Though the last 10 years has seen a steady flow of new recordings of Morton Feldman’s music, those have tended to concentrate on the remarkable series of works from the final decade of the composer’s life. But how his music achieved the refinement and clarity of those often greatly extended late pieces has been less thoroughly explored.
This entrancing and consistent collection, mostly made up of works for one or more pianos, but also including chamber pieces involving other instruments – strings, percussion, brass – focuses on Feldman’s music of the 50s and 60s; the earliest piece here is Intermission 6 for one or two pianos, from 1953, the latest is Between Categories, for two ensembles, from 1969. All 12 works demonstrate, as the pianist Philip Thomas points out in his superbly thorough commentary, “the intensity of Feldman’s experimentation with notation and sound” during that period. “Considering the works chronologically,” Thomas says, “one senses the composer trying out, teasing and developing means of notation to get close to his desired elasticity of time and duration.”
In all of these works, the pitches are precisely specified in the score; none of Feldman’s 50s forays into total indeterminacy and purely graphic notation are included. But the performers are given a great deal of freedom in deciding how long individual sounds last, how they decay and how they are co-ordinated between performers. There is a huge range of ways in which Feldman lays out his scores, and in what he expects of his performers, as if testing these different notations to destruction; in the works that came afterwards, from the early 70s onwards, he would return to much more conventional methods.
What is so remarkable about the music here, however it is assembled and put down on paper, is how transcendently beautiful so much of it is, its composer unmistakable. As in the later, better known works, every pitch, every chord seems precious. Every hint of rhetoric is a seismic event, even when the dynamic range is so deliberately confined – “The music is intended to be quiet and is best played at a low volume,” says a note on the sleeve. Every one of these exemplary performances, with John Tilbury and Thomas leading the way, seems to be totally immersed in this very special expressive world: one of the most extraordinary of any composer’s in the second half of the 20th century.
