Feldman 2

Morton Feldman: Toronto lecture, 17 April 1982
Transcribed by Linda Catlin Smith

Revised March 20191
In 1982, the Canadian composer, Linda Catlin Smith, who had attended lectures of
Morton Feldman at SUNY, Buffalo, invited him to give a lecture in Toronto. He agreed
and the lecture took place on Saturday night, 17 April, at the Mercer Union Gallery.
It was very difficult for me to decide what I wanted to play, because I’m used to only
open, what we call open lectures in universities, in a classroom once a week, and there as
you know it’s words without music essentially. One of the difficulties is that it’s very
difficult to talk when you don’t know your audience, and I don’t know the Toronto
audience, especially in relation to my own music. I have very little exposure in Canada.
And so it’s very difficult for me to get a picture of it. I don’t know if you can, there are a
few decades here.
Usually, and I don’t think I’m any exception, one always wants to play the recent music.
That’s usually because nothing, say, happened over the decade when you’re thinking you
finally wrote it or painted it and everybody’s gonna recognize it, you’re gonna knock ’em
out. And then you’ve heard a new piece which is supposed to knock you out and you sit
there and you’re listening the way you listen in the ’50s ... and that doesn’t help you. So I
was caught there.
There’s plenty of room to sit down here; we’ve got some nice seats in the front.
So as you can see I’m comfortable with an audience, but I’m not comfortable in terms of
1 Revised by Chris Villars by comparison with a video recording of the lecture which enabled two large
gaps in the original tape recording, and several previously inaudible passages, to be filled in.
www.cnvill.net/mf-toronto-lecture.pdf 1
what my role should be. For example, the ’70s – interesting period, the ’70s. I don’t think
anything really happened really of any terrific significance anyplace. Forget about
Toronto, but anyplace, in the ’70s. And that’s a very interesting problem, a lot of work
that was really done in the ’70s, beginning in the late ’60s, really in a sense has not really
been digested. One always wants to, you know, you wanna remember Jasper Johns’s
targets and flags, and things like that. But the new work of the ’60s and the ’70s – for
many people they would go away. Philip Guston was very close to us, and changed
completely in the ’70s. And that work evidently is not going away and so particularly is
creating some interest in some places.
But in terms of music what happened in the ’70s – I know that with my own students,
they know very little repertoire of the ’70s years. They know what we did in the ’60s, they
know what we did in the ’50s, and in my own classroom there seems to be a twenty-year
lag. I don’t think it’s twenty years up here. It’s very difficult going to a new place, and you
don’t know where they are. Years ago, I was going to Hawaii to teach for a summer,2 and
I know John Cage was there a year before me, so I called him up and I said ‘John, what is
it like in Hawaii? What do they think about in Hawaii?’ He said ‘Oh you’re gonna have a
wonderful time,’ he said, ‘but watch out, they’re ten minutes behind the times.’ [laughter]
A great Cage remark which he forgot to put in one of his books. [more laughter]
OK, so we’re into the ’70s. I have two pieces from the ’70s, and this piece that you heard
[gestures to poster of lecture called ‘Triadic memories’3]. It’s from the early ’80s,4 and
we heard it last week, stunning performance. I’m very divorced from it. I’m actually
divorced from everything I write. I mentioned to Jim Tenney over in the corner, that one
of the big problems, that you come in, you play something for an audience, and you talk
about it with authority, and the music has a hell of a lot of authority. At the same time, as
I said to Jim, I have a kind of Don Juan complex with my art. Love ’em and leave ’em.
2
Feldman taught in Hawaii during the summer of 1970.
3 Feldman’s lecture was billed as a lecture on Triadic memories, his ninety-minute piano piece written in
1981, which had received its American premiere by the Japanese pianist, Aki Takahashi, a few weeks
earlier, on 12 March 1982, at Baird Hall, SUNY, Buffalo.
4 Feldman actually says ’70s at this point, but the context suggests this was a slip.
And the minute I finish a piece, that’s it. And it’s very hard, it’s very hard for me to even
say which pieces that I like. It’s very much like the Jewish mother that buys her son two
ties for his birthday. He comes for dinner, and she opens the door and she bursts into
tears. And he says, ‘What’s the matter Mom?’ And she says, ‘Didn’t you like the other tie?’
[laughter]
So if I would decide which piece to play, as I’ll be playing it I’ll be thinking about the
piece that maybe I should’ve played.
Unless we could solve the problem, how could we solve the problem? I don’t wanna start
off on the wrong foot in Toronto. At the same time I don’t know the right foot. What
should I do? Maybe I should ask you questions? Maybe ask questions about what it is to
be a composer? What do you expect from a composer? What do you think a composer
thinks about before he goes to bed?
Now here I am, in my mid-fifties, and about a year ago I got very upset. Terribly upset. I
began to wonder if music was an art form altogether. Now that’s something to get upset
about. And I think the reason I got upset about it perhaps maybe is because of my PhD
students. Because none of them approach it as if it’s an art form. Yes, it’s a music form, a
memory form, it’s a form that is allegedly supposed to do this and that, if you do this and
that. And so here I am; after all Beethoven only lived a few years longer than I am now5,
talking to you here. So I’m at the end of my life, let’s say I’m at the end of my life; working
since I’m thirteen; I wake up one day and I say to myself, ‘What the hell am I involved
with? Memory forms? Musical forms? Various type of almost like, set Avedon6 poses?
Now we take a walk in the Alps ... Now we go slumming with some peasants ... Now we
thank God that we got rid of venereal disease, or whatever? I mean what the hell is it all
about, all the set poses, the set emotions? Do we have anything in music for example that
really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away, from some aspect of
illusion and reality? Do we have anything like – Proust? Do we have anything
comparable to Finnegans wake? I wonder.
5 In fact, Beethoven died aged 56, which was Feldman’s age at the time of this lecture.
6 Richard Avedon (1923-2004), US fashion and portrait photographer.
So that’s something I think about. And that’s where I am now: is music, could it be, an art
form? That it could exist on its own terms, whatever those terms are. And so as I began to
think about that, I began to think about the other thing. I played a game with myself. I
make a very comfortable living. I have an elegant home. Jackson Pollocks on the wall.
I’m a rug collector; I have nothing to worry about. [laughter] I’m not your typical
composer, you see. Do I have to worry about performance? No, I don’t have to worry
about performances. I have more performances in a year than Varèse had in his lifetime.
And my music is pretty esoteric. So it’s certain I don’t have to worry about performances.
But I am worrying, I am worrying about maybe I’ve been involved all my life in
something, thinking that it was other than it might be. And here I went really out on a
limb, really out on a limb. And I still got nervous, that I was really safe on third base. See
I’m not saying I brought in a home run, but I am on third base. And I was very, very
worried, and I’m still worried as I talk to you. I don’t mean to be a stand-up comedian,
though it looks as if I’m developing some gifts I didn’t know about. [laughter]
But I think it’s interesting – guy wakes up and says, ‘Is music an art form?’
Processes, yes. Fantastic, mechanical dolls, yes. Like a fugue. Very much like those
fantastic mechanical toys that became all the rage in the royal courts. That we know how
to do. Processes we know how to do.
So what can we expect from a composer, and what can we expect from music? What
could it possibly be?
And what’s fantastic about music, I find, is that there’s something so impregnable,
something – I wouldn’t say it’s mysterious ... A remark of Whitehead’s clarified
something for me last week. I don’t know what the hell he was referring to ... But he said
that the reason that something couldn’t be defined is because it was too general. I like
that. But not that it was so complicated or so esoteric; it was just like – too general to get
a handle on. And that’s the way I feel about music. Just too generalized. Everything is too
generalized. Everything to me is like a found object. A major third is a found object, what
the hell, you have no right to write a major third – with or without a context. It’s like
picking up a broken comb from the floor. Everything. This was when I woke up, that was
part of a hallucination, if music could be an art form. Everything sounded like a found
object. Everything didn’t seem to be personal. Everything had a fantastic reminiscence
about it. Even my own music. And I wrote a piece that I like very much, called Triadic
memories, in which I went ahead and treated everything, even my own invention, my
own creation, as a series of found objects, no longer even feeling in a sense that I had the
capability of making any kind of poetry out of it. Now for me to play now a cassette of a
piece like that which is about an hour and a half, I just don’t know whether I should do it,
it’d be pretty difficult.
