Morton Feldman - Violin and String Quartet

hat[now]ART 2-137
Peter Rundel (Violin) with the Pellegrini Quartet

As a general newcomer to Morton Feldman’s music – I’ve been enthusiastically pursuing his work for maybe two years now – I’ve found that even his diehards encounter difficulty in calling up a work that could be used as a “reference point.” "Coptic Light" might be considered a compromise, but it has a cruel density that tends to harass judgment with its wavy course and harmonic incongruity. Violin and String Quartet, with its deceptive simplicity and marathon tonal shape-shifting, certainly does not make this game of association less burdensome. The work couldn’t have been any colossal leap for Feldman, though it is meant to be approached with some measure of dedication in the observer.

The two-plus hour piece is a relentless examination of tonal relationships, with the minor 7th the progression’s lowest common denominator. It might be classified as an organism comprised of occurrences which can be taken as wholly categorical or fleetingly capricious, depending on exactly what sequence of patterns in the piece you latch on to as reference. As Feldman himself might have put it, this music “alienates memory.” Overtones confuse the otherwise simplistic courses maneuvered by the strings in a way that white noise might linger in memory following a stretch of silence. As the piece progresses, the instruments stagger their lines, so that slowly bowed scales, rather than chords, become central to the flow of the music. Peter Rundel toys delightfully with timbre, however only transiently. His violin is the instigator of a ceaseless call and response with the separate, though hardly detached, string quartet. In flashes of periodic closure, the five instruments congeal at imprecise moments; a horizontal length of tension-building embellished with brief vertical segues. Then there are examples of Feldman’s sneaky penchant for the disruption of complacency in both music and listener: the violin’s two-note lines toward the end of disc one are almost maddening, but not without a sense of gorgeous resolve created by the return of the quartet, cello in pizzicato. The theme is never lost. Better, it is a case of music as function of itself, and a reminder that impatience demolishes experience.

The music for Violin and String Quartet was written toward the end of Feldman’s life. There is a quote that I find particularly enlightening and tend to remember each time I sit with his music. It certainly helped this time. In his “History of Experimental Music in the United States,” John Cage supplied this anecdote, encapsulating Feldman’s treatment of music and, adjacently, life:

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

~Alan Jones