And thus Morton Feldman, ignored by the classical establishment during his life (1926-1987), takes his place at Lincoln Center Festival 96 this August 2 through 4 as quite possibly the greatest composer of the late 20th century. Once known only as John Cage's quiet, heavy sidekick, the composer who made ''as soft as possible'' his trademark has come into his posthumous moment of glory. Among other works, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will play The Viola in My Life 1 and Why Patterns?, Aki Takahashi will perform the delicately off-balance and 75-minute-long Triadic Memories, Joan LaBarbara will sing Three Voices, the Kronos Quartet will wind through six hours of the Second String Quartet, and John Kennedy will conduct Feldman's late, shimmering masterpiece, For Samuel Beckett. And, in an inspired move, the festival has de facto paired Feldman with Beckett, the playwright whose sense of bleak yet richly textured motionlessness is so perfectly parallel to Feldman's own. A Downtown composer occupying a Lincoln Center pedestal next to the century's greatest playwright? The times, they are a-changing indeed.
I knew Feldman slightly. I was only a grad student, and while he certainly paid
attention to students, he favored the women. The irreverent caricatured him as a
frog, with his large bulk, immensely thick glasses, preternaturally low hairline,
and long, oily black hair. Convinced of his historical importance, he put people
off with his arrogance, and yet he conferred attention on young composers so
magnanimously that newcomers spontaneously called him ''Uncle Morty'' behind his
back. He was famous for his bons mots. In one lecture I heard, he stated that it
was impossible to teach composition in a university, even though that's what he
did, at SUNY at Buffalo. One student became livid (Feldman always infuriated
someone) and shouted, ''How can you spend your life doing something you don't
believe in?'' Morty looked perplexed for a moment before replying, in his
nasal, curvilinear Brooklynese, ''That's a definition of
matyoority.''
Thanks in part to such maturity, Feldmania has swept college music departments from the students upward, and the academics can no more stem the tide than they can ban nose piercing. No composer in decades has had such a widespread influence. Long decays and uniform dynamics are in fashion. Youngsters who write 12-tone music now specify pianissimo throughout. The noisy British improv group AMM has taken to soft and sustained playing. Even the music Cage wrote after Feldman died sounds like Feldman.
Perhaps what makes Feldman the composer of the moment is that he's the only Downtowner who beat the academics at their own game, the only one the establishment can embrace without dropping their European expectations. On the surface, his music meets most modernist criteria. It is atonal. It is highly chromatic, rippling with dissonant intervals. It rarely articulates a steady beat. Its rhythms are complexly notated, even if they don't sound complex when played.
What sticks in the classical-music craw is the stasis of Feldman's music, its
absence of drama, direction, or virtuosity. What it has instead, and what sparks
its influence, is its mood, a subtle and intricately etched melancholy found (as
Feldman noted) in Kierkegaard, Van Gogh, Beckett, Rothko; but almost never in
music. (When an interviewer traced this moodiness to Feldman's Jewishness and
sorrow over Auschwitz, Feldman admitted that ''I do think about the fact that I
want to be the first great composer who is Jewish.'' Mendelssohn and Schoenberg,
OK, but what about Mahler?) Because his pieces usually have one dynamic marking
throughout, Feldman has been called a minimalist, and even, in an implied slap at
Glass and Reich, the real minimalist. But how can a work as bristlingly complex,
as difficult to grasp or even follow its score, as For Samuel Beckett be
considered minimalist? The idea is absurd. All Feldman's music shares with
the minimalists' is its flatness of surface, and his pensive moods, nuanced
via reminiscences and slightly varied repetitions, couldn't be more
foreign to the mass-produced impersonality of minimalist music and art.
Many composers, I think, envy painters and novelists because they aren't held
hostage to a highly technical German tradition, and their arts don't seem split
into a pair of artificial dichotomies (serialism versus minimalism, structure
versus intuition). But only Feldman lived so much among painters that he absorbed
a non-composerly attitude. For him, ideas became the enemy of music. Ideas are
weapons in the war of careers, and their end result is ideology, not art. ''There
was a deity in my life,'' Feldman said, ''and that was sound.'' ''Those 88 notes
are my Walden.'' He chided his students for trying to make their music
interesting; he wanted to make his beautiful.
For Feldman, the image replaced the idea. The pairs of rocking, chromatic chords
in Why Patterns?, the dense and slowly modulating thicket of For Samuel Beckett,
the 12-tone row from Webern that makes sporadic appearances in the String Quartet
II, the reappearing languorous arpeggio in The Viola in My Life, these
irreducible images that can't be analyzed, only listened to, were partly
suggested by the slowly shifting shapes in Alexander Calder's mobiles. Other
qualities come straight from the canvas: the painterly application of touches of
sound to an ineluctably flat aural plane. The length of his late works, two to
six hours nonstop, intended to entice you to live with the music the way you live
with a painting on your wall, slowly acclimatizing yourself to its implied
universe. The obsession with minute choices of tone color, so intense that when
Earle Brown once remonstrated, ''But Morty, just because you've
chosen the instruments, that doesn't mean the piece is finished,''
Feldman replied, ''For me it is.''
This isn't to say that Feldman tried to compose like a painter, for the reliance
on images also comes from Stravinsky. Even if Feldman resisted taking sides in
that debate, he appreciated Stravinsky's receptivity to sound, and he was
certainly familiar with Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles (1966), whose muted
chords for timpani and quadruple flutes sound stolen from Feldman's late
music. Schoenberg concentrated on method, but for Stravinsky, just as for the
abstract expressionists, ''material reigns supreme,'' as Feldman
wrote. ''Construction is kept at a minimum. The material is always
'on camera.' ''
But we miss Feldman's significance altogether if we don't see that the
most important thing he brought back from painting was the artist's attitude
of subjective immediacy in an era in which composers had become theorists and
technicians. ''Music is not painting,'' he observed,
''but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and
observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's
vested interest in his craft.'' What Feldman particularly loved about
abstract expressionism was that it wasn't polemical; it was a reaction not to
history, but to the direct, in-the-studio experience of manipulating paint.
Watching Pollock and Guston on one hand, and his Europe-certified composer
colleagues on the other, he came to contrast the dangerous and vulnerable life of
the artist with the safe, justifiable career of the professional composer.
''[T]he real tradition of twentieth-century America,'' he wrote,
''a tradition evolving from the empiricism of Ives, Varese, and Cage, has
been passed over as 'iconoclastic' - another word for unprofessional.
In music, when you do something new, something original, you're an amateur.
Your imitators - these are the professionals. It is these imitators who are
interested not in what the artist did, but the means he used to do it. . . . The
'freedom' of the artist is boring to [the imitator] because in freedom he
cannot reenact the role of the artist.''
Feldman became the Great One by imprinting young composers with the attitude of
the artist, while everyone else was role-playing. As gorgeously seductive as his
music is ''sometimes too beautiful,'' Cage pointed out in
Silence the painterly listening mode it requests can challenge a concert
audience. Paradoxically lush and austere at once, For Samuel Beckett contains an
overload of detail, but nothing to focus on; hearing Kennedy conduct it at the
Spoleto Festival in June was like seeing Monet's Water Lilies from two inches
away, scintillating but mystifying. Yet this Lincoln Center retrospective will
undoubtedly draw an international audience of Feldman devotees, like pilgrims to
Mecca, proving that this contentious ''amateur'' 's instincts
were right all along.