But I was talking about the ’70s. What happened was, in the ’70s, is that I decided that I
wanted to become competitive, essentially that’s what it amounts to. And by being
competitive means that you more or less get involved in mainstream. But what the
mainstream was to me was something very, very special. The mainstream wasn’t any
kind of intellectual ideas – I’m not gonna call Pierre Boulez and say, ‘OK Pierre, you win,
I lose, let me know how to do it.’ [laughter] No, nothing like that, nothing like that. That’s
not mainstream. What was mainstream to me was only production value. That’s all. And
I got the cue or the clue from a big-time publisher ... I don’t even think they publish, no,
publisher means ownership. But he’s a big-time publisher as Faber was actually in the
’20s and ’30s – Leo Feist Incorporated. Every time you go in one of those deco – you’re
looking for something deco and you see those things always Leo Feist, and this was his
son, multi-millionaire, big cadillac, big cadillac. Cadillac. Cadillac, cardiac and catalogue
– the three C’s. [laughter] Big catalogue of things, big time, everything, everything, also
esoteric things, twelve-tone things, whatever – anything they could pick up in some kind
of bargain and bartering, he had. In fact he owned a big, uh, I don’t know why this is
important, but it’s interesting if you know the kind of people. He even owned an outfit
called Associated Music that had people like Milton Babbitt and all kinds of ... Elliott
Carter. I mean everything besides Jerome Kern. So he knew everything that was going
on. So I would see him occasionally, once in a blue moon, might show up at concerts,
especially in the excitement about concerts in the ’60s in New York. And I was sitting
with him of course in the Russian Tea Room,7 with another composer. And he looks over
to me and he says, ‘Feldman, you mind if I tell you something.’ I said, ‘Go ahead.’ He
said, ‘You’re not gonna make it unless.’ I said, ‘Unless what?’ He said, ‘You’re a fabulous
composer, but you’re not ... unless.’ ‘Unless what?’ ‘You need a little drama. Not much.
You need a little drama. Just a little bit.’ And so, after living, after living for about
twenty-five years with absolutely no drama, at least in my music – I had all the drama in
my livelihood and my domestic life. Actually I was brought up in the garment centre of
New York, and I was in the garment centre until I was actually an international celebrity.
By that I mean Toronto. [Laughter] Oh, are you lucky that Dorothy Parker didn’t include
Canada in that marvellous remark of hers, where she put down some guy, she said, ‘Yeah,
he’s the toast of two continents – Africa and Australia.’ She didn’t mention Canada.8
[laughter]
Well anyway, I got very into that, and I started to think about him, and I started to think
about history, and the whole idea of mainstream, which is essentially big time, not ideas,
not intellectual ideas. I don’t even think that they’re influential. I don’t know who in
heaven’s name Bach influenced. I’ve heard some fantasy some late-nineteenth-century
composers would have about sonata–rondo form, or ... Sounded pretty silly. That French
stuff and that German form. I don’t even know who Beethoven influenced. Anybody here
could talk ... ? I don’t know, I’m not a glutton. They say that Brahm’s first symphony ... I
had a high school teacher used to refer to it as Beethoven’s tenth. I don’t know, I don’t
know who Boulez has influenced. Has Pierre influenced ... ? I don’t even know who John
Cage has influenced. There are and was and still is a generation of Cage cripples, as Steve
Reich refers to them. But whether those Cage cripples were influenced by Cage I had no
idea and I still don’t. I certainly have not influenced anybody, unless ... I was told I
invented the pianissimo. [laughter]
7The Russian Tea Room was an expensive New York restaurant adjacent to Carnegie Hall on 57th Street.
Over the years it became a restaurant where musicians, performers and celebrities gathered.
8 Feldman’s recollection characteristically modifies Dorothy Parker’s original remark. She was in fact
putting down her own reputation in the 1920s when she said: ‘I was the toast of two continents: Greenland
and Australia.’
A student of mine, writes computer music, has nothing to do with me, in fact he’s not
really a student of mine, he’s just in some of my seminars, went down to a computer
conference. The music was about a mezzo-forte and they say, ‘Hey, you’re getting
influenced by Feldman.’ [laughter]
So I don’t know in heaven’s name, in music, whoever influenced anybody. It’s Greek to
me and I’m pretty brilliant and don’t argue with me. I can’t see the influence. I don’t even
know if there are people who are influence ... Schoenberg has influenced a few people.
More than Beethoven, I think Schoenberg was the bigger influence.
But we’re still in the ’70s. But we’re gonna forget about the ’70s, we’re gonna change the
subject immediately, we’re gonna go on to the ’80s. Apropos of what I was talking at,
there are about three subjects going on. And I’m going to the subject that I feel a little bit
closer to tonight, and that subject is: can music be an art form? What does it take to be an
art form? And what happened to me when I started to think about that.
So we’re talking about a lot of things, and one of the things we’re talking about, or are
just about to talk about – I was telling you how comfortable I am, and that I have nothing
to worry about. I said the same thing to John Cage when I was just 24 and we first met, I
said, ‘John,’ I said, ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can’t understand what we worry about when here we
are in the privacy of our own home, working.’ And I got very involved in the psychology
of that worry, in the privacy of our own home working. I just couldn’t figure it out. And
then I took it on thirty years later, and took it into another direction.
And I said to myself, ‘What kind of music would I write, if I didn’t think about
performance?’ Not that I really thought about performance, or to write a piece one side
of a record. But, a few years ago, not too long ago, just about two years ago, being an
entrepreneur in Buffalo, and putting on a series of concerts which were just as good as
Bob Aitken’s series in Toronto. [laughter] We worked together actually, bringing people,
sharing people ... You got a marvellous series, I think that without that series I don’t
know what the hell you would have here. It’s a wonderful series, with support. Of course
my series wasn’t supported. Now it’s just a desert down there, just an awful life musically
in Buffalo now. Well anyway, I brought in a few people and at a dinner party for – we
threw a dinner party at my place for Elliott Carter and Pennebaker was filming this thing,
maybe some of you saw this film about Elliott Carter in Buffalo.9 And there was one
moment where he bristles with something I said. I said, ‘Well Elliott what the world
doesn’t need is another twenty-five minute composition.’ He bristles and he said, ‘Well
most of the pieces you play here are twenty-five minutes.’ Then without thinking, I’m on
the phone with Charles Wuorinen and I said, ‘Charles,’ ... I never got along with Elliott
since I was a kid, and I don’t like him. It didn’t help that we were actually having a nice
dinner in my home where I evidently made him bristle ... And I told Charles, ‘Well all I
said was, “What the world doesn’t need is another twenty-five minute piece,” and he
said, “Well most of my pieces are all twenty-five minutes.” ’ Then I felt I really had
something good. [laughter] So I’m on the phone with Steve Reich and I mention it to
Steve and he says, ‘Yes that’s my length, isn’t it?’ Then Ralph Shapey calls from Chicago.
He’s all excited, we’re giving an all-Shapey concert. He’s a damn good composer, and he
said it was the first time anybody put on an all-Shapey concert. This was my sibling rival
– we both studied with Wolpe at the same time. And I’m giving this guy an all-Shapey
concert and he never played me in his own group in Chicago. What did I do that for? Well
anyway – I’m more generous. But anyway, Ralph has a million pieces, a million pieces he
wants played. Should he do this or that? He said he’d just finished a piece for piano
four-hands, and I said to him, ‘Steve Manes and his wife are very, very good, they’ll do it.’
And I said, ‘How long is it, twenty-five minutes?’ And he yells on the phone, ‘How the
hell did you know?’10 So I got something, the whole idea about the twenty-five minute
piece, right?
And then I started to look, and I know a lot of repertoire: Concerto, Bartok’s
percussion–celesta piece – twenty-seven minutes. Did a seminar on the Rite of spring –
I think it’s thirty-one minutes – about that half-an-hour period of great masterpieces.
And the whole idea of that particular time span for the composer and for the listener and
9
Elliot Carter at Buffalo (1980) by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, 45 minutes, colour.
10 Feldman put on an all Shapey concert in his June in Buffalo concert series in 1980. Shapey’s piece, 7, for
piano four hands was played in the concert by Frieda and Stephen Manes. Interestingly, the piece lasted
only seven and a half minutes.
for me as well. And then I said to myself, ‘Well what if I don’t think about the length of
the piece?’ Because evidently, here I was programmed, I was programmed to write a
piece twenty-five minutes, thirty-five minutes. And you say I have no problem, I’m not
involved in a kind of movement form, I don’t write pieces in movements, which makes it
a little different. It makes it a little difficult, slightly more difficult, because when you’ve
got that twelve-minute slow movement and that four-minute fast movement, and you
juggle the time around with movement form. But I work in, consistently since I began, in
just monolithic. Sometimes, like in the Rothko Chapel [1971], you sectionalize, but
actually it’s the only piece I ever wrote that was sectionalized.
So I asked myself what would I write if I just didn’t think about the length. And then I
said what would I write if I didn’t think about the audience. Well there was a review in
the Village Voice last week, about a new piece of mine, which I wrote for John Cage’s big
birthday concert. It’s for violin and piano – Paul Zukofsky played the violin, Aki
Takahashi, who’s a sensational, wonderful pianist, played the piano, it’s for violin and
piano, For John Cage [1982], it’s about an hour and ten minutes, and the Village Voice
said that I write music in which my lack of concern about an audience – that they might
as well be ants. Which I don’t think is fair. I don’t think it’s fair. It’s a very serious
problem, I don’t think it’s fair. How the hell the audience got into this subject, I don’t
know. I know we needed the French Revolution, but they didn’t have to have music to it.
I think it’s terribly unfair, because a guy says to himself, ‘Let’s make music into an art
form, let’s see if we could really do something with it, other than a memory or common
practice music form.’ I think it’s unfair to say that he’s thinking of the audience as ants. I
mean would you say that with Proust? I once read somebody years ago who thought my
work was too esoteric. I read one convoluted paragraph to this person, from Proust. She
understood every word. Very convoluted, she didn’t have any problem. But with my
particular type of sentence structure, she didn’t understand anything. She didn’t
understand what related to what ...
