Timeful Dancing

Exposition, development, recapitulation: presented, elaborated, resolved. Morton Feldman, the American composer and student of John Cage, said of his teacher that his work granted all kinds of ‘permissions’ to a younger generation. For this generation presentation might begin with a conceptual statement:

‘I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now…’

These permissions might be elaborated, but not resolved. They might not even reach elaboration, being undone in the very moment of utterance:

‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it.’

Cage ‘gave permissions’ for Feldman to consider silence, although never just silence, and duration, an element evident in his earliest works that got played out to an absurd degree towards the end of his life. Meditations on duration, silence and the autonomy of sound are the composer’s greatest contribution to modern music. Over the course of his career Feldman scored precisely notated music, as well as experimenting with improvisation and indeterminacy. An example of the latter, his Durations of 1960-61, allows the performers to decide the lengths of the pieces. The third piece in the series for violin, tuba and piano begins with a sound played by each instrument simultaneously. There is no tempo and no time signature. Each sound is chosen by the performer and all beats are slow. The sounds are played with a minimum of attack. According to Feldman’s instructions, the dynamics in this piece should be ‘very low’. Two years before in 1959 Feldman gave instructions to the performer of Last Pieces: ‘Durations are free… hold for as long as you can.’ Musical instruments are activated by human bodies. In the third piece of Durations, to play the tuba requires periodic pauses for breath; and would therefore suggest phrases of no longer than ten seconds. It is in this sense that the music is formed around a human scale. To further illustrate the key of human scale in composition the historian of music Paul Griffiths points to how pulse in paired beats at around one per second corresponds to the left-right swing of walking; a faster pulse of two beats per second to running.

Music is of time. It is a system for measuring and quantifying. It can also travel through time: to hear twelfth-century chant performed is to experience structuring of temporality nine hundred years old. If a piece of music lacks precise notation, organisation of time will exist only in duration of performance. How and when to begin and end a piece of music is to consider sound’s relation to silence: the musician must decide where to pause, how best to reach the end of the music, to bring it to extinction. As Don Ihde puts it, ‘sound dances timefully within experience. Sound embodies the sense of time’. Listen to the environment for a short duration and one will notice a succession of sound-events occur. Concentrate and listen closely: one sound follows another, or sounds occur simultaneously, they exist for a moment and pass away. Perhaps more than any of the other senses hearing is temporal and the world of sound is one of flux and flow. In other words, sound and hearing have a positive relation to time. There is a philosophical tradition that takes this for granted: ‘Language has time as its element,’ wrote Soren Kierkegaard in Either/Or, ‘all other media have space as their element. Music is the only other one that takes place in time.’

But music takes place in space too, in an auditory field. Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971), for soprano, alto, mixed choir and instruments, was written as a eulogy to his friend the painter Mark Rothko, in whose work he apprehended a ‘sound world more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.’ Like Matisse who, some years earlier, had designed and built a chapel in the French Riviera towards the end of his life, Rothko received a commission in 1964 to design and furnish with his own paintings a non-denominational chapel at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. For a sense of scale Rothko painted inside a full-scale model of a segment of the chapel in his studio. He was notoriously obsessed by details, falling out with the architect – who finally resigned – over lighting. His studio assistant reported how he had worked an entire month on half an inch area of canvas. Rothko did not live to realise the project; in 1971, a year before its completion, he took his own life.

Still today fourteen large canvases hang around the walls, elevating the near octagonal structure beyond mere building, and the painting beyond mere painting. To enter Rothko’s darkroom is to take a journey into the psychological interior. It is a peculiarly liminal space. ‘It is a place oriented towards God,’ its patron Dominique de Menil writes, ‘named or unnamed.’ In rehearsals, it is said, Feldman would assist his performers by describing the sounds as ‘sourceless’. His piece was performed in 1971 at the painter’s memorial service inside the chapel. In addition to its emotional and existential quality it is an exposition of an ideal space for the experience of listening. Where the painter did not live to experience that space, Feldman’s composition sounded in an art-architectural design for immersive contemplation. It is thrilling to imagine the immanence and transience of Rothko Chapel inside the permanence – the immutability – of Rothko Chapel.

Feldman’s later compositions realise a structure in which sounds are liberated to be sounds precisely by diminishing that structure to such a degree whilst allowing it to retain its identity as music. His String Quartet (II) (1983) and For Phillip Guston (1984) clock in at six and five hours long respectively. Clearly music of this duration tests the resilience of the audience – who anyway are under no contract to stay; but consider too the performers. If we take for granted that the structure of music expresses, in however attenuated way, the biology of the body, a musician is therefore a person with competencies, competencies and effective knowledge of how to control the body. The virtuoso Feldman performer requires extra-normal competencies. Skill, concentration and attention become a physiological matter. Whether one listens attentively or not – or indeed is even conscious of listening or not, dwelling in the time-space of these long duration performances is to enter into a new consciousness. Music, we are made aware, is a corporeal art that is physically involving for performer and listener alike. What the audience might hear is the emergence of order, the artwork organising itself into existence where perception and creation is conceived as the same act. Feldman does not lead the perceiver through time but allows her to find her own way through it. And yet after four hours of music without discernible structure how can one remember what came earlier? It has been said of Feldman that he intended to induce erasure of aural memory with his compositions. To erase the listener’s apprehension of what came before is to root the listening to the present, to a kind of immanence in space. Alex Ross, music critic at the New Yorker, says that Feldman was in the business of creating ‘places of spiritual otherness’. Extreme length, he believes, allowed the composer to approach his ultimate goal of making music a life-changing force, a transcendent force that, in the latter’s words ‘wipes everything out’ and ‘cleans everything away.’