Morton Feldman

'The space between the cracks'

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) had already built up a strong reputation as one of the core members of the close-knit New York circle around John Cage when, in 1972, he became a composition professor in Buffalo, in the far north of New York State. In the following years, the small city near the Niagara Falls would, under his impetus, grow into a place to be for composition students and other advocates of new music, with the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts and the new music festival June in Buffalo. For Feldman, this step coincided with an evolution in his music. While he had already shown a preference for softer and subtler sounds than his New York contemporaries, this tendency towards inwardness, repetition, and balance on the edge of silence became even stronger, with works such as the Viola in My Life cycle or Rothko Chapel as well-known examples. These are delicate sounds and patterns that Feldman, by repeating them almost-but-not-quite identically, or suddenly replacing them with others, kneads into a static, twilight-like musical texture.

On the surface, little seems to happen in this music. Yet the listener who opens up to Feldman’s inviting sonorities discovers, within the subtly varying patterns, a phenomenal range of tonal colours. Instead of developing or building up his material, Feldman makes time itself seem to stand still, circling for long stretches around similar elements — an interval, a harmonic combination, a figure of just a few notes. At a time when the avant-garde was captivated by strict rules and systems for shaping material, Feldman composed with striking intuition. For him, more than the logic of abstract construction, it was the sensual experience of the music that mattered. The exact blend of voices and instruments became as important as the notes they played.

Julius Eastman

Of all the composers who appeared in Buffalo during Feldman’s tenure, Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was among the most striking. He was renowned as a virtuoso singer (he made his mark with the recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King and sang in Meredith Monk’s ensemble—his voice can still be heard on her Dolmen Music) and, as a composer, he shaped the inspirations of minimal music into something wholly his own. An outsider in many ways, as a Black gay man, he lived a flamboyant life that, during the 1980s, slid into a downward spiral of addiction and poverty: evicted from his home, he survived for a time as a homeless man in Tompkins Square Park, and eventually died almost anonymously in a Buffalo hospital. In his work he did not hesitate to harness the driving force of his repetitive style for powerful—sometimes provocative—statements. At the same time, his music contains many references to spirituality and religious symbolism. The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), for ten cellos, is propelled from beginning to end by an unrelenting pulse, its motifs often bearing the intensity of riffs, closer to rock than to Feldman’s ethereal quality. The religious reference in the title suggests that Eastman was here searching for a form of transcendence—but one that arises from ecstatic exaltation.