Morton Feldman's "For Philip Guston"

Recording Reviews

Morton Feldman. For Philip Guston. California Ear Unit. Dorothy Stone, flutes. Gloria Cheng-Cochran, piano and celeste. Arthur Jarvinen, percussion. Includes a recording of a preconcert discussion of the composition by the composer. 1997. Bridge 9078 A/D. There are rare instances when one hears music of such great originality that it alters the way one hears all music from that moment. Morton Feldman exemplifies a composer who was in touch with his own unique compositional ear and voice to such an extent that it had that effect on an entire generation of young composers who began their musical development in the second half of ­twentieth-century America.

A romantic mystique surrounds New York City of the 1950s, the time and place of Feldman’s early development. It quickly emerged as the center of the art world, similar to Paris and Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, and became home to a tightly knit community of artists who are today loosely and collectively identified as the New York School. These poets, painters, and composers lived with, worked with, and greatly influenced each other in the city. Among these were the Abstract Expressionist painters Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, the poet Frank O’Hara, and the composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. The titles of some of Feldman’s greatest compositions are dedications to these individuals, and some of his most poignant essays are recollections conveying an almost Proustian sense of a lost time and place relating to this period in American cultural history.1 The greatest influences on Feldman during this period were Cage and Guston. In fact, Cage accompanied Feldman when he first encountered Guston’s paintings in the early 1950s, and it is both Guston’s and Cage’s specters that hover over the composition For Philip Guston.

Guston’s constant and relentless questioning of the meaning of art, its history, its materials, and its processes led Feldman to rethink his own music in painterly terms.

Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament American Music Summer 2007 © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer’s vested interest in craft.

—Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art,” 26 Feldman was particularly struck by Guston’s working methods—the way in which Guston would get “inside” the painting. The painter would stand in close proximity to the canvas, scrutinizing each brushstroke, never stepping back to look at the entire canvas. But it was Guston’s “touch” that in great part defined his particular style of abstraction, and “touch” (both instrumental and compositional) is an important stylistic element of Feldman’s music as well. Touch is the composer’s imprint.

I have always been interested in touch rather than musical forms.

—Morton Feldman2 Feldman single-mindedly strove to compose a truly abstract, acoustical music, free of thematic, rhythmic, instrumental, and harmonic hierarchies, and one that never departed from his ideal of the beautiful. The critical importance that painters attached to the “purity” of the medium, the nature of the material, the flatness of the canvas, and the creative act itself reinforced Feldman’s sensibilities and led him away from the rigidity of predetermined compositional systems.

In his rejection of the more conventional musical structures and procedures, he continually experimented with different forms of indeterminate and determinate musical notation.

Guston continually struggled with the meaning of abstraction in painting and this eventually led him to explore radically different styles of painterly expression, until in the 1970s he abandoned abstraction altogether. In dramatic contrast to the delicate, ravishing beauty of his abstract paintings of the 1950s, his late paintings consist of surrealistic landscapes populated by haunted figures and images, in a figurative, cartoon-like, representational style that is frequently based on politically charged scenarios. Nothing could have been at further remove from Feldman’s own aesthetics, which were deeply committed to abstraction, and to his own personal ideal of beauty. He could not reconcile himself to Guston’s radical shift in style and this, sadly, led to the end of their friendship. In a painting entitled Friend—To M.F. (1978), Guston addressed their estrangement with an image of the composer’s large head, puffing on a cigarette, half-turned away from the painter. The center of the painting is dominated by Feldman’s hugely oversized ear.

I have resistance in talking to anyone who could tell me why Guston assembled these last works the way he did. My attitude is not unlike my father refusing to ask for directions the time we were lost in Hoboken.

Feldman, “Philip Guston:1980/The Last Works,” 128 Philip Guston died of a heart attack in 1980 in Woodstock, N.Y. at the age of sixty-seven. Later that year, for an exhibition and catalog of his late paintings, Feldman contributed an essay entitled, “Philip Guston: 1980/The Last Works.”

In this essay the composer begins to come to terms with Guston’s late work. Four years later, in 1984, he composed a single work, For Philip Guston. It was the last of his many compositions dedicated to particular painters, including his earlier short piano piece “To Philip Guston.”

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For Philip Guston is scored for flute (doubling on piccolo and alto flute), percussion (marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and chime), and piano (doubling five-octave celeste). It is Feldman’s third piece in a series of works composed between 1978 and 1984 scored for this particular instrumental combination.

Particularly striking in his orchestration here is the absence of sustained bassoriented sonorities. The piano part is written almost entirely on a single treble clef, as the instrument only rarely articulates its lower register. Because instrumental decay always seemed important to Feldman’s sound world, note how in this work the decays of the piano and percussion instruments blend into one another and recede into silence. The overall instrumental sonority hovers in an after-glow of a shimmering stasis.

Decay . . . this departing landscape, “this” expresses where the sound exists in our hearing—leaving us rather than coming toward us.

Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art,” 25 In his late compositions Feldman strove to achieve an ambitious monumentality that was synonymous with both scale and size. In composing For Philip Guston, he was no longer concerned with composing music that is performed in the traditional concert venue. Just as the oversized canvases of the abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock challenged the tradition of easel painting, Feldman challenged the concept of traditional “scale” in music.

In establishing scale as an aesthetic factor, Feldman challenged the idea of what constitutes a “piece” of music. For Philip Guston questions and dissolves many of our traditional assumptions about compositional rhetoric, including those of musical structure, form, continuity, development, scale, and the function of musical memory. Feldman often preferred the term “assemblage” to that of “composition,” when discussing his own music.

A “composition” for me forms sentence structures within a scenario of beginning, middle and end. . . .With assemblage there is no continuity of fitting parts together in a sentence or a paragraph.

—Feldman, “String Quartet No. 2,” 196 The extended length of the composition heightens the listener’s awareness of the passing of time and the “duration” of the listening experience. Temporal awareness—instead of being directed upon a single moment of time—is cumulative, directed toward stretches of gradually unfolding time. This produces a paradoxical situation for the listener: the listening experience can be both intimate and distant, centered and peripheral.

For Guston the painter, the problem of scale and its relation to time applied to the creative act of painting itself. It was a problem that created a particular personal ambivalence about when a painting was finished. Feldman shared this ambivalence toward the finality of his compositions. While he manifests this ambivalence in his music in different ways, it emerges in For Philip Guston as a reluctance to dictate an end to the composition itself.

In For Philip Guston Feldman achieves scale primarily through the repetition and variation of arabesque-like pitch patterns that weave throughout the ensemble. The composition slowly unfolds at a very soft dynamic level in a series of sustained, transparent sounds. With no rhythmic impetus, the music’s sense

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of scale and stasis primarily consists of the repetition, revoicing and reorchestration of a series of asymmetric pitch patterns. With no sense of harmonic motion, the music hovers in midair, creating a world without movement. The musical texture never changes dramatically.

In the seeming absence of instrumental attack, rhythmic impetus, and dramatic gesture, one’s attention is drawn to the gradual unfolding and variation of one overall instrumental sonority or “image.” Like Monet’s haystack paintings, where the same image is depicted in a new and different light, Feldman’s various instrumental shadings subtly transform with each new voicing and orchestration. The delicate repetition of pitches allows the ear the time to settle into the instrumental sonority. The music conveys both the care and concentration of attention the composer has paid to each variation in instrumental registration, instrumental voicing, and pitch repetition. What is even more remarkable is the overall blend of the instrumental sonority and the delicate balance the composer achieves between the weight of each individual pitch and instrumental sonority.

This quietest of music has a poetic dimension and mysterious beauty.

For Philip Guston alternates between three overall harmonic areas that interact throughout. The composition begins with a slightly varied harmonic/melodic motive—a soggetto cavato— on John Cage’s name (C–G–A flat–E flat) that gradually dissolves as the motive is transposed and combined with the remaining notes of the total chromatic. The C–G–A flat–E flat motive (an A-flat seventh chord with no tonal function) reappears in various guises and transpositions and alternates with passages exhibiting varying degrees of chromatic saturation.

A third harmonic area is more diatonic. Its final appearance, toward the end of the work, is comprised of all white-note music. These diatonic passages become the most elegiac sections of the piece.

Feldman’s late works are known for their extremes of rhythm and notational complexity. This is particularly true of For Philip Guston. A characteristic device of Feldman’s rhythmic and notational style is the polyrhythmic repetition and variation of asymmetrical conflicting rhythmic patterns. This results in a form of polyphony in which the individual lines achieve a maximum of rhythmic independence, eliminating all feeling of a consistent metrical organization. The repetition, sequencing, and variation of both shifting rhythmic and pitch patterns of different and irregular length result in further complexities.

There are instances where Feldman’s notational style appears to be needlessly complex, for example in the visual alignment of different time signatures in the score.3 This form of notation—a form of notational shorthand—maintains the grid-like format in his early graphic compositions. It does not, however, accurately reflect what one sees taking place in the notated music. It becomes clear, given both the complexity of the rhythm and the notation, that Feldman does not expect the performers to reproduce the notated rhythms precisely, but to approximate their relative values. Feldman’s experiments in rhythmic and notational complexities can best be described as mannered, as his complexities bear a striking resemblance to the late fourteenth-century “mannerist style” of notation cultivated in southern France and Italy. In fact, he frequently makes use of the Medieval mannerist “hocket” technique throughout For Philip Guston.

Since Feldman’s death there has been a resurgence of interest in his music, and indeed the further removed we are from his time we see his presence grow

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ever larger. When he died, few recordings of his music were available. Today’s digital recording techniques, nonexistent during his lifetime, are ideally suited to the extreme quietude his music requires, not to mention the length of his late works. The web site www.cnvill.net/mfhome.htm, devoted to Feldman, now lists approximately one hundred recordings of his music.

