Customer Reviews

Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987 (New Series)

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I've spent a fair amount of time with "Morton Feldman Says" and I've decided it's an excellent collection, but not necessarily worth it's price. While in Scarecrow saw fit to offer an interpretation of Feldman in his review, I'm content to leave that task to the reader. I will, however, offer a few comments on the book itself.

The selection of interviews, lectures, and writings are fairly diverse. For those who enjoyed "Give My Regards to Eighth Street", there is plenty of new material here. Where "8th Street" is mostly Feldman's essays, notes, and fragments, "Feldman Says" feels more complete. The books fill different needs and thus work well together. "Feldman Says" also has a number of black-and-white photos from Feldman's life. One of the most interesting features of the book is a collection of reproductions of Feldman scores. For those who do not have access to Feldman's scores, this will be of great interest.

The only thing that keeps me from giving this title five stars is that I feel it is significantly overpriced. Although Amazon currently offers it well below the $50 list price, I feel this is simply too much for a paperback of this type. Especially so when you consider the superb "Give My Regards to Eighth Street" is closer to $15. Both titles offer a great view into Feldman's world - his life, his ideas, his compositional technique - but aside from some photographs in "Feldman Says", I can't see a major difference.

I don't mean to sound cheap. I just mean to warn you that for the price, you may expect more than you'll receive. Most of the time when a book crosses the $50 threshold, it's either a beautiful hardcover, some sort of limited edition, or large and comprehensive. This is none of the above. Ultimately though, this is a fine collection of interviews and writings. Add to that some interesting reproductions of Feldman's scores and a timeline, this is a great book for both Feldman fans and anyone interested in 20th century American art music.

The late Morton Feldman was an articulate speaker. Not that some days he was "off" where he came to repeat himself and get bogged down in one single work explications. His last Darmstadt lectures for example (with Ferneyhough and Rihm in attendance) is an example. He spoke about his historically long piece for Flute and Piano and percussion. He speaks in timbre, think of the flute he would say, "I don't think of the flute, as a flute" (to paraphrase).He thinks of his music as transitory, always to something else.

Feldman honed his ideology hanging out with painters,the Abstract Expressionists at the Cedar Bar in New York. But he also was invited to studios (Guston, Kline, de Kooning) to view new works and think about what they mean not philosophic but the technical. He always found fascinating concepts to bring to his music and thinking about the process of writing music. Very late in life he re-discovered the inherent mysteries in minimal aesthetic, an aesthetic very different than what you may think you know of rhytmic patternings music. Incredibly Feldman didn't discover this odyssey for the minimal earlier, although in many respects you can argue that he always had a fascination for un-repetition of the same stasis.In retropsect you can see where his music has much more elements of longevity than the "Star" minimalists whose work today has is now a mere caricature of what it may have been,co-opted, homogenized down to its lowest forms.
Feldman has written some of the most beautiful music claiming a place that the vigours of modernity need not lead to "alienation" schemes practiced so well by his brethren, the post-war European creators as well as closer friends, Cage and Brown.Feldman it seems always thought something else need to happen while modernity simply goes on toward its own demise. Well here you get to experience his thoughts into pathways into how he composes, although much of these materials are already available on the web if you know where to look.
Feldman delves into memory of concepts from Henri Bergson. Memory is a realm quite a problematic when you consider the question how does one listen to a six hour piece of music as Feldman's "Second String Quartet", or the seminal(granite-like) now last piano works, "for Bunita Marcus,"and "Triadic Memories". He became interested in the process of rug making and how patterns become distributed over a defined space. Do we listen in a striaght line or in para-memory means, where are listening is similar to a Moebius strip where we continue to return to events, fragments, particles of timbre we had previously experienced. Feldman then suggests ways of thinking about important elements of maodernity as density, shape, space, texture and timbre. Ultimatly it was timbre itself that he most contributed, the love of timbre I think compells us as composer, the composer to continue to write. Meaning then becomes something you can ponder after creativity. This is something Feldman would advise the young composer, write and write and write,ponder and think later or during.

This is a wonderful job of Villars attempting to fill the void left by the interviews with Walter Zimmermann now a collectors item to purvey.