Search - Morton Feldman, Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland :: Morton Feldman: For Christian Wolff - Eberhard Blum / Nils Vigeland

Sailing the seas of durational lengths,a challenge??

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 07/03/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Sailing the seas depends on the Helmsman said Mao tse tung once upon a time. And Feldman the last ten years of his life was devoted to the attenuation, the nurturing, the challenge of longer durational structures. Not that within the realms of th avant-garde music this has not been a studied preoccupation,Herr Stockhausen,for one his(Inori,Weltsparliament),and John Cage's(Book of Music,1 Hour piece for Two Prepared Pianos), Cornelius Cardew's 9 Hour "the Great Learning" Olivier Messiaen"Vingt regards. . . ", all have thought about this problem aside from the obvious reference to programmatic utilization of imagery(as Jesus for Messiaen,and Confucious for Cardew) and text.Also from quite different perspectives. Kaikhosru Sorabji and Ronald Stevensen,their oceanic piano music. With the advent of minimalism and its potentialities, in the late Seventies early Eighties,with the successes of Phil Glass, Reich,it looked like repetitive patternings was here to stay. Well it was short lived,and has grown boring and opportunistic. Glass has long abandoned his early more interesting experimental years in place of facile market concoctions to fill the green at the box office. However Feldman was bitten by this bug strictly for aesthetic creative concerns and tried his hand at rhythmic displacements, the reiterations of somewhat similar materials over oceanic lengths. The results? to me anyway are mixed to disasterous. The creative agenda at work for Feldman here is as the minimalist canon, the slow transformations of timbre, not quite as predictable or simpleminded as Glass, for Feldman had other items to dissect and exploit,i.e., the pure beauty and quality of sound,register,density,regions nurtured. This "For Christian Wolff" has to be the longest piece for Flute and Piano, at least Pierre Yves Artaud thinks so.A piece nearly 4 hours. So you might say, what fantastically oceanic agenda has Feldman prepared to sail the musical long durational seas?? for that length of time. Nothing immediately apprarent; simply like turning and returning blades of grass,their shapes and designs and structures over and over, that's the agenda.Feldman's intuition for timbre and density is what in the end makes a piece of this length listenable at all. For face it, unless you seriously devote inordinate amounts of time,listening to this music, you will never get it,on one try. The flute is an instrument with potentialities,listening longevity, something you don't get tired of. In one of the last Darmstadt Lectures,in 1986 Feldman speaks about the concept of "flute" that he really doesn't think of the flute timbre as present in his mind, he simply places some abstract phanthom distance, and proceeds to manipulate the materials. The creative process was very important to Feldman, he devoted his life to nurturing, how he composes, what pen and ink to use, how to improve the creative process,by for instance composing at the piano,it may slow you down or with indelible ink, so that you regret making a mistake,in the pains it takes to correct your error. Christian Wolff you may know hung out as a teenager with Cage, Feldman and Earle Brown,and inhabits an equally gifted realm as creator of indeterminate vessels of perceived un-wisdom timbral concoctions."