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Feldman on Feldman

Lecture given at the South AfricanBroadcasting Corporation,Auckland Park,

Johannesburg, August 1983

Transcribed by RdigerMeyer

The copyright of this lecture is owned by the Estate of Morton Feldman. It is

published here with their kind permission. Any further use of thistext must be cleared with Rdiger Meyer and the copyright owners.

Well of course I spend a few hours, oran hour at least every day, jottingdown possible things I could talkabout. And it's just amazing when youwrite down all the categories what youcome up with. I also thought about,maybe I'll just talk about, just themusic and not get involved inanything that much in depth about mymusic. I thought maybe I'll just tellstories, I love to tell stories. If not myown then perhaps then someoneelse's story.

Just as I say the word story I think of about a million things coming into myhead. I just thought of a marvellousstory Kierkegaard wrote. Not a realstory you know, but an incident wherehe was walking down the street in hisneighbourhood and he comes across anew establishment with a sign in thewindow and the sign says "We presspants". So he goes back to hisapartment, gets hold of a few pairs of

pants, brings it down to the store andhands it to the clerk. And the clerksays "Well, what are we supposed todo with this?" And he said "Well, pressthem of course! You've got a sign inthe window that says "We presspants"." "Oh, we don't press pantshere, we only sell the sign in thewindow." [laughter] And, of courseyou all know I mean that as a verybiting and important, I feel importantaspect of what I feel is the separationof what one is given musically and

what one perhaps should get.

I also thought about, maybe I'll tell thestory of my life and my influences,and I kind of got frightened by all theinfluences. They all seemed veryportentous - Freud, Kafka, Proust. Andeverybody you could think of in myown artistic background. And then Idecided there was only one real biginfluence in my life, and that was mygrandmother.

I was brought up by my grandmother.My mother and father were togetherin business during my early years andthen my teenage years. Andoccasionally she would come up withsome kind of remark or some kind of advice and when she decided to tellme something there was only onegesture that she would use. She wouldshake her fists like this. If she wouldtell me to hold on to my money, shewould shake her fists like this and youcould actually see bills. Ten, Twenty,

Thirty dollar bills being held onto yousee. And then one day she told mesomething and I think that's what mymusic is really all about, she said,"You know, that you must knoweverything, think everything and do

nothing." [laughs]

And then the whole relationshipbetween my grandmother and myfather. They lived together in thesame house for fifty years. And theynever said a word to each other.Which I think is a marvellousenvironment to grow up, there was nohostility there. They never actuallycomplained, they never complained tome about each other. I realized thatthere was something fishy going on,but I saw that you could live - withoutcommunication. For Fifty years. Andthen I developed another attitude, anattitude perhaps to the audience, tomusicians, to everything outside of my exterior life. That is - I think of thewhole world as my mother in law.[laughs] I really do.

That kind of detachment in a senseenabled me not to treat my music asmy mother in law. Now to the music. It

is very, very hard to explain, I've beenasked for years about my music, I

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[Tudor] was the pianist for essentiallywhat was maybe a two minute piece.So I was quite nervous with thisintroduction to the New York musicalworld. And the piece was played. Andthere was a very legendary for anAmerican, a very legendary composerwho was a very big time Hollywoodcomposer in 1950 writing all theHumphrey Bogart movies, and thatwas George Antheil. And he was thereand it was all very exciting. Wellanyway there was a Sonata of Antheilplayed. There was ... some otherthings that I don't really remember,and there was this piece ... and thatwas the end. I didn't talk to anybody. Ididn't get into any discussions. I justsat there with my wife and I behavedmyself, after all I was about twentyfour or so, not even twenty four.

Well, the next day I spoke to JohnCage and he says ... oh, I said to him"Did you speak to Virgil Thompson?Did he like my piece?" He said, "Well,if you must know, he said, "Neverbring that man to my house again."He said "I don't want to hear howmuch of a genius he thinks he is with

every note he writes."" [laughs] Andwe've had problems ever since, Virgil Thompson and myself.

