Essays (German Edition) [Paperback]

Morton Feldman (Author), Walter Zimmerman (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: German, English

Product Details

• Paperback: 244 pages
• Publisher: Beginner Press,Germany; First Edition edition (April 1985)
• Language: German
• ISBN-10: 3980051617
• ISBN-13: 978-3980051613
• Product Dimensions: 11.6 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,233,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars reveals more of the lifeworld than just music., September 11, 2004

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Essays (German Edition) (Paperback)

Shame these essays and interviews are no longer available or difficult to obtain.

Feldman has, or had many interests verging converging in all directions but all of it seems to have served, to have nurtured his music, and his thinking about the various nefarious processes that music allows one,memory, timbre, texture, register,and finally long durational lengths and rhythm. All this was the lifeworld that challenges the work ethic,sitting down everyday at a table, with pen, to organize oneself is perhaps just as important as what one writes, for we learn the process itself determines the results. Feldman said that one day he would write, and if it went well, the next day he would copy the one page of many yet to write in final form in some indelible ink.

Feldman has much to say about working, that for instance he wrote at the piano to try things out, this it turns out slowed him down, you needed to think before you wrote. Also he utilized indelible inks that simply one could not erase easily, unless the page of score was cut with a pen-razor knife.

Walter Zimmermann had interviewed Feldman, this was a time(the early Eighties) when Zimmermann himself was evaluating his own work in composition, what musical language one may might adopt.

Feldman studied composition with Stefan Wolpe yet was schooled within the mileau of the Abstract Expressionists in New York, where they hung out at the Cedar Bar in New York City speaking about all things commonplace, as density, texture, shape and design of abstraction, also working and process, how does one learn again and again when something is already learned (as for instance drip painting or field colours, largeness and scale, what now does one do to further the process along. Feldman would often accompany painters to other studios to see new creations/directions art was(or did) take. Usually friend painter Philp Guston said when examining a work, ". . . . yes overall it doesn't work, but this moment here (gesturing to the lower right quadrant of the painting) is pure genius."

Feldman had challenged himself constantly with new forms new musical shapes in genre, he simply titled his work , :Durations: or:Music for, , , or named it after a friend, or simply :piano piece", then simplified still "piano". But he did break this with more dramatic titles as "The King of Denmark", a wonderful graphic piece (in numbers) piece for solo percussionist who must play the instruments his/er choice with knuckles and fingers only.

These interviews are well-endowed with selected pages from Feldman's music yet they stop prior to the large scale works the last ten years of his life as the String Quartet, the 6-Hour work, and "For Christian Wolff", the 4 Hour flute and Piano work.I find this late period rather dismal and not thought through enough, enamored over theso-called rhythmic discoveries of Phil Glass. Feldman had a wider pallette to manipulate and survey, he had a deeper understanding of "what works" in timbre in density in register. He had no feel for the market and the cash box as Glass surely did with his repetitive rhythmic harmonic formulaic dribble.

Feldman also speaks here of how memory works and Henri Bergson, how the mind retains "data", or music, what happens to a musical idea before and after it is transformed and within the context of what surrounds it and itself., during as well, and how all this affects the "composition" of how we remember music, their/its events and gestures. Although Fedlamn did not think of his music as gesture, simply relationships of timbres and intervals where they reside for how long what comes before and after. He sought real unadorned beauty of the aesthetic object, something that set him quite apart from his indeterminate innovative brethren as John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, unofficialy referred to as the Cage School. Well Cage had the drive, Feldman tells us he knew how to organize and event send out :mailers:, and postcards, schedule rehearsals and the performance space. Coordinate the logistics of what is needed, as say four pianos, or simply a string quartet.