So I really want you as my confidante, I want you all as my friends, but I don’t want you
as my audience. Because the problem is, is that, if music is to be an art form, it has to
exist at least six weeks. Give us six weeks without an audience, and maybe something
else could happen. So that’s what I’m plea-ing for. Accept my good will. And my good
nature. And feel that maybe the role of the composer and the audience has to, will, must,
and possibly could, change. So what happened to me, even though I never thought that I
was Gluck, because all the form movements are pretty conservative. Though I never
really thought you know that I was gonna really change anything like bring back a
diatonic pattern, to someone with a BA degree, from Colgate.11 You know, I’m not Phil
Glass.
This is a true story: I was a student, just finishing up with Stefan Wolpe. Stefan was a
proletariat twelve-tone composer, there was a hell of a lot of them at one time, and I
think that he was the best. He would talk about his music as gutter music. He would talk
about, at one time he talked about the man in the street, and he was bawling me out.
Here I was, 22, 23 years old, and he was telling me the music is too esoteric, it’s just too
esoteric. And he’s talking about the man in the street, and I was just meeting the artists
in Greenwich Village. I was looking out, my eyes were better that time, it was 14th Street
and Sixth Avenue, and there was Jackson Pollock walking across the street. And that’s
my only defence about the man in the street. [laughter]
And I’m every man, I’m certainly you know, a certain generation of New Yorker. Typical
New Yorker. It’s the last thing, you know, I’m not from London, I’m not from Paris, and
New York intellectuals are not snobs. So it’s certainly nothing snobbish ... But there’s
something wrong someplace, there’s something wrong someplace.
So, the reform movement is – actually there’s a lot of irony and the whole thing’s gonna
work out wonderfully for all of us by the time I’m finished in about two or three minutes.
Because I’m coming to the end of my saga. I know it’s seems it’ll go on, but it’s not. I have
the glimpse of the end.
Because what happened was – soon as I got rid of the audience, I started to write a series
11
Colgate University, Hamilton, New York.
of pieces for this audience that I was trying to get rid of. A string quartet we did in Cal
Arts12 – one hour and forty minutes – what happens, standing ovation. Reviews, the Los
Angeles ... big paper there, what’s his name? What’s the name of that critic, the Los
Angeles ... He’s been after me for thirty years. Back in the ’60s I remember Lukas Foss
sent me a review, Lukas always sent me terrible reviews: ‘Last night in Royce Hall we
heard a thing [laughter] by Morton Feldman.’ It was only seven minutes. I mean, what
did he have against me? It was only seven minutes – ‘we heard a thing’. The same guy:
‘We have to re-assess our views about Morton Feldman.’
Same thing happened recently with another piece, Triadic memories in London.13 Some
of them didn’t like it, a little more hesitant about it. One rave review, not that, London
papers don’t give rave reviews. It was a begrudging rave. But a rave it was, about a piece
they had to sit and listen to for an hour and a half. I never got a letter from a colleague.
Jim [Tenney] you never sent me a letter. Years ago you sent me a very nice letter. But you
never sent me a fan letter. I know you love my music, but you never actually sat down
and wrote me a fan letter. Lo and behold, I get a letter from a guy who, I don’t know, I’ve
seen him around for many years, maybe we spoke ten words, American composer on the
West Coast – Roger Reynolds. ‘Bravo. What a step for you. Fantastic piece.’ That’s
Triadic memories, which we’re not hearing. [laughter] ‘What a step forward,’ he says,
‘bravo’. But he killed it. He killed it in the PS. He said, ‘I’d love to get together with you
and talk about new designs.’ He killed it.
That never happened to me, I never got letters like that from my six or seven minute
pieces, never got reviews. So you see what happens? Here I wanna get rid of the
audience, I wanna get rid of the critics, and I almost wanna get rid of the performers. But
performers want it. They want it. Because there’s a whole breed of performers out there.
They’re science fiction characters. They can’t be more difficult, it can’t be difficult
enough. I once saw a fantastic Australian by the name of Geoffrey Madge teaches piano
in Holland – sight reading new pieces like this: Wshhhhhhhhhht. Two people are
12
Feldman’s String quartet 1 (1979).
13
The world premiere of Triadic memories, performed by Australian pianist Roger Woodward, took place
at the ICA in London on 4 October 1981.
holding the score, as he was going through it ... [laughter]
My piece that I wrote for John Cage, it is so difficult, it’s the most tenuous type of supple
rhythms, just it’s not even like rhythm at all, you know how difficult it is to write a
complicated rhythm that doesn’t even sound like a rhythm? Try it. And it’s going and it’s
unbelievable, the coordination is difficult – the idea for the piece is that they’re both in
their same space, I had a very unique idea of writing about a piano and violin piece, that
they’re both in the same space, no business of this one here that one there at all. Of
course it happens, but it’s like one instrument in the same space, with just a little echo of
sorts. Very difficult thing to do. But even I got freaked out. It was the first actually
technical idea I had, you know, to treat something like that. And I called up Paul
Zukofsky and I said, ‘Paul, I’m thirty-five minutes in the piece and I’m worried, I don’t
think the piece is important.’ And he says, ‘Why isn’t the piece important?’ I said
‘Because the piano is only on one ledger.’ ... We’re all brainwashed ...
OK. That was just a preamble to my talk. [laughter] It’s like the rich escargot we had for
lunch. What would you like me to talk about, would you like to hear some music?
[From the audience: ‘Yes.’]
What would you like to hear, would you like to hear the ’70s, would you like to hear that
other subject about production value?
[From the audience: ‘The ’80s.’]
You wanna hear the ’80s. You don’t wanna hear, you don’t wanna to hear something that
kind of fights it out with Monteverdi? [laughter] You don’t wanna hear my idea of
showbiz, after all that’s what Monteverdi is you know – pum pum pum pum – that’s all
showbusiness. Venice was New York, you know. That wasn’t Off Broadway up
there.[laughter]
They don’t put a Titian looking down on his tomb for nothing. But they put him next to a
guy who’s not as good. You know who’s buried next to Monteverdi? A sculptor, very
elegant sculptor.14
OK. The ’80s. Well, why don’t we take a vote on it. Who wants to hear the ’80s, and – let
me tell you what you’re gonna hear. It’s an hour and a half, it’s not a professional
recording. You’ll hear there’s a fountain or cistern – it was raining.15 What’s that song of
Gershwin – about London? ‘A rainy day’.16 Well, it was one of those days. And so you
hear the cistern and the little the trickle of water. I don’t have Aki Takahashi’s tape yet.
But he [Roger Woodward] does it beautifully. We could hear, we could hear Triadic
memories or we could hear some of the more competitive showbiz things like Elemental
procedures.17 Toronto Symphony’s never gonna do it. [laughter]
That was a very funny story, you know if you don’t hear it. I was given a commission by
the Cologne Radio,18 and he thought I’d fit in fine – it was called the New Simplicity.
Twenty-five years, thirty years later, there was finally the New Simplicity, and of course
my music and Steve Reich, Phil Glass, and the minimal music from America and Europe.
So here he’d already told me the title of the thing, and I got this nice commission, where I
could bring in my own soloists, which I did and chorus and orchestra, and write a piece
for the New Simplicity. But for some particular reason, that was, being that it was the
’70s, and so mid-’70s, and being that the mid-’70s was, as far as I could see a very –
where middle-age composers, painters and everybody became very competitive, and very
worried, and I was no exception, and for whatever reason, not that I thought I was gonna
14
Claudio Monteverdi’s tomb is in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. The sculptor
Feldman refers to is probably Antonio Canova (1757–1822) whose pyramidical tomb is also in that
Basilica.
15
The night of the premiere of Triadic memories in London it poured with rain. The rain on the tin roof of
the ICA theatre was almost louder than the music. Feldman was present and sat next to Harrison
Birtwistle. He kissed Roger Woodward’s fingers after the performance.
16
The song by George Gershwin was probably his famous late song ‘A foggy day (in London town)’, with
lyrics by Ira Gershwin, recorded by Fred Astaire in 1937. Feldman’s recollection appears to have
substituted ‘rain’ for ‘fog’.
17
Elemental procedures for soprano, chorus and orchestra (1976).
18
Elemental procedures was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Cologne.
knock ’em out in Europe, but I found out that the new simplicity was developing into the
new complexity. And I wrote, for me, an unusually complex piece. And I was very
embarrassed actually the fact that it was on that festival called the New Simplicity.
Then we have another fabulously competitive piece, and it’s for flute and orchestra.19
That’s one of the best pieces written by anybody in the ’70s. I mean it is a sensational
piece. And it’s very interesting to hear something, to some degree – peculiar – I can’t find
the word, I don’t mean in a pure peculiar sense, but to hear something in a sense that you
don’t associate again with orchestra, you associate it more with a more chamber context.
