Customer Reviews

Rothko Chapel

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Morton Feldman may have been the prototypical minimalist. His music, though varied in effect, tends to consist of very soft, discrete sounds which slowly morph from pattern to pattern. Though his music falls into periods, roughly divided by notational practice (early music uses primarily graphic scores and aleatoric procedures, later scores tend toward more precise notation, though the rhythms still remain approximate), the effect of his output is remarkably the same throughout his life. It is intellectually challenging, beautiful ambient music.

Rothko Chapel, written to be played in the famous Houston space, is a wonderful piece, one that should win new converts to the Feldman cause. It isn't daunting in length, like many later Feldman pieces, yet it retains the sonic beauty and delicacy of instrumental color that makes Feldman unique. The piece is also remarkably tonal, unlike many other Feldman works. The gorgeous hushed soprano solo sounds like a distant call to prayer. Feldman talks in the liner notes of the influence of Hebrew cantilation and you can hear it, although it is much more distant than most cantilation. This work is an example of the best kind of ambient music. It is endlessly fascinating, and yet seems to have a physical presence that does not depend on your concentration. You can listen intently or just let the sound wash over you.

Inclusion of Why Patterns? was a good idea. This work is much more typical of Feldman's style. Written for the combination of flute, glockenspiel and piano, the almost 30 minute work is a slow spinning out of subtley dissonant patterns, all at extremely quiet volume levels. The work doesn't seem to start or stop. It's as if we are dropping in on an eternal piece of music, hanging around a while and then leaving again.

As one other reviewer stated, it would be nice to have another version of Rothko Chapel available. With a composer like Feldman, alternative versions can really proove useful. So much of his music depends on chance and the sensitivity of his performers that comparisions are more important than with more standard music. The sound on this CD is wonderful. Thank you New Albion! This is my favorite Feldman CD by far!

"Rothko Chapel" was composed for the dedication of the de Menil chapel, for which Mark Rothko created some of his final paintings. The space, in Houston TX, is a downtown quiet space, for contemplation, with only the dark colorfields of Rothko's work as a visual point of focus. The work here is a very beautiful and equally dark counterpoint to those canvases, evocative of both the sense of visual diffusion as well as the inner mystery they seem to conceal within their colorfields. Sometimes seeming like some mysterious shrouded procession, at other times like a distant call to prayer, and with a recurrant vocal figure of a solo voice, evoking a sense of both innocence and encantory devotion, the piece is one of Feldman's shortest but most powerful. And the version performed here is excellent, with very precise yet human performance characteristics...which is just what's required, as a rule, to make Feldman's music 'work'. The accompanying work, "Why Patterns?", is a self-answering rhetorical question...the work asks the question, then answers it perfectly, demonstrating just _why_ Feldman's work from the 1960s onward concentrated on pattern-based structures. This piece reminds me of Philip Glass or Steve Reich's work...but far more understated, with subtile dissonances that would be unheard-of in those two 'minimalists' works. Again, very sensitive and precise playing here from the CA EAR Unit. A highly recommended CD, and a great starting-point release for those who've heard of...but not heard...Morton Feldman's work.

"Rothko Chapel" is the most accessible of Feldman's compositions. It sounds like Debussy, with spare, lyrical strings, chimes, and an enchanting soprano, Deborah Dietrich on this recording (there is at least one other, on Col Legno). Feldman, a friend of the painter Rothko, constructed this tribute in four sections as "an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples," to accompany the Houston exhibit of 14 canvasses in 1972. (In July of 2006 I visited the Rothko Chapel, which is part of the Menil Collection. It is a dark space, with the very dark Rothkos on the walls -- it feels more like a crypt, or a bomb shelter, than a chapel, but it is still active, with various events sponsored by any and all religions, including events promoting peace.)

The exquisite "Rothko Chapel" alone would be an utterly uncharacteristic introduction to Feldman. Fortunately, in that sense, this disc also includes "Why Patterns?", which is an excellent and far more representative piece. From 1978, for flute, glockenspiel and piano, it unfolds like a delicate spiral, invoking a sense of wonder. As a reminder that packages might as well be attractive too, New Albion uses Rothko's "Red Over Dark Blue on Dark Gray" (1961) for the cover -- perfecto!

See my MORTON FELDMAN: A LISTENER'S GUIDE list for more recordings and reviews by one of THE 12 BEST LATE 20TH CENTURY COMPOSERS (another list!).

A repetitive chorus of female voices, moaning, wailing, like a train heard passing from nowhere to nowhere at three in the morning, this is the coldest offering to the ear I've ever heard. And yet, somehow, it fits both Rothko's work and the manner of his death. After the Zen no-mind of the first four tracks, Feldman embraces his listeners and--by proxy--Rothko's spirit--in the 5th track, which offers us a "warm" and charming cello motif, that the composer, in his collected writings, tells us he composed at age 15. Rothko Chapel is then, a radical listening experience of "outside" (as in interstellar space), and "inside" (as in some catchy riff lifted from Dvorak's "American").

"Why Patterns" is more familiar Feldman territory: think aural disjunction, fragmentation, etc.

