Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet (1/6)

Piano and String Quartet, for piano & string quartet (1985) Aki Takahashi, piano Kronos Quartet Morton Feldman wrote Piano and String Quartet in 1985, which was commissioned for the 1985 New Music America Festival in Los Angeles. For this work, the composer has placed the piano and string quartet in opposition, with the piano primarily performing arpeggios while the quartet performs mainly held chords. The opportunity to hear these different musical bodies luxuriating as separate bodies in a common soundscape is a uniquely revealing method for Feldman to display the operations of his mature writing style. For the work's eighty-minute duration, the piano's arpeggios and the quartet's chords go through minute changes of rhythm and register so that the decay of each collective undulation gradually comes together, diversifies, and eventually there are brief solos, so that there is a kaleidoscope of motion between them. Though Feldman had only two years left to live when he wrote Piano and String Quartet, the expressive elasticity of his imagination was at its height during these last few years, and this simple musical premise is as evocative as any great work of the twentieth century. Though there are means of outlining his approach to creating a piece of music, the forms are invariably original. He referred to his works as "handmade," which pertains to his willingness to do something new with each composition. Listeners who are only beginning a relationship to this composer's music may find the distinctions between each work remote, but that is because the syntax that Feldman discovered and refined over the course of several decades is so specific to him that one must first learn to listen past the initial revelation of having found him. Two of the most important inspirations for Feldman were not musical; they were abstract expressionist painting and Persian rugs. Abstract expressionist paintings by Rothko and Guston managed to document a relationship to emotional states that cannot be represented. When taking in such works, the viewer enters an aesthetic space that cannot be penetrated by any other means because the painting in question represents one outlook (the painter's) at one specific period (when it was painted). Viewers can then enter into an aesthetic relationship posed by the work's tensions, which suspends conscious ties with identifiable, knowable things. This suspension is part of what Feldman was after, though this is more difficult to achieve in music than in the visual arts because the work itself takes place in time. The solution is to present the music in a collection of moments, a set of undulations wherein the piano and quartet perform an utterance that evolves in such a way that the material is not in contrast to the previous utterance, which is then obliterated from memory. The listener is caught in a perpetual state of the present, caught up in the tensions between the "now" and whatever had happened previously as it disappears into a fog of "before," as well as the tensions between the piano and quartet. Feldman's command of rhythmic features was elastic enough to create a sense of looseness, of an easy and natural relationship to pattern, as opposed to something mechanistic or scientific. This is what he absorbed from the Persian masters of rug weaving. The patterns these masters created are not rigid but fluid, reflecting a tradition predating the hard lines of contemporary design. The resulting music is a refreshing approach, and not merely novel but completely engrossing without being manipulative. Piano and String Quartet is a formidable work and ennobles the tired label of masterpiece. Listeners will find that a lifetime is not long enough to exhaust this work. It is timeless and human concurrently. [allmusic.com] Art by Elizabeth Murray