To hear an orchestra doing it – it’s amazing how an orchestra glamorizes anything, just
glamorizes anything. A very interesting problem writing for the orchestra. Very
interesting problem. And I think that the problem was essentially, is that, when you’re
playing in an orchestra, when you’re writing an orchestral piece, you’re just distant from
the instrument, you’re just distant from the individual person that’s playing it. And it
develops a certain type of shellac, that is not too human in terms of performance, of its
relation to performance. And every orchestra piece ever written in the history of music
that has it, has that kind of distant, distance on. It’s very classy, it’s fantastic, but it’s kind
of remote. Or even a Debussy orchestral piece, is remote. It’s there someplace, and you
can’t get near it. And I had that experience with the orchestra. And the ’80s, especially
the long pieces, what I wanna do cannot be done with an orchestra because of that reason
... It’s like a ballet, you know – I don’t like to see one ballet dancer or two people whirling
around. I like to see a ballet company – that’s exciting. But I don’t think I’ll be able to
write an orchestra piece that’s lasting an hour and a half – it’s not interesting.
One of the reasons in a sense that I could keep up a piece for an hour and a half is
because I immediately, in some kind of Stanislavski fashion – I am the cellist, I am the
pianist, and I’m keeping that concentration, and I’m working, we’re together, but I’m
with a cello, I’m with an instrument. I’m not with an orchestra, I’m not with this
fantastic, wonderful machine, even though I might draw out an instrument from it, but
be sensitive how to use that instrument. And I think that to really be successful perhaps
19
Flute and orchestra, for flute and large orchestra (1978).
is to create this unconscious alienation between an orchestral sound and an orchestra. I
don’t think that people want the intimacy. They’re not walking out of a quartet or
chamber music because it’s boring them or they don’t know what’s happening. I think
that they, one senses a certain type of intimacy which you’re running away from. But
there’s nothing intimate about an opera, about an orchestra, about the big-time
mainstream. Nothing threatening. It’s up there someplace.
OK, you wanna hear something from the ’80s. Nobody wants to hear my flute and
orchestra piece? Remember the story about the two ties ... Oh, so you don’t like my flute
and orchestra piece. [laughter]
It’s like Danny Kaye, we’ll do one side, then we’ll do the other side.
[From the audience: ‘Play them simultaneously?’]
I’m afraid not. I don’t like collage too much.
[Jim Tenney: ‘How about one after the other, in chronological sequence?’]
I have the stamina you know. I’m famous for six hour seminars where my students are
collapsing. I use that as upmanship
I don’t know about Triadic memories. I think it’s good, it’s good to hear about a piece,
here we’re talking about Triadic, it’s like that marvellous idea about Buddha, they’re all
waiting for Buddha, but where’s Buddha, you see. ... You could tell someone, ‘I like
Feldman.’ ‘What did you think of Triadic memories?’ ‘Didn’t hear it.’
When you’ve heard it, no matter what it’s like, you’re gonna be disappointed. I blew it. It
can’t, it can’t be as good as the anticipation. We have to wait for the next – Triadic
memories 2. Because if I play Triadic memories you really should hear my string quartet.
And that’s an hour and forty minutes.
[Tenney: ‘Do you have it here?’]
And then you should hear my Trio.20 [laughter] The trio is an hour and a half. But it’s
interesting the lengths of these big pieces, especially even for the non-composers or the
non-musicians. That the instrumentation in a sense became very, very conventional.
Like Untitled composition for cello and piano,21 an hour and a half. Very long Trio,
piano, violin, cello. Triadic memories, very long piano piece. But they’re all very
conventional instrumentation. It works better that way, it’s like that wonderful Marianne
Moore image, of real frogs in an imaginary pond. Or was it a real pond with imaginary
frogs? Does anybody know that? I think both will work.22 And there’s just something
about having these unglamorous instruments that we know very well start to do that
which historically and technically that we’re not – I’m fed up with inventive
orchestration. You give a course in twentieth-century orchestration, which is essentially
the only course I teach, you get annoyed with everybody inventing a new orchestration,
leaving out the violins. All right, he was lucky, wrote a piece called Symphony of
psalms.23 [laughter] But this whole idea of the inventive orchestration, we’ve had it,
we’re finished with it. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna sit down and say now, ‘Let’s see...’.
Because I did it and I did it just as good if not better than anybody else, in the ’60s. But I
don’t like it anymore, I just don’t like it. Because what it did, it created the music.
It’s like when you have lyrics, and you’re writing something, it helps the melody, how
could it not help the melody? And there was just something about it that began to disturb
me. I began to see when I get a beautiful instrumentation, and if you have a sense of
instrumentation, and if you’re not wilful and if you’re not arrogant and you wanna learn
from the instruments and how they move, the instruments could do some marvellous
things. Very much like paint could do marvellous things. And even someone like Francis
20
Trio for violin, cello and piano (1980).
21 Untitled composition for cello and piano (1981) published as Patterns in a chromatic field.
22
Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry” (1919) talks of ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’. Feldman’s
recollection transforms the ‘gardens’ and ‘toads’ of the original into ‘ponds’ and ‘frogs’.
23 The orchestra in Stravinsky’s Symphony of psalms (1930) has no violins.
Bacon, whose not an abstract expressionist, wrote a very famous paragraph how he
watches the paint, there’s something about the paint. So everybody in the ’50s and ’60s
got into that aspect. And for the composer, the paint essentially was the instruments.
So you watch that flute, how it’s going, how you lace it, what you do here and do there,
and you might as well just phone it in. [laughter] What you can’t phone in is to take a
cello, piano and violin, which in a sense is so known, and then to have them operate in a
way that they never operated before, you know. The style of the composition has now
become very interesting. What else? Well, I’m not even interested in the actual applied
color, I wanna see if there’s something there that’s essentially closer to the musical
thought, how the instrumentation to some degree takes over from musical form, to some
degree doesn’t even need musical form.
And I think there was a fantastic period in history where we needed especially someone
like Varèse, who I would say was the Matisse in relation to my music of that direct type of
wonderful sense of color, immediate placement of color .... And it can only be that way.
Try to make a piano reduction of a Varèse score and you’ll see what I mean.
OK. So how about compromising, how about hearing Flute and orchestra? [laughter and
applause]
But Triadic memories is fantastic. [more laughter and applause]
And Elemental procedures is a very glamorous piece, believe me. In fact, I used it as a –
Elemental procedures gave way to a whole series of pieces which were the same
psychology, they were called ‘try outs’, try out pieces for chorus, and orchestra, where in
a sense I was no longer interested in writing a piece. I was interested in just trying out
things. Not that I really had a notion of what a piece is, and I still wouldn’t know what a
piece is. Just trying out things. It was terrific. I wrote a whole series of pieces which I
called ‘try outs’, where everything was down in ink, anything was accepted. I’ll try this
out, I’ll try that out. They were all pretty good. The element of selection was not as
intense as it used to be. It was alright, because I was on a very good period, I was lucky, I
was no longer unhappy if things weren’t so good. So this was the try out piece for an
opera I wrote to a poem that Becket wrote for me, called Neither. And I had a meeting
with Beckett and I showed him – he reads music you know, he plays the piano – and I
showed him, it was the first line from a work of his called Film24, and I was showing him
how I might treat the voice. But as it so happened, when he finally sent me what he did
send me, I didn’t treat it in any way that I did in Elemental procedures. No way could I
treat it like that. Elemental procedures was very glamorous, it was still part of the ’70s,
still competitive. The opera was toward the end of the ’70s, less competitive, [laughter]
and much more esoteric, and really trying to get back to the ’60s, or something or other.
But it’s a very glamorous piece, and you should hear it some time, but I don’t think
tonight.
[Partly inaudible short exchanges with the audience while the tape is being prepared
omitted here.]
It’s Flute and orchestra. It’s thirty-five minutes, and it’s Hans Zender and Southern
German Radio, Roswitha Staege. It’s an interesting piece, and I hope you like it. Thank
you very much. [applause]
[The tape recording of Flute and orchestra is played.]
The piece incidentally, it’s very important incidentally, is dedicated to the memory of
Edgard Varèse. And there was something about the flute line, that was not actually
Varèse, but was Varèse for me, in its energy, where it was, and the kind of breathing in
the tessitura area especially, as an image rather than just as a register. It didn’t start off
as a ... the dedication came in the middle of the piece. I felt his presence there. I’d love to
... if anybody wants to ask me any questions ... ?
[Question, inaudible on tape, from the audience.]
24
Elemental procedures sets the first two lines of Beckett’s general introduction in his scenario for Film.
No did I say visual? Did I say visual?
[More from the audience.]
That the tessitura, that is the high area was more, it wasn’t a question that I was, like, I
didn’t feel that I was in a high register. I felt I was in a place, well of course it was in a
high register, but I was in a place in a sense that I learned from him. Not that he
exploited the tessitura ...
[More from the audience, inaudible.]
I don’t think of that, by image, by image I mean – again Whitehead, too general to
articulate. I don’t even know what I mean by it, just ... An image to me is essentially just
an intense belief in material, and that I feel that I cannot have musical image without the
belief, that the belief goes hand in hand.