Exciting, challenging, memorable--these are the three key words I would apply to this CD.

A previous reviewer uses this recording as ambient music. First I could not believe it. But why not? It would be rather pleasant if people overall would play Feldman's music instead of "musak" or other "things" they use as background music. The sales would increase and probably we would have more versions of the same pieces to compare (suposing that musak musicians would not start playing Feldman...). As Stravinsky noted, the lack of comparison in recording contemporary music "fixes the music at a single angle", or at very few angles. This CD is a good example. I considered the present rendering of "Why patterns?" beautiful, but it is (in my opinon) not that good compared to the recording with the première musicians including Feldman himself at the piano (American Masters: Morton Feldman. Composers Recordings Inc. # 620).

Cage's influence on Feldman is obvious in most of the latter's works, and certainly also in the works on this disc. Yet a charge often leveled at Cage - that while his work is art, perhaps great art, it is not really "music" - cannot be leveled against Feldman, at least not in the case of the works on this disc. Yes, very Cageian ideas about everyday sounds and silence are certainly at work here, but this is definitely musical works - enchanting, deeply moving and masterly musical works at that.

Rothko Chapel is Feldman at his most immediately approachable. The "painting-like" or "canvas-like" quality of Feldman's music is of course here, and a deep understanding of Rothko's paintings is all-permeating (although the work is in no sense a auditory illustration of Rothko's paintings in the sense of, say, Mussorgsky) - indeed, the piece exhibits much the same ethereal effects as Rothko's paintings, down to the almost tune-like apotheosis of the final movement. Why Patterns? is a more "difficult" work in the sense that it requires some more concentration on the part of the listener to reveal its qualities; it is a play with musical lines - disconnected series of patterns for the three instruments that are never really aligned and do not even work together before the very end of the work. It is a quietly contemplative, almost meditative, work, intricate and complex yet devoid of outward tension or drama.

I have nothing negative to say about any of the performances, which seem to realize the spirit and point of these works perfectly (though I admit to not having heard any alternative versions), and sound quality is unobjectionable. All in all, I think this might just be the best possible introduction to Feldman's music (both for newcomers and those like myself who previously never really understood what the fuzz was all about), with the Rothko Chapel being the most immediately approachable and the Why Patterns? a somewhat more challenging experience.

Within the oft befuddled stylistic wash of the 20th century, we have our camps, our geniuses, our individuals, our movement-founding demigods... Feldman's music is so unique, it transcends, even ignores, any self-concept of 'the individual', focusing all of what little energy it needs to expend on subtleties among subtleties: such as layering identical choral chords and exposing the shaky hollowness of the human voice in Rothko Chapel. Yes, Rothko Chapel is a revolution -- a quiet revolution nearly lost within itself... it ends, though it does not fade, and it remains: the vibraphone keeps faint, lucid rhythm, the viola turns back on itself, the choral murmur hovers... and just lingers on.

This is absolutely beautiful music, a set of short pieces, two to nine minutes in length, five in all, that somehow evoke the feeling of fullness, colors both static and in (very, very slow) motion in Rothko's paintings. Feldman is resolutely modern but the opposite of abrasive. His music takes close, careful listening because things move so slowly in them. It's minimalist music, but not like Reich's or Glass's or Terry Riley's who minimize on structure and then fill up the reduced framework with movement. Feldman's pieces, on the limited exposure I've had to them and based on what Ross writes about them in his book, use random or semi-structured transitions, vide John Cage, that seem partly found in the ground harmonies rather than invented. The music sits in front of you, changing and deepening as you listen to it. He likes to create a ground chord and then let a single instrument --cello, viola, voices, etc.-- emerge from it, evoking a line almost as static as the base line. It is really a gorgeous album. There is a second piece on it --29+ plus minutes long- entitled Why Patterns?, performed by California Ear Unit, but I haven't listened to it carefully yet because I'm so enamored of Chapels.
.......

A friend of mine said I should check out Rothko Chapel. He said when he was in college he would go out and play golf and bake in the sun while listening to Rothko Chapel. After hearing this I went right out and got a cd of it. I haven't played golf to it but it's still one of my favorite pieces of music.

Listening to Feldman's music today, it can sound dated and derivative- if only because so many have followed him down that road since. We've heard a lot of this sort of minimalist tone poem from numerous hacks and sci-fi film composers. (I'm sure John Williams keeps a stack of Feldman CDs handy when he writes incidental music for the Star Wars films.) But Feldman can still sound fresh; unlike the hacks, he is fully capable of composing melodies that linger on in the mind long after the piece ends. He's rather stingy with them, but that only makes them even more welcome when- as in the final movement of "Rothko Chapel"- they finally appear.

This, along with "The Viola in My Life", represents the most accessible part of Feldman's work, and probably (I would argue) the part most likely to still be played long after a lot of the boring and overly pretentious work of the 20th century has been condemned to the dustbin. I doubt Feldman will ever rival the great melodic works of the 18th and 19th Century masters- or modernists like Lygeti- for lasting appeal, but I think that he will always have a place in the canon.