[Friday afternoon, 3 November, 2:00-5:00, New Approaches to Recent Music, paper 3 of 4 ]
THE SOUNDS OF THE SOUNDS THEMSELVES:
ANALYZING THE EARLY MUSIC OF MORTON FELDMAN
Catherine Costello Hirata
Columbia University
Morton Feldman has characterized the experience of his early music in terms of each
sound being "erased" from memory by the next. Essentially, the idea is that, instead of
hearing progressions of sounds, we hear the individual "sounds themselves." We do not
relate the sounds; rather, we are always "very fresh into the moment." Certainly some
sense of this music is captured in this characterization. However, the implication that, given
two sounds, our experience of the second one is more or less what it would have been had
we not experienced the first, is misleading. In this paper I propose that, though we have
little sense of holding onto sounds in our memory, each sound nevertheless marks us in a
certain way such that we hear the next sound with a particular perspective. We do not have
direct perceptual access to the relations between sounds, but we do have access to the many
qualities conferred on the individual sounds by way of those relations. In the absence of
any overall pattern to the music, the relations involved are of a large number and of many
different kinds -- including seemingly nonsensical ones. The music's almost unbearable
refinement is a direct consequence of its refusing to impress upon us some relations more
than others.