And I decide, this was a good choice, because this was the beginning of new concerns for
me, different spellings, and what sounded out of tune, in the strings were not out of tune,
it was the way the instruments were spelled, but not in a conceptual way, in other words,
it just didn’t go into quarter-tones it went into – where I would take double sharps and
double flats very seriously but not in a Schoenbergian kind of leading tone way, but it
was still related to the pitch – but as you know a sharp is a little more directional. I
started to take spelling very, very seriously, and to me it was like adding a little
turpentine in the chromatic field. I’ve been living with the minor second all my life and I
finally found a way to handle it, and if you look at all the scores, all my recent scores that
have string writing, is that I’m very much into the spelling of the strings, not in
woodwinds or brass, just the strings. So that’s a new concern for me.
And also the questioning, there’s a whole gambit here, from nothing to everything, whole
gambit, where I’m actually not questioning or re-questioning, just material, where I
noodle with the chromatic line, the colour, very peculiar, so it’s in the flute – and there’s
one solo cello playing a harmonic with it with a little bent tone. In other words it wasn’t
just a ... there’s a lot of, you know you lose a lot of information in orchestral pieces, a lot
of it is lost here, but it wasn’t ... just an orchestration of a chromatic tone, how I feel it
going, going down other than up, while she was just playing here, the one solo cello is
playing the same pitch, and you have a little bend – at the same time the cello section is
pizzicato-ing. So the orchestration of just a chromatic thing, like watching them, here,
truly like ants, but on a, you know, watching their life, you see. So, the terrific concern
about very small phenomena. At the same time also a concern about letting the material
in the flute actually make more reminiscent type of curves, almost motivic things. So you
have that concern, almost to the other, which is about as far as you can go actually.
Well, the only thing is there’s no synthesis here. To me that’s what’s interesting about
these particular pieces of the ’70s, I present the information to myself and of course to
the listener, and because there’s no synthesis, and there’s also no argument, there’s no
discussion. There are certainly no winners. It doesn’t end on a major chord. Just an
investigation of material, giving free vent, and not having a vested interest in a sense that
the material should go either this way or that way.
I just wrote a piece now for three voices,25 in which it was very disconcerting because I
don’t wanna write pretty music, I don’t even wanna write beautiful music, because on a
scale to ten you know – You know, there’s a postcard and it’s by Uccello, and so beauty –
it’s a dangerous word to use.
I like my music in a sense to have a kind of – you know, kinda like a garden. I want my
garden of Eden and eat it too. I wanna feel in a sense that there is the apple and there is
the snake, and yet you’re in Paradise. And I think that life-attitude, which is essentially
how I feel about life, is in my music, where I really want everything, alles zusammen
[altogether] in one piece. But never an obvious type of sensual beauty, and certainly not
something that is communicable in terms of its motivic imagery or its harmonic
25
Three voices for three sopranos or soprano and tape (1982). The score is dated 15 April 1982, just a few
days before the date of this lecture.
language, even if the language is non-functional, whatever that means, it still in a sense
can be very very beautiful, and if you handle it beautifully. And what was happening in
this piece that I’m writing now, which I just finished the other day, is that I really wanted
to write an abstract thing, called Three voices, with three singers, and I really, my dream
always when I write, is that I wanna do it abstractly. Because I feel that if you finally do it
abstractly nothing could equal it. Nothing could equal it. No representational painting
can equal maybe one or two paintings where Rothko made it. That’s my feeling. It’s
almost political. Jackson Pollock – one or two things where nothing else could get
anywhere near it. But of course when he doesn’t make it – put it on a lampshade.
Obviously. Same’s true of Mondrian.
So I have a total political conviction in that abstract sensation, without the help of an
iconic iconography, no matter how startling, or no matter how fantastic it is. It’s like
Josquin. Easy. Easy. It wasn’t easy for him finally to surrender to it, but he did. And I
don’t think Savonarola would have liked it. So I had that political bias. And it seems as if
now, as I mentioned earlier, that my life is coming to a close, got a few more years before
Beethoven died, I feel that that, in a sense, is the argument with myself, that’s the
dialectic that I have with myself, how can I do it abstractly. And it doesn’t happen that it
works out sometimes, like in this vocal piece. It went the other way. It is luscious, it’s
sexy, it’s gorgeous, you swoon with it, and there’s nothing I could have done with it short
of throwing it out. Which is a possibility, and if I do, it’ll be the first piece that I ever
spent a long, long time with that I actually threw out. But at the same time you could
make a virtue of all these things, and you could say, ‘Oh, I was fighting it, and I fight it
and I really surrendered to it’, and it’s as if I came through with some kind of spiritual
and emotional cleansing. I didn’t. I didn’t. I ... [laughter] I was weak, I couldn’t say no.
And that’s the way I feel about it, not that it really, you know. But it’s not the way I want
it to go, and most pieces happen that way, that they always go that other way, that I can’t
get to that abstraction, because the abstraction then is essentially where you’re in an area
where you just – it doesn’t speak to you, it doesn’t help you. You know, it just doesn’t
help you.
I was very close with Rothko in the last year of his life, when he was working on the
Rothko Chapel, and I first saw those pictures live, not that actually now they’re dead.
And he had this fantastic studio. One of the problems, if you go down to the Chapel, is
that it to some degree tried to copy the design of his studio – he had a big carriage house
in New York, old carriage house – but what the Chapel in Houston doesn’t have is all the
dirty rain water and the snow for years. And that Texas light, they don’t know what to do
about it, because the pictures don’t look right, they’re all kinda – It’s not that same dirty
light, you know, with all the speckles you get, because it’s all broken up. Anyway, the
point of the anecdote, the reminiscence: I’d meet him for lunch, and I always ate before I
met him for lunch [laughter]. And I’ll go there and he just can’t leave the damn thing,
and he likes to see it in the changing dirty light. And he would always say, all the time, it
was actually his song, ‘Is it there? Is it there? Do you think it’s there.’ That’s what
happens when you work abstractly, you gotta pray. Because it can’t be there by making it,
you know. Years ago I was going to a big show, the AC, that artists’ place in London, the
arts club place.26 Anyway, I would go in there, and they would have a group show, an
international show. And there the paintings always looked empty. And all the English
paintings, everything was filled up. There’s a tremendous term for it in Latin, fear of
empty spaces. Many of the paintings looked empty. ... So you just don’t know. Big
problem, when to stop, when to stop painting.
There was a guy in New York, I can’t remember his name, shared a studio with Jack
Tworkov. Would drink a lot. He was a good painter. Never hurt him. Jack used to hide
his pictures. Because he didn’t know when to finish them. He lived in Paris all his life. He
used to kill the picture. And that’s the whole problem with working abstractly, is that
you’re leaving something out, and you don’t know what you’re leaving out. You’re not
taking something out, you’re leaving something out, and you just don’t know what it is.
And you don’t know if the experience, what you’re leaving out is a certain type of
pregnant element that is suggestive of what could happen if you put it in, you see, like a
Buddha. So it’s a big problem. And to live a whole life working with that particular
dedication to the abstract, however you wanna define it, or whether you can conjure up
what I’m talking about, is essentially one of the problems I have with music. One of the
26 Feldman probably means the ICA: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
big problems in music is that if you put something here, and then you put something
there, there’s obviously, has to be, an immediate reference or reaction in terms of cause
and effect. You can’t put something here, you know, you can’t do it like the guy that was
head of – the famous painter – he was actually head of the Royal Academy – Constable?
[From the audience: ‘Joshua Reynolds?’]
Joshua Reynolds. I read an account of him giving a critique of some background – and
he’s saying to the student, ‘Don’t take it so seriously, make nothing of it, make little of it.’
Joshua Reynolds, make little of it. A major composition teacher saying, ‘This area here,
don’t take it so seriously, make little of it’. Lay it back. No such thing. No such thing. So
that’s another reason why I feel that music actually never really became an art form, that
is, by an art form something that you cannot identify, something when you hear it, you
say, ‘What the hell is it?’ Like things I’m doing in the ’60s, with the Los Angeles critic that
said ‘a thing appeared at Royce Hall last night’. You see, that’s what I really mean by it.
That music had these connections, one another, all the time ... on a scale of how didactic
it was, or on a scale of how – that it’s not didactic but it’s still kind of a relationship of
some sort. If they’re not relationships, they’re correspondences, or the language is
similar, the stance is similar, the gesture is similar, you see. Big problem. Big problem.
And the biggest problem in music is how do you do it without a process. And the
unbelievable vested interest in the history of musical process. Process in a sense that to
some degree is not involved in kinda acoustical reality.
Did a seminar on some of Steve Reich’s earlier process music, which the students love.
We talk about it, and the music is going on on a very high energy field, and the process is
over. Four organs.27 It’s over. And as you know it’s slower and slower and slower and
slower and slower, and the piece ends, right? The piece didn’t end for me. I started to feel
that maybe his unit was too big, that maybe it was too big, that maybe it needed some
divisions, maybe the process shouldn’t have such logic. I started to tear it apart, though I
do admire the piece and actually recently wrote an article where I give an analysis of that
27
Steve Reich, Four organs for four electric organs and maracas (1970).
particular rhythmic structure, particular process.28 I’m interested in that, though I don’t
apply that to myself.