A very important piece to me. I thinkabout it all the time. I was justfinishing my studies with Stefan Wolpeand it was very difficult for me to writethis piece because there were verylittle notes. Obviously there's was akind of Webernesque influence in it,but it's not a Webernesqueatmosphere. And if one would look atthe piece I wrote right before and thispiece ... It's amazing that I could do it.

Then, probably the next piece is ..."Between Categories" ... I think, it'snot that important. Anyway BETWEENCATEGORIES. For those of you thatheard my piece DE KOONING it's verymuch the same format. And I think theone important thing about the piece,that is, the essential idea of the piecefor me, was to have two small groups,

like a doppelganger, of the sameinstrumentation and it was a kind of,

creepy type of symmetry, onlybecause of the symmetry of thecolours. But not really of the samemusics. Only towards the end do youhear an arpeggio on one piano takenup in some kind of distant relationshipwith the other piano.

WHY PATTERNS? Oh there's anotherpiece, the first piece that opens up theprogramme. INSTRUMENTS 1 is part of a trilogy. I do write sometimes sets of pieces where I wanna take essentiallywhere I'm at into another kind of instrumentation, or into a differentkind of colour, or a different kind of instrumentation. I don't want toexplore it all in one piece. I feel that itwouldn't be appropriate. And this wasthe first. The whole, this is absolutelyunlike like WHY PATTERNS? andBETWEEN CATEGORIES, this isprecisely notated. In this piece thefocus as I remember it had to do withbreathing. Breathing in terms of akind of breathing timbre. Listening tothe instruments and trying to clockwhat I feel their own timbral rhythmwould be. That's essentially what thewhole series of these three pieces

were concerned with. Breathing,rhythm as breathing.

WHY PATTERNS? ... theinstrumentation is very important.WHY PATTERNS? is one of the fewpieces that I ever wrote where I wasactually inspired by an extraneousidea, outside of the music itself. As Imentioned a few times I'm involvedwith a certain area of oriental rugs,older rugs, with old colours, and I hada rug and I happened to catch, wellactually it was an interesting rugbecause there was no field in the rug.

The rug was made up of just a seriesof borders. Just like a Jack in the Box,

just getting, some were wider, somewere, ... and rugs are no different forexample than musical scales. For themost part a lot of them, at least theones I like, only have about seven oreight possible ... basic colours. There'sa variation of colours, it's called"abrash", that is - the dyes are done insmall batches and what happens isthat the colour, the gradation of the

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colour changes, sometimesimperceptibly and sometimes quitenoticeably. It adds to the rugespecially in the refraction of the lighton it. And that's what I caught, lookingdown just haphazardly at this rug of

just patterns, and how the patternsare just going around, and what'sinteresting about these particular rugsunlike the kind of more commercialPersian rug is that the pattern repeatsitself, but it's never really exact. It's asif every time they do it again it's doneidiomatically. It's quite different. Infact I actually measured one patternthat seemed the same all over, and itwas different. And the colour actuallychanges, because of this dying thing,this "abrash".

And I decided to write a pieceessentially of patterns, which I wasnever really involved with, my musicwasn't really ever concerned withcomposing pattern situations, in whichthere was no sharing of the material.Each one because of the nature of itsinstrument and the nature of thepattern, is independent, orinterdependent from each other.

So basically there were just threecolours here, and then I had to decide,very much, I didn't have any colourclue from the rug. In other words theywere somewhat homog ... somewhat, Iwouldn't say they were homogeneous.

They didn't tell me say for examplewhich instruments to use. Though ittook me a long ... as soon as I got theinstrumentation then the piece in asense ... went pretty well.

And the instrumentation is very ... wellfor example - using the glock in aserious way. Actually treating theglock as if it's an instrument ratherthan just a toy. And I also chose itbecause like "abrash" you see, it'skind of out of tune. And I like themetaphor of going in and out of tunewith the various flutes and with thepiano. I once gave a concert in

Toronto. I was on a programme withHarrison Birtwistle and Harry was very

interested in this piece, in the formatof this piece. And he said to me, how

many instruments could this work withand what kind of instruments could doit, the way he felt I did it in WHYPATTERNS? And I said, "Harry, I triedto write a lot of ... I thought I was ontosomething with WHY PATTERNS?", Isaid, "but I think it's just for flute,piano and glock, so we might as wellforget about writing another one."

