[Thursday afternoon, 2 November, 2:00-5:00, The New York Schools of
Music and Visual Arts, paper 4 of 4]
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST CONTENT AND MINIMALIST PATTERN
IN MORTON FELDMAN'S LATE MUSIC
Steven Johnson
Brigham Young University
In articles and written statements Morton Feldman repeatedly
emphasized his debt to the Abstract Expressionist (or New York School)
painters. He credited Mark Rothko and Philip Guston in particular for
showing him a new "sound world," and he also noted similarities between
his and Jackson Pollock's compositional methods. Yet in the late 1970s
Feldman's music turned in a different direction. Beginning with Why
Patterns? (1978) he developed a style based on minimalist repetition of
basic patterns carried on through vast stretches of time. Feldman
credited two visual sources for this new direction: middle Eastern
carpets and Jasper Johns's paintings of the 1970s, both of which dwell
on the repetition of simple patterns. Focusing analytically on Johns's
Scent (1973-74) and Usuyuki (1977-78) and Feldman's Why Patterns?, this
paper illustrates aesthetic and structural parallels between painter and
composer. Sustaining a complex and sometimes contradictory aesthetic,
both Johns and Feldman adopt minimalist repetition but apply it in a
"painterly" as opposed to "industrial" manner. But what is more, both
painter and composer intentionally reflect back on several past
aesthetic movements. Underlying the impersonal minimalist surface of
these works, Abstract Expressionist values are revived and combined with
such earlier modernist organizational principles as cubism and
serialism.
RESPONDENT: Dore Ashton (New York City), "On Guston, Johns, and Feldman"