You see, acoustically ... the new piece with the Hebrew texts,29 they invited me to hear it
down at the Met in New York and he got sore at me, because I said, ‘Very nice work,
Steve, do you mind me saying something about the piece? You went into a coda, terrific
idea, three loud clarinets, way up there. Beautiful. Great idea.’ But he created such an
energy field, where the harmonic rhythm in a sense was so tumultuous, and then the
piece just goes like that. In other words the process, the whole idea – you see, the
operation’s a success but the patient died – I mean that happens in music, that happens
in music all the time. I mean in all kinds of music. Chopin is going along on his preludes.
What could be more exquisite than the preludes, they’re going along all of a sudden you
get a tacky, you get an, essentially, a tacky cadence. Thing is going along. Happens all the
time.
Once you get involved, what is the length of the piece, not in terms of the form, that
doesn’t mean anything, that’s no longer operative anymore. There are things happening,
sounds are going on, they’re on something, it might not be on a background, it might
think they’re on a background for example if it’s push and pull, or this or that, you see.
But what the hell is a background, what is our surface in music? Nobody knows what to
do with a background, that’s why Duchamp did the painting in glass. Essentially
Duchamp did the painting on glass because he didn’t know what to do with the
background. He says it. What’s a background? What do you do with a background?
Now. I’m very interested in the whole idea of what, what am I on? I’m not on harmony.
Because the harmony’s just going down the river quickly. I’m not on harmony. I’m not on
anything. You’re writing a piece of music, you’re not on a goddam thing, you might think
you’re on a thing, especially if you have a system. But you’re on nothing. And one of my
28
‘Crippled symmetry’ (1981), collected in Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of
Morton Feldman, edited by B.H. Friedman (Boston: Exact Change, 2000).
29
Steve Reich, Tehillim for voices and ensemble (1981), sets Hebrew texts from the Psalms.
concerns now is, what am I on, what is the music on? Like this piece, it’s on a lot – fifteen
triangles.30 A lot. Orchestra’s a pain in the neck because it becomes – You know there’s a
certain time when you can’t be that good. There’s certain times when you cannot show
that good. And one of the problems of an orchestra piece is that you become a little too
good, you’re handling it like a tremendous Park Avenue sidewalk fountains. Don’t worry
about it we’ll get over this particular solo. [laughter] What do you think of brass? After all
you have no alternatives, you know the reason you wanna commit suicide is because you
don’t have any alternatives. So you become too psychoanalytical when you work, because
in a sense you’re not really, you’re performing an operation and you’re just, the blood is
oozing out and you’re putting on Band-Aids, and it becomes a big pain in the neck,
because it’s really a kind of preventive surgery. After a while, you feel like that woman
had a breast removed when it wasn’t necessary. But you do that, you do that in orchestral
music. You’re involved in all kinds of preventive aspects of keeping the thing going, if you
have no illusions about composing.
So I’m very into, for example, problems about what am I on, and someday, when you
hear Triadic memories, you’ll notice that the pedal is halfway down throughout the
piece, which is not an aspect of an amateur pianist playing a piece of music with the
pedal on. When I put the half – I’ve got an excellent instrument – when I put the pedal
halfway down, for me to create any kind of continuity, though I don’t mind a certain
degree of obscurity. I’m into that to some degree, now you hear it, now you don’t,
obscurity, you find that the sounds that you write cannot be the sounds that you’re used
to. Because you wanna create as much clarity in its progression, not a technical clarity,
just hearing clarity, that you find that the different kind of sound formations, certain
parts of the register that take about thirty minutes before you get it into the ... That’s a
long time. Took about thirty minutes to finally play a long note and you didn’t go ‘ugh’.
And you find that there’s a completely new world there, you see, that was very interesting
because I had to change my ear, had to change my thinking, and adapt to that, really that
was, call it a system almost. But it wasn’t really a system. I look for those things. I look for
things that slow me down. I look for things where in a sense I have to get away from a
30
The instrumentation of Flute and orchestra includes 18 triangles.
certain type of skill and get involved in a sense of listening, and of developing a skill in
relation to listening. Not rather than the skill of who listens, which is essentially the way I
feel about most music.
But the idea came from a painter, of having the pedal half down. I’ve done it in a few
pieces now, the piece for John Cage, also the piano part was half down. And it came from
a very good friend of mine, I don’t know to what degree his work is known here in
Toronto – Cy Twombly. Exquisite painter, actually he was part of the Jasper Johns and
the Rauschenberg trio. They were all close friends and they all lived together. And I saw a
show – Actually, he showed me some once. I first saw it when I visited him in Rome and
he took me to his dealer and showed me a bunch of work, and then I saw this new work
in New York. And I caught something that was very, very interesting for me, that, only
because this picture that I did see in New York, it was a show of fifteen big pictures, that
some were related, in name anyway. And I noticed that he used a kind of gesso, very thin
gesso, where the tint changed ever so slightly. You could hardly catch it from one
painting to another. And it gave it this kind of – rainbow. And I got that idea from him, I
got that idea of putting a little gesso, that I’m on this very precarious gesso smudge, so to
speak. And I think it works very well.
Usually my problems, I never come to a problem a priori. A priori. I think that anybody
goes along the street singing something has a problem. And I’m not the only one,
Stravinsky never had an idea in his head until he sat down and started to work. And there
are many, many people like that. I don’t think about ideas. I don’t have any ideas. And I
don’t even know that I’m into ideas, or I’m after ideas. However, things do happen as
you’re working. And I suppose ideas do come out of it. But then I become very suspicious
when I do get an idea, even when it’s a good one, because I usually find that I only get
ideas when I’m stuck.
You know, the Rothko Chapel, which is not particularly an important piece of mine, but
easy to listen to, and I wrote it for a special occasion – And I mentioned to a composer
you probably don’t know, after hearing it at the concert, that there’s not a goddamned
idea in it. There’s essentially not an idea in it. There’s not one idea that I’ll actually call an
idea in the piece. It just goes along, always gets the right note. Everything that happens is
OK, even when the style changes, there are three style changes in the piece. Everything
seems to be fine. Yet there’s not an idea in it. Some things might look like an idea, for
example there’s a lot of polyrhythms in this piece. The fluidity from the beginning, the
long breathing thing, going on her own thing. and events. And it wasn’t even layered, I
didn’t, like, write something and then layer things in, actually everything was growing
from each other, and everything else is in another time, that happens a lot. But I don’t
see it as a polyrhythmic idea. Just when I begin to hear it, I begin to hear that the pacing
of the flute is going this way, and the other one is going the other, so the ability to do that,
is just the sense of experience, of just knowing exactly what it is. Now because I know
what something is doesn’t mean that I have an idea, you see. So I don’t think of it as an
idea, and I don’t milk it as an idea, you see. I don’t even think of it has having any
implications towards other art.
But the greatest composition lesson I ever had in my life was at my meeting with John
Cage, though I didn't go to study with John. And he said something to me and I've kept
up this particular – this to me is my secret. He said, always copy your own music,
because while you're copying you'll think about what you wanna do next. And that's
exactly the way I work now. I work for two hours, then I copy for another long session. If
I work for two hours, I might have four, five hours of copying. And I go back between one
and the other. And I love that! And he's absolutely right! But it's not as if I'm having an
idea what to do. And I don't know what the process is going. I think actually what's
happening is a kind of like, even unconsciously you're just throwing out all the classy
things you possibly might think of if you weren't copying! So, in a sense, on one hand it's
helping me to write the piece, and on the other hand it's throwing out all the, the baloney
that we reassure ourselves with, you see. So I couldn't even imagine, in fact I don't even
know what a musical idea is ... I'll be going along and I'll say to myself, like in my String
quartet, I would say, ‘What I need here is some kind of twelve-tone construction’. I work
six hours inventing a fabulous row, and that's it! I don't say, ‘Hey, I'm really a closet
serialist!’ [laughter] It was like a row for the moment! I don't know why the nature of the
idea. And a wonderful piece I wrote for Paul Zukovsky - the last of the series31, and
perhaps the best of the series - is called Violin and orchestra, in which there are three
cadenzas, if you could call them that, not technically. What are those three cadenzas?
The three cadenzas are three quotes of different Webern rows. I don't know why the hell
I used three Webern rows. Maybe because I felt that my music, maybe I felt that the
music had an intervallic deficiency, an intervallic deficiency. So I went to Webern for
intervals. I didn't use his pacing though, because his pacing stinks! [laughter] I used my
own pacing. But I'm fortunate I had a lot of fun, because when I started to pace the
Webern rows they didn't sound like intervals! They sounded like pitches. I sort of
distanced them, all kinds of things. But anyway, I don't have no idea why I decided to
have the rows, late rows of Webern. I have no idea.
But it's very interesting now, since there's an article in a German magazine, seemed to be
very extensive, where he gives a rhythmic analysis. The essence of the problem. The
problem is, ‘How does Feldman float?’ And there it is, beautifully done. He takes the first
of the series, called Cello and orchestra, which I wrote in ’71, and he has this graphic,
beautifully done, of my durational relationships. And it looks like a million dollars! How
I use symmetry here, and how I seem to have a tendency to go asymmetric symmetry and
have a balancing symmetry assymetrically, and how I make a counterpoint with that and
the orchestral part in relation to the cello. Looks fantastic. But I didn't know what I was
doing, I didn't know I had an idea about floating, you know! [laughter] But of course I
loved that, and it wasn't bad, because he tried to – You know, I mean we could all look at
anybody and point out some personality or character deficiency, you know. You know, it
wouldn't be too far off, so I wouldn't even argue with some of his observations.
