “100
minutes” by which this piece is known. A repeat
performance by the same group took place a month later
during June in the Buffalo Festival. At this point
Feldman seems to have hesitated, for when he returned
to composing he created three works of more or less
conventional length. It was not until after the first West
Coast performance of the Quartet, almost a year later,
that he returned to explore the long piece. The overseventy-
minute Untitled Composition for cello and
piano, was completed shortly thereafter, and finally,
the success of Triadic Memories for solo piano, dated
23rd July, 1981, committed him fully to this new
direction.
Keenly aware of the controversy surrounding the
length of the Quartet from its première the year before,
Feldman began his 1981 CalArts lecture by discussing
the length of a minute, the moral being that even a
minute can be a very long time. Although the topic that
afternoon was to be the use of the Twelve-Tone
Technique in Varèse’s Déserts, Feldman used the
occasion to provide some insight to his own music. He
characterized the String Quartet as a natural result of his
work up to that time:
|
“Mel Powell used the word at his talk the other
day, a term which I feel very important to me.
The term is strategy ... I don’t like to give things
a name. This is my compositional strategy, I
don’t want to give things a name. If I have
repetition I don’t call it repetition. It looks like
repetition, it doesn’t sound like repetition ...
I would never let a student of mine put in a repeat
sign. I would say, “something’s happening, what
if you wanted to change your mind?”
I copy like an idiot. Until finally I put a double
bar line in and I just write fifteen times, seven
times, nine times. But even that became a great
concession. It was really a concession to my
eyes, because I want to copy my own music...
So I don’t call things a name, because I repeat
things for different reasons...
For example, if we asked the question, “isn’t
there a certain type of material that you can
repeat and can’t repeat?” “What’s repeatable
material? “You can’t just repeat...”
What I think of it now is that I’m watching
some bugs on a slide, and I’m just watching
how I feel .. .
So the String Quartet has a lot to do with that
kind of watching and letting it go. And the
reason the piece is so long is that I got into
dangerous territory. I let things go…”
Feldman’s harmonic language during this time was
chromatic, influenced partly by his respect and
admiration for the music of Anton Webern. Feldman
does not follow strict serial procedures for ordering the
chromatic scale, rather he starts with a chromatic subset
which he utilizes as his basic material. Typically, he works
with groupings of three to eight notes (a three pitch class
chromatic sequence, such as C sharp, D, E flat, serving for
him as the most fundamental of building blocks.) From
these pitch class groupings he realizes a musical idea
through an aspect of orchestration, registration or
rhythmic patterning. The result is an identifiable musical
module which is brought back at various times in the
course of a particular work. With each return the material
is altered; sometimes this is subtle (such as a cello figure
subsequently played by the violin - in the same octave). It
is a modular form of construction, with an obvious debt to
Stravinsky, but also to his own music from the 1950s
where he composed graphic scores on a grid.
A note about tempos: scores from Feldman’s last period
usually carry the tempo mark 63 to 66 (to the quarter
note), indicating a slow tempo with a certain degree of
fluidity. In practice he was not generally critical if the
performer(s) took a slower tempo. He was equally happy,
for example, with a performance of Triadic Memories
which lasted over one hour as with another which lasted
closer to two. His tempo marks became, as it were, a
maximum limit for interpretation. This is not to suggest
that there are no boundaries as to how slow a Feldman
work can be performed. His interest was in creating a
gradually unfolding piece where the perception of time
becomes distorted. Too slow a tempo can have the
opposite effect, making each component of a musical
gesture seem like a major event.
Characteristic of Feldman’s sound world in his last
period are the over-all soft dynamic level and a preference
for instruments with simple overtone structures (such as
flute, celesta, vibraphone). In string writing he often uses
the mute as a way of making the complex overtone
structure these instruments have, less so. The String
Quartet calls for the use of mutes throughout, offering the
unique string quartet timbre heard on this recording.
Douglas Cohen