Piano, for piano (1977)
John Tilbury, piano
Morton Feldman wrote Piano in 1977. It was his first work for solo piano in thirteen years, during which his mature style had fully consolidated. Though its textures are mostly chords with no single note lines or even a fragment of melody, the work feels continually varied, and the listener is likely to become rapt in its decidedly specific pickings from the piano's expressive capabilities. The surface's featurelessness is deceptive, and the single movement's twenty-six minutes passes almost more quickly than one might hope. Feldman's relationship to musical time was the final piece in the puzzle of his development, and the understated sophistication of time in this work makes it a surprisingly eventful listen. This is partly due to the composer's interest in creating a perpetual sense of the present, casting aside the listener's need for recall of what had happened before, which Schoenberg called "structural hearing." Creating the perpetual now, an immediacy delivered through time, is a challenge that few composers would dare to take up, let alone succeeded at creating. To succeed at this, Feldman had to look beyond music to other art forms. Luckily, the inspiration he needed was in operation in his own hometown.
The primary source of inspiration for Feldman was the abstract expressionist painters of his native New York. Artists such as Guston and Rothko conjured the experience of painting in their paintings. Their works are not representations of that experience; they are the embodiment of the experience. That suspension of what happened, the resulting document called the artwork, is static, and Feldman wanted something comparable. To this end, each moment of his music would annul the previous one, steeping the listener in a continual state of the present. During the thirteen years that stood between this piano work and the one previous to it, Feldman's rhythmic sophistication grew to become a vital component of what makes listeners forget about what had come beforehand. His work generally eschews contrasts; otherwise there would be stark departures of sound that could not easily be left behind. With a continual rhythmic adjustment of where the next moment of material appears, the musical idea that is being adjusted in time is going through comparable adjustments, meaning that no element of the work ever gets comfortable and therefore uninteresting. There is always a low-energy astonishment in motion with the music, which never gives the listener an element of definite regularity from which to begin a perceptive departure. When different levels of register create separate bodies in the soundscapes of Feldman, these blocks of sound consistently adjust in relationship to one another, as well as maintain an independent, metric irregularity. Piano commits to this operation but conceals this method; among the composer's mature works, this is among the least emotive, but it is as successful as it is entertaining and edifying. "Entertaining" is not a commonly used word in describing great art such as this, and it is more or less never used in the case of Feldman's music. But in the composer's lack of interest in showing his operative cards, the tension between the players, who are the composer and listener in this case, is as large and crackling as a poker scene directed by filmmaker Sam Peckinpah.
There are three sections to this movement. The third resembles the first, enough so that scholars will notice a ternary structure (ABA´) to the work. This does not impair the full sense of the continual newness of the solitary idea. It is best for listeners to dismiss any discussion of the Piano's structure and just pay attention. [Allmusic.com]
Art by Marlene Dumas
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Soy pintora. La música de Morton Feldman me ha acompañado a menudo mientras trabajaba, su obra tiene notables afinidades con la mía. Esta en particular es una de mis preferidas. Gracias por compartirla.
faroenmano 4 months ago
@faroenmano Muy interesante tu comentario; se sabe de la relación de la música de Feldman con la obra de algunos pintores como Guston o Rothko, pero es mucho más diciente cuando es una pintora quien encuentra tales relaciones. Sería muy interesante conocer tu obra.
Muchas gracias por tus comentarios en mi canal. Espero sigas visitando. Saludos desde Colombia!
pelodelperro 4 months ago