Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness

“I really don’t feel that it’s all necessary anymore,” Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. “And so what I try to bring into my music are just a very few essential things that I need—to at least keep it going, for a little while more.” Feldman had been asked whether his corpus of work, with its brooding slowness and trembling softness, had something to do with Jewish mourning in the wake of the Holocaust. He evaded the question, though he admitted that he thought about it privately. Instead, he gestured toward a more abstract vanishing—what he called “the death of art,” or, more acutely, “Schubert leaving me.”

It’s still going. At the time of his death, in 1987, Feldman seemed destined to be remembered as a particularly esoteric associate of John Cage’s. His obituaries were preoccupied with the fact that some of his works were very long. But a cult was growing around him, and in the past few decades his influence on new music has become pervasive. The late Feldman archivist Chris Villars assembled a list of some two hundred and fifty pieces written in Feldman’s memory. Linda Catlin Smith, who wrote two of them, recently told the critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson that hearing Feldman “made me feel that writing music was possible, that I might be able to write music that I want to hear.” The homages continue to arrive: in 2022, Tyshawn Sorey wrote “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” which emulates Feldman’s shiver-inducing 1972 score “Rothko Chapel,” a musical response to Mark Rothko’s sepulchral shrine in Houston.

In an age of algorithmic din, Feldman’s appeal lies in his unhurried, monkish devotion to the elementals of sound. His output can be seen as a kind of wilderness preserve, in which stray fragments of musical history are allowed to roam free, without having to worry about adapting themselves to any modish system or sensibility. You encounter ambiguous piano chords that could have survived a charred sonata by Schubert; darkly sighing flute motifs that might have graced a quieter page of one of Schoenberg’s expressionist eruptions; cryptically tolling percussion tones out of late Stravinsky; static repetitions that nod toward minimalism. Each sound inhabits its own space, hardly touching the others. A canyon of silence envelops them all.

At first glance, Feldman might seem to be a prophet of the so-called slow movement, which calls for the savoring of simple pleasures. Yet his empire of quiet is undergirded by unease. As in the writing of Samuel Beckett, who supplied the libretto for Feldman’s only opera, “Neither,” gnomic utterances bear the scars of catastrophe. This is not music you can zone out to, unless the zone in question is the shimmering wasteland of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.” An atmosphere of tension, even menace, circumscribes the sensuousness of those lost Romantic chords. As another Jewish American sage once said, beauty walks a razor’s edge.

Feldman’s hundredth birthday was on January 12th. Little is being done on his behalf in New York City, where he was born and raised. But the University of Buffalo, where the composer taught for many years, mounted a two-day festival in his honor, and the Piano Spheres series, in Los Angeles, presented a pair of marathon concerts. I attended the latter, which culminated in the unveiling of a cake emblazoned with Philip Guston’s portrait of Feldman—a bulbous figure puffing on a cigarette and gazing into the distance. I happen to share a birthday with the man of the hour. It was as good a way as any to mark the creep of age.

The Piano Spheres events, which were divided between the Wende Museum, in Culver City, and the Brick, in Koreatown, concentrated on the music of Feldman’s final decade, when he largely gave up trying to produce works that could fit onto conventional programs. Thirteen of his scores from this period go on for more than an hour; two of them, “String Quartet II” and “For Philip Guston,” each outlast “Tristan und Isolde.” I sometimes suspect that Feldman seized on Wagnerian scale as a way of exacting revenge on Hitler’s favorite composer. But the vastness was really about fostering conditions in which his spectral harmonies could thrive. Rothko needed to fill a room with his canvases; Feldman needed to fill an evening with his music.