Running to four and a half hours without a break, Morton Feldman’s late work For Philip Guston is long by any standards. Non-athletes can finish marathons in less time; even the apocalyptic final instalment of Wagner’s Ring cycle is shorter. Yet the most striking thing about the work is its economy. An opening sequence of four pitches played by three musicians provides the musical material that is transformed, transposed, stretched and compressed throughout. Notes and motifs are repeated and multiply, echoing across the ever-sparse texture. The tempo is consistently slow, the dynamic consistently quiet. Rhythms are complex, but subtly so, making the instances of absolute synchrony into passing miracles. Time is the only resource with which Feldman is profligate.
Challenged on the work’s scale, Feldman once quipped, “it’s a short four hours!” I’m not sure all attending this rare performance in Kings Place’s Memory Unwrapped series would have agreed. Seats creaked constantly as people wriggled, late arrivals crept in and others trickled out. Coughs were half stifled. Phones buzzed. Someone near me went through an inexplicable, maddening phase of humming along.
Yet after a brief wave of low-level panic in the first hour when the obsessive repetitions felt airless rather than expansive, I gradually acclimatised. Notes from Taylor MacLennan’s flutes seemed to materialise from nowhere, with no discernible articulation and no vibrato – sometimes approaching the disembodied quality of synthesised sound, sometimes sinking into the feather-down timbre of the alto flute’s lowest register. Siwan Rhys and George Barton of GBSR Duo switched, respectively, between piano and celeste and vibraphone, glockenspiel, marimba and tubular bells. Those shifts appeared increasingly revelatory, as did the texture’s occasional sheering away to a solo instrumental line.
The abstract expressionist Philip Guston was Feldman’s closest friend until, as the composer put it, “we broke up because of style” when the artist re-embraced figurative painting. This work was dedicated to Guston after his death in 1980. A live performance in its full, fidgety duration inevitably demonstrates the impossibility of complete abstraction in music. But the intense concentration of these performers and the delicately immersive sound world they created were utterly unforgettable.