Then there was another interestingcompositional problem. Alright, you'rewriting a pattern and she has apattern on her rugs, but, how do youmake it with a kind of, well, how doyou imitate the abrash and how doyou imitate the ever changingidiomatic way that she's changing asshe's going around the rug with apattern?

So there are quite simple things, Imight have the same pattern, but themost subtle, the most discreet kind of change might happen even in itsreiteration. Also what's marvellousabout the rugs is that thisimperfection makes the kind of conventional patterning in a sensequite lyrical, and it's quite gorgeous.

So on the one hand we have themechanical aspect of it, the changingaspect of it. The looseness yettightness of it. Very enigmatic the waythey do it. The concentration of howthey do it. Because they're lookingdown at it, they're concentrated, theycan't just toss it off.

So consequently I came up with thisformat. The music, every individual

part is super precise, yet when youput them together, essentially notpolyphonically however, I would saypolyrhythmically, this precision plusthe imprecision of its verticalhappenings more or less created thefeel of the rug.

Oh, we're going to run a little overbecause I now, I wanna just play,being that there are no orchestralpieces here and being that I do writelarge pieces I thought I should justplay one and so we're going to run

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over, Jacques, if it's alright, about fiveminutes. And being that we're notgoing to have an interval I think thateverything's going to be okay.

Very, very briefly about this piece. This piece is also part of a trilogy. Andto a great degree I think that it'sresponsible by the mood of SamuelBeckett. Because I wrote an opera of sorts on a poem, if we can call it that,that he wrote for this opera, and Ireally got into the Beckett mood. It'sin another piece called Piano, andthen it's in this piece, and then I gotout of it, I just shrugged and got out of it. Now, the strategy of this piece,there's no strategy of how, for me, toevoke the Beckett mood, I just, I'm inthe Beckett mood, that's all. It waslike being a vegetarian for a week.And then I went back, you know, toanother diet.

Oh, now I remember, it was right afterI wrote WHY PATTERNS? The openingtheme of the flute and orchestra pieceis a theme that I obsessively use inthe opera in different kinds of combinations. Piccolo against E flat

clarinet. And every time I use it I use itin a different place. Actually it's alsothe opening flute line also in WHYPATTERNS? Unknown to me at thetime it spelt out B A C H. A local critic,who I once had in a class actually,who was a musicologist, he was verypleased with himself and he wrotehow this piece was a tribute to Bach,which it wasn't, it was just that when Imodulated it for the flute it happenedto be B A C H.

And ... OK so the strategy of this piecewas ... the working title for myattitude was - "Don't compose, trythings out." And wrote it down, "Don'tcompose, try things out." But there'sno such thing, once you're tryingsomething out on paper, you'recomposing. So that little riddle wasmore or less like a ... some kind of a ...game evidently, some kind of game, Idon't know what term to use for it, inwhich I'm saying to myself, "No.

You're composing now, you're nottrying things out." And what I tried to

try out was problems of juxtaposition,how "z" sounds against "e". Questionslike "What is new material?" What ismaterial that I don't understand,which justifies trying it out ... you seerather than using a word likeexperiment, I'm too old to experimentbut I'm not too old to try things out.

Okay and with that we'll hear Fluteand Orchestra, written around I thinkit's 1977. It's with Hans Zender andthe Saarbrucken Orchestra. I don'tremember the second name of theflute player, it was the first fluteplayer, Roswitha somethingorother,I'm very embarrassed, I don'tremember at this particular moment.I'm also trying out polyrhythmicstructures, that is ... the expanse of the flute. And now as I'm talking Iremember how I got the idea for WHYPATTERNS? and its polyrhythmicsituation. I didn't want to interferewith the expanse of the flute as it'sbreathing, against rhythm, you see.I'm involved with breathing, which Idon't consider rhythm, but I have tomeasure it in time and the actualrhythm which I'm really hearing as

rhythm.

Okay. Thank you.