All I'm really trying to say is that I work so personally that if anybody says you’re not a
composer I never get insulted. I'm very removed from this. I love it, and I know it, and
I'm comfortable with it, as much as the next guy. I'm very removed from it. It's very
indifferent. Not that I expect, you know, Stravinsky to be Morton Feldman. He was
certainly lazy, this genius. He certainly was lazy.
31 The series of ...and orchestra pieces that Feldman wrote between 1971 and 1979.
[long pause]
It's a wonderful series you're having here. Who else is coming?
[inaudible audience remarks]
Now that you have your own constitution,32 [laughter] you could invite more foreigners
[more laughter].
[extended applause]
[Audience member: If anyone's thirsty, we have beer at a dollar a bottle. Before you go.]
32On April 17, 1982,the day of this lecture, the British Queen and the Canadian Prime Minister signed the
proclamation which brought the Constitution Act, 1982 into force. This formally confirmed that Canada
controlled its own constitution and had full independent sovereignty.
Morton Feldman: Remarks on Varèse
The following remarks by Feldman, from a programme on Edgard Varèse entitled “A Martyr for the
Cause” presented by Roger Wright on BBC Radio 3 on 22nd October 1986, were transcribed by Chris
Villars from a tape recording of the broadcast made by Tudor Wright.
Artistically, [Varèse’s] great legacy is a marriage between timbre and pitch that was absolutely
uncanny. It’s a great harmony lesson in orchestration, or instrumentation, as harmony, and not
conceptually arrived at. He really mixed them a way that the Germans do not mix, probably more out
of Debussy.
You had to be a very secure musician to have a sense of [Varèse’s] stature. And I noticed that, through
the years, even some of my own students effectively couldn’t really ascertain any strong systematic
approach. This took away some kind of credibility that he possibly might be a great composer. The kids
felt a little better when I explained, for example, that Arcana was an eleven note passacaglia, or that
Deserts is a twelve-tone piece of sorts. It’s not really... I mean, I don’t know what you call it! I see no
function for the twelve-tone [method].
There’s a marvellous story about Duchamp which might relate to Varèse. It is that, someone came in
and they saw Duchamp squirting paint with a cheap water pistol. And they said, “Marcel, why don’t
you go to the hardware store and get a sophisticated gun?” And he said, “I thought of it,” he said, “but
the more inferior the material, the greater the aim.” And that’s saying, in a sense, that he’s dealing with
inferior point of view by being, say, less involved in the construction of a piece, say than Schoenberg.
But I feel that there is elements of knowing that if you’re not using something, you have to compensate
it with something else. If Stravinsky compensated the loss of harmony with rhythm, I would say that
Varèse compensated the loss of the things that he loved with orchestration as harmony.
I suppose that a young composer in New York in those times was very much like female composers
now who I teach. Like they’re in search of a model. We didn’t have any models. We wanted a flesh and
blood model. No-one should want to be an artist just by seeing some dead music on the page. That’s no
justification for being a composer. I want to see who did it. And the people that did it at high school -
my friends - just didn’t give me any confidence in the sense that I would like to be a composer. Really,
I mean it! I’m not kidding! Stefan Wolpe had a... He was on fire, he had a face. And Varèse had a face.
The face was alive with the subject. And to me that was very, very important. He made the chain
complete, giving me a sense of... that I would not be wasting my life writing music. Very important; the
face, and then the personality.
I would say that to me, and to maybe others in America, [Varèse] was to me what perhaps Webern was
to Boulez, of more or less the same generation. More so than Ives, though but you put Ives in the same
situation. I mean, if one is always trying to recruit figures in history that present your own point of
view, you know at least there is Varèse in America! That is, [of] the less systematic type of composer.
Morton Feldman: Current Trends in
America
Lecture given at the South African Broadcasting
Corporation, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, July 1983
Transcribed by Rüdiger Meyer

The copyright of this lecture is owned by the Estate of Morton Feldman. It is published here
with their kind permission. Any further use of this text must be cleared with Rüdiger Meyer
and the copyright owners.
I hope you don't mind too much if I circumvent the subject. Of course by doing that I'll
probably talk more about it than not. One of the reasons is that if I was about to talk about
what is happening in music today in America I'll have a heart attack on the stage. And I
don't think you'd like to see that. [laughs] I myself, I'm not too happy about what's
happening. And I don't think its a question just of the USA, I think it's happening all over.
Let's put it this way - every week in the New York Sunday Times there's an article and the
article is usually titled "The Death of the Avant Garde." [laughs] There is just something
about the avant garde, whatever that was or is, that seems to be annoying everybody when
it comes to music. Yet the unbelievable avant garde art galleries in New York. On a
Saturday afternoon you can't see a picture. Have to wait in line just to see a Jackson
Pollock, more or less. And thinking about this phenomena has affected my own music in
the past few years, and I've asked myself some very very devastating questions. A whole
series of devastating questions.
The first question that I asked myself: "Is music an art form?" Secondly, if John Cage did
the same thing in painting I don't think you would even know his name. He might not have
been good enough. Certainly no level of the notoriety. Why music? Why is music so
entrenched in its music forms? And the notion ... I speculate the notion, you see I'm just the
devils advocate I haven't answered these questions. Remember I just ask these questions.
And I've come to the conclusion that maybe music is not an art form. That there are really
some things that you can't do that you could do for example in literature, in painting or in
the cinema.
I think that one of the reasons it can't be done is quite simply because music is so difficult
to write. No other answer except that it's difficult. And we just don't have the talent around
to handle new concepts or even think of them. Now I'm convinced about that, and I'm
certainly convinced of it more and more in terms of say my own students. I teach students
on a masters and doctorate level. I don't teach undergraduates. I'm teaching in a very fine
university for the past twelve years. And I came to this conclusion not only because of my
teaching but being on various juries. Establishment juries. I'm an establishment composer
in effect. Of the International Society of Contemporary Music, other juries, internationally
and otherwise. But why is it that I myself give the more establishment pieces by the
younger people the award. And that the more "adventurous" ... I'm not that interested.
This happened to me a month or two ago. And the reason is that the young establishment
composer was guided in having the right kind of acquired skills to do what he or she wants
to do. The one that wants to be original or creative essentially don't know what skills are
needed for their originality. Don't know what to use. Don't know, more important, what not
to use. Doesn't seem to have the discipline, the focus only because he or she does not have
really strong models. It's not like being at Yale university where everybody is trying to
rewrite Schoenberg's Fourth String Quartet. So it's a very serious, a very serious problem.
Music is very, very, very difficult to write.
So instead of talking about trends which are disquietingly, appallingly conservative, only
because there's not a new need for communication. Not because of anything other than
music is very difficult to write. Also what has happened is that, well let's put it this way:
When I was growing up in music we would hear a new piece and say "What terrific
material, Boy that's terrific material." Don't ask me what material is, but you had a sense of
the material. Now my students will talk about a piece and they'll say "What a terrific idea",
you see. And I think for anybody that teaches composition it rings true. "What a terrific
idea". And I could lately tell a certain part of the world whether it's La Jolla in California or
Downtown New York, I could tell where the music is coming from only, not because of the
material, only because of the ideas in a sense in which it's a kind of community shared.
What we have really now all over, dramatized in America only because it's so large, not
because it's more gifted, is this kind of folk music of different cities. What we have lost is
the fantastic international ... excitement. The international concerns that we had in the
fifties and into the sixties.
Now because of this I decided to play a work by a young American, she just hates it when I
would say "female composer", by the name of Bunita Marcus. Unfortunately everything is
suspicious because I was her major professor. [laughs] And ... I wish I wasn't actually, and
in a sense I never really felt I was. Back in 1975 I got a phone call from Bunita Marcus.
And she asked if she could visit me, that she was living in Buffalo with her husband. At
that time Buffalo was still a very important avant garde music centre. And the reason that
she was in Buffalo was that she and her husband really wanted to go to Toronto because he
was a classical guitarist and there was somebody terrific for him to study there. But being
that rents and real estate were just appallingly expensive in Toronto they decided Toronto is
only an hour and fifteen minutes away. She was going to settle in Buffalo. And usually I
never saw anybody. Actually I would, if they weren't interested in coming into the
university I, for whatever reason, I didn't want to see them. And there was something about
her manner on the phone - I said "sure". We made an appointment and she came over and
she then entered and got her doctorate about two years ago.
Now rather going along with the axiom that something new is obviously something new,
now that I'm in my late fifties I could mellow a little bit and repeat Anton Chekhov when
he said "talent is always new" and Bunita is certainly the most gifted young composer that I
know of, certainly in America. There are others. There's a young man by the name of Jo
Kondo. And he's Japanese and I would say that he's going to be the Webern of the nineties.
