On Morton Feldman

by Mariano Etkin

[English translation by Chris Villars]

The following article was first published (in Spanish) in the magazine of the Segundas Jornadas de Música Contemporánea (Days of Contemporary Music-Second Edition), Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina, 2001.

Morton Feldman said that one could live without art but not without the myth about art. One of those myths supposes that some durations are more natural for works than others, somewhat in the way that Rameau and his age proposed that tonal harmony was something natural. Feldman composed, in his last years, works of unusual length, among them the Second String Quartet, played by the Pellegrini Quartet in Buenos Aires in 2001. That very extensive duration is far removed from any pretence of greatness. The extension appears as an attribute closely tied to the material, and not as a formal device. "The myth-maker," Feldman said, "is successful because he know that in art, as in life, we need the illusion of significance. He flatters this need. He gives us an art that ties up with philosophical systems, an art with a multiplicity of references, of symbols, an art that simplifies the subtleties of art, that relieves us of art."

There exist two works that are unavoidable antecedents, not only for linking Feldman to a preoccupation with time and duration, but also for locating him in a line of continuity with composers who, like himself, questioned the fundamental premises of musical art: Vexations by Erik Satie and 4'33" by John Cage.

Besides adventuring in the realm of durations, Feldman almost achieved the impossible: to rob the instruments of the gestures, conventions and tricks acquired in their passage through Western culture. He turned the instruments back to their function of making sound, prior to making music.

His activity as a tailor until the beginning of the 1970s probably favoured the development of his refined sensibility for detail and even his interest in certain types of oriental carpets. "My music," he said, "is handmade. So I'm like a tailor. I make my buttonholes by hand. The suit fits better."

If there is a music paradoxically both contemporary and at the same time outside of its time, it is Feldman's. His world is essentially opposed to mass media, anti-technological and, certainly, nothing spectacular. In the years that have passed since Feldman's death, he has ceased to be, thanks to the recording and the analysis of almost all his works, a marginal composer.[1] On the other hand his music - maybe there is this to say happily - has remained marginal.

Notes:

It is good to remember that already by the mid Sixties, Buenos Aires was one of the very few places in the world - outside the circles of the New York School - where Feldman's music began to be played and appreciated.