In addition to the Bridge recording, released in 1997 and readily available today, there are two additional recordings of For Philip Guston, and each is highly noteworthy. The Hat Hut label (Art CD 61041) from 1991 with performers Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, and Jan Williams is no longer available. The Dog W/A Bone recording (DWAB02) was recorded in 1995 by the S. E. M. Ensemble performers Petr Kotik, Joseph Kubera, and Chris Nappi, and released five years later in 2000. It is somewhat difficult to obtain. The Bridge recording features the California Ear Unit, a Los Angeles–based new music ensemble. A bonus of the Bridge recording is a photo montage of the composer; unfortunately it is difficult to access on a Macintosh computer. Both Bridge and the California Ear Unit have a well-established reputation for producing high-quality recordings and performances of new American music. This recording is a significant contribution to American music on the part of the performers and Bridge—though what is truly remarkable is that three recordings exist of so demanding a composition, and that a genuine performance tradition has developed around Feldman’s music.

Remember that, while many of Feldman’s early compositions were modest in length, beginning in 1979 he began to compose works of monumental length, and this length becomes one of the most daunting aspects of For Philip Guston for both the performer and the listener. The California Ear Unit’s performance, here on four discs, is approximately 248 minutes and 23 seconds long. The Hat Hut recording is 265 minutes and 16 seconds long. At 288 minutes and 23 seconds, the S.E.M. recording is the longest of the three. I prefer the slightly faster tempo of the California Ear Unit to the slower tempos of the other two recordings.

Nevertheless, For Philip Guston always presents problems only virtuoso performers can address: extraordinary concentration, focus, and stamina. Members of the California Ear Unit (Dorothy Stone, Arthur Jarvinen, and Gloria ChengCochran) are clearly up to Feldman’s demands, each being consistently focused and controlled. Replication of a consistent tone and instrumental touch is an important performance aspect of this piece for each performer. But especially is this true for the flutist. As the only self-sustaining instrument in the ensemble, the flute often takes on a more soloistic role. Stone gives a beautifully nuanced performance in her subtle use of a slightly expressive vibrato that is never intrusive and always in the best interest of the music. In the more densely textured passages, the consistency of tone and touch throughout the ensemble is remarkable, often making it difficult for the listener to identify the instrumental source of the individual pitches.

Included with this performance, I should add, is a recording of the composer speaking about his work to a preconcert audience in February 1986 at the Roy O. Disney Music Hall, at the California Institute of the Arts. He remarks on the highly personal nature of his composition, describing the piece as a story without a beginning, middle, or end and how its story can only be told in such a long work. He characterizes the work as a “tale of two people, two types of artists that are telling their stories continually, either with notes or with images or with

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styles and fluctuating from one to another regardless of any other consideration” (Morton Feldman, “For Philip Guston,” 198).

There are several ways of listening to the Bridge recording of For Philip Guston, each of which offers a different perspective. The listener may decide the where and how of the listening experience. If listened to as a whole, in one concentrated sitting, the experience offers the opportunity to get lost in the atmosphere of the work. The listener may often find him/herself moving in and out of different levels of concentration and memory. A second way to listen is in successive stages, at different times, segment by segment—as if one were reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. One may also listen to the composition as ambient music, as a mysterious presence that accompanies one’s daily routines. Each way has its rewards.

But do we ever hear a melody of Schubert’s without that sense of a life cut short, of genius cut short?

—Feldman, “Frank O’Hara: Lost Times and Future Hope,” 103 One early morning in September, 1987, I was awakened by the sounds of Feldman’s music on my bedside clock radio. My first reaction was that these beautiful sounds must have been part of a dream—that I should wake up and write them down before I forgot them. When I realized I was not dreaming, and that Feldman’s music was being played on my local NPR station at 6:30 a.m., I knew he had died.

Both Feldman and Guston died early deaths. Both were prolific artists whose creative lives were cut short, leaving me to wonder about the direction their work might have taken had they lived longer. I view their so-called late work not as a culmination of their creative lives, but as a passage to another creative stage that sadly remained unfulfilled. It is impossible to know what the next step might have been for either. What if Guston had lived longer and eventually decided to return to abstraction? What would those paintings have been like? And where would the composer Feldman go, after having composed abstract instrumental compositions of four to six hours in duration? Perhaps a return to miniatures, somehow large in scale but small in size?

I do know that I am unable to forget the ineffable beauty found in For Philip Guston for it will hover over me every time I begin to compose another “piece,” either influencing or challenging my own compositional thought.

Paul Paccione Western Illinois University Notes

1. B. H. Friedman, ed., Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, with introduction by B. H. Friedman, and afterword by Frank O’Hara (Boston: Exact Change, 2000). Except as noted, Feldman’s quotes in this review are found here, essay titles and pages cited in the text.

2. In Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 94.

3. Morton Feldman, For Philip Guston (London: Universal Edition 17967, 1985).

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