Morton Feldman

Ivan Hewett marks 100 years of an American modernist whose complex, sometimes lengthy scores ultimately reward those willing to listen

- ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING

After the premiere of his orchestral piece Coptic Light in 1986, Morton Feldman was described by an irate American critic as ‘the most boring composer in the history of music’. Listeners coming to his music for the first time might well nod in exasperated agreement. First impressions are of tiny muffled gestures, often amounting to no more than a single tolling note or a wispy three-note melody, separated often by huge silences, floating by in a musical landscape devoid of direction or drama. ‘Where is the interest or attraction of this music?’, they might reasonably ask. The music of those other notorious pioneers of postwar modernism may seem equally puzzling in terms of the actual notes, but at least they have some positive qualities to annoy or entertain us. One can relish Boulez’s coiled-up fury, laugh at the absurdity of Cage’s chance ‘happenings’, marvel at the sheer ambition of Stockhausen’s mystical ‘cosmic’ visions.

Feldman’s music refuses any kind of rhetorical flourish. There’s no attempt to outline a narrative, or ‘take us on a journey’, or wring our feelings. And yet over time an unexpected, delicate yet powerful fascination arises from those introverted sounds. Feldman wanted to ‘tint the air’ with a certain meditative colour, by inviting us to focus on slow changes to a chord or observe the way layers of overlapping patterns shift among themselves as they repeat. That essentially meditative stance required a dynamic range somewhere between quiet and inaudible. Feldman, along with the Austrian prewar modernist Webern, was the great master of the pianissimo – although (again like Webern) his music can suddenly be riven by unexpected fortissimos. But we don’t read these fortissimos the way we normally read such things, as the signs of overflowing human passion. They are simply a different scale of sound; boulders rather than pebbles.