Very strange stuff. Bunita's is less strange. Her work is upfront, she doesn't really need
dynamics, it's almost like Bach the way the work projects itself. And I feel she has an
exquisite voice. But most important, getting back to one of my earlier thoughts, she has a
sense of material, a fabulous sense of material in almost a kind of Stravinskian sense. And
she has incredible instrumental presence, again in a Stavinskian sense. But also, very
important to me, is her notation. Notation is a very, very serious problem which I felt - that
is handled only superficially, evidently the late Beethoven never helped when he started to
get involved with incredible detail as he does in his late sonatas. Didn't seem to really leave
any influence. Her aspect of detail is in a sense really quite uncanny and how she expresses
it both rhythmically and on the page is unusual.
I think I embarrassed her enough with this lengthy introduction. Obviously I don't want you
to make your mind up for yourself. [laughter] I just went through with, when I awarded her
a big prize, and I had a very important New York, South American composer living there
now - David Davidowsky, where I had to convince him about another piece of Bunita's and
he says, "Well Morton, I love you, if you say so, it must be there." [laughs]
But actually it's an interesting confrontation and I'm really presenting it more, not so much
to the non-composers in the audience but to the composers - to confront yourself, you
know, on the tennis court, with a champ ... that you never heard of, like these thirteen or
fourteen year old girls that are coming out of nowhere, you know ... [laughs]
And the music is called MUSIC FOR JAPAN and she wrote it for one of the few and
perhaps the best groups in Japan called the Ark ensemble. And she was invited to come
over there. Takemitsu who's nuts about her music also saw to it that she was funded to get
there. And so it will be the ARK ensemble that you're gonna hear and Bunita Marcus is
conducting the group.
[A tape recording of MUSIC FOR JAPAN is played.]
This is probably going to be my only public forum because as I understand it we're just
going to be with the composition seminars ... Except my last talk where I talk about myself,
so maybe we could talk about you. I once called up a friend and said, "This evening we're
just going to talk about you." [laughs] So it might be a very apt time, if you could ask me
questions.
Q: There is a painting form known as "post avant-garde" which is quite interesting and does
seem to be valid, certainly critics regard it as valid. Isn't there some validity in a music form
known as post avant-garde?
M.F: Well, I don't know what it means. I'm pretentious in speaking street talk. And to me
post avant-garde means post famous names. Essentially that's all it means to me. Until
those names become famous. I mean, just what are you gonna do, for example, after
Jackson Pollock's gesture in 1951. I mean what in heavens name are you gonna do? You
know. Or just do two unbelievably beautiful colours you know and paint them as well as
Rembrandt, the way Mark Rothko did. With his mysterious edges. The same thing in fact,
getting back to Bunita Marcus. I went over to her apartment in the midst of her writing this
and I noticed she had a big sign right on top of her desk and it said "Feldman - Boulez".
And I said "What's that?" And she said, "That's the enemy." [laughter] She says "I just gotta
remember, I just gotta remember what I'm dealing with here, to be a composer."
And ... I think we hid in the past twenty five years or thirty years, I think we hid behind this
terminology long enough. And I think individually we have to come out be tested in a
sense. I don't think these names really help any. "Modernism", "Non-Modernism", you see.
Because I think again if we have to find, we have to find the leadership in ourselves and by
finding the leadership in ourselves is knowing in a sense how we can, in a sense, develop
fantastic technical facility in terms of doing what we want to do rather than Feldman or
Boulez, you see. I think that's essentially the problem now.
And the problem is now, is not looking for some new methodology that can make things
easier for us to understand what we're doing. There's a big problem about teaching and
being a professor and being well known and handling students who feel that they have to
know what they're doing. There's a famous ... remarks that I made at Yale twenty years ago
when I was invited there to give a big seminar and a concert of my music. A very famous,
one of the most famous musicologists after listening to my music and to some degree my
vague authoritative way of talking, said, "Mr Feldman, I've come to the conclusion that you
don't know what you're doing." And Mel Powell who was the chairman at the time still tells
me how fantastic it was because I walked off the podium to where this man was sitting, and
he thought I was going to punch him in the nose or something, he had no idea what was
going to happen. And I said to him, "Listen, just because I was invited by Yale university to
give a lecture doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing."
And I say that all the time, I never ask my student what he's doing. I would say ... you're
not focused. I would use general terms like "you're not focused". Or I said, "Your
hierarchical notions" I said, "are absolutely ridiculous. For example if you think that
melody is a hierarchical notion, look how mediocre your accompaniment is." You know.
That's tossed away as if it were unimportant, you know. It was the melody they wanted or
something. And I guide them that way. But I never guide them in any way of ... give them a
certain type of security in knowing what they're doing. I think that's why ideas have taken
over so many aspects especially in terms of university music. And the sense is that they feel
that they have to control things, they have to essentially know what they're doing. But I
think that's essentially where the problem is.
And also I think the problem, another thing that interests me about Bunita Marcus is that
she makes the distinction between "problem solving" and "solutions". And there's a vast
distinction between those two words. Now we know that in problem solving you don't have
to know what you're doing. We all solve problems in our sleep. And we find solutions
when we're awake. So many times my problems, I could be gnawing at a thing, I could be
upset for days, I don't know what's wrong. And usually it could be what's wrong is that the
instrumental combination is not working, you see, and that I'm waiting a little to get
familiar with my material in order to see if some kind of adjustment has to be involved.
And this whole kind of consciousness and this whole kind of control which of course
Wagner didn't have and Mozart to some degree had intuitively, you know one of the
interesting things is that when you teach is that the best, one of the most interesting periods
I like to teach is before serialism. And that's some of the greatest pieces that Webern, Berg
and Schoenberg wrote in those years where Webern just had this chromatic scale on the
edge of a page and it was just like picking out notes, you know. The more the system
became formalized and understood to some degree there was a deterioration in the art. I
mean there's a perfect period in a sense. And all history has those periods.
I think we're all on our own now, essentially. Now in getting back to America I feel that the
conservatism to some degree is, I don't feel that a country could create an art that
outstretches the political climate. I feel that the political climate, no matter how strong
anybody is, to some degree creates some unconscious "we must stop here." Some kind of
thing and it's very interesting that in America in the fifties and the sixties the political
climate in a sense after McCarthy for example created a new kind of radicalism in the art as
if to say, "We can't have anything like this ever happen again." I think it affected the art
too. And I've seen this happen in other countries as well. That one is programmed. I have a
lot of Canadian composers that come to study with me. And that I find that their work is
pretty safe only because they get large grants. And they don't want to rock the boat. And
they're not, they're being programmed and they don't realise it. This generosity of helping
them out as professionals has made them so careful in the kind of music they want to write,
has really affected their music unconsciously.
So rather than saying what kind of music is happening in America I'd rather just say that
I'm waiting for just strong talent to emerge. What I really think is going to happen, and I'm
using Bunita as a model because I see hundreds of scores all the time, an awful lot of
music, is that we might go into a period in which the music is not recognizable as either
modern or as conservative, as her music is. I never get the feeling that I'm listening to
Cologne when I'm listening to her, and also don't get the feeling that I'm listening to West
Coast. To some degree I don't know what I'm listening to. I'm listening to a very private
voice, with a lot of technique, you see. And hopefully, I'm very interested in creating a kind
of intellectual climate, by my colleagues, by my teaching, by my own music as an example,
to create that kind of music.
You know history is a burden and the burden is really not to take it on because a terrific
musician in this sense has no argument with history and as TS Eliot reminded us we take
from it what we need, we all do that. But I think that the burden we have of history is
essentially getting it off our back as a safe refuge and I think that that was always one of the
problems. I once compared history to, especially people who always bring up history,
continuity, tradition, that they're in a bank and they talk about it as if they're in a cathedral.
And by a bank I mean that the assets are there to draw on without really putting anything in
it, you see. The way Stravinsky had it. I consider this to some degree cultural welfare, you
know, a music that just sounds like every other music. "Okay get out cultural welfare and
we're going to play you a piece next week."
And I'm kind of fed up, naturally after twenty five years you're waiting and waiting, but I'm
certainly not waiting to see this conservatism. Conservatism without technique actually,
that's the worst. Then it's a kind of like amateur night of the reactionary attitudes and that's
no good either. So rather than "either/or" it's "neither/nor". I don't like amateur radicalism
and I don't like amateur conservatism. I wanna hear names again like I did when I was
twenty four. Names, when someone came back and said I heard a piece, it was like being at
a tennis match. I said, "What do you mean?" He said it was like the sound was going from
here to here. That was John Cage talking about Ligeti. Earle Brown coming to me and
saying, "Boy there's a guy in Paris, he just came from Greece, boy you ought to hear that
stuff it's far out." And that was Xenakis. I wanna hear names again. And I think we all
wanna hear names again rather than a return to something ... again.
Sounds like a sermon. Born again. [laughs]
Q: What amount of responsibility do you think the composer has towards the audience?
M.F: None. [laughter] Why? Because if you haven't got the moral conscience, in a sense,
that if the humanity is not in you, you see, then what good is it? What good is it? What
good is it to manipulate the audience to write someone a letter like Gluck, "I want to write a
music as if I'm actually sitting in the audience." All the responses, you know, everything. A
lot of that stuff you know was really audience manipulation. That they were involved not
necessarily with a sense of time as it was unfolding but a sense of timing, in a sense that
will give, in a sense, that will give the right kind of response in the audience. You have no
idea of how many really fabulous people were involved with the audience.
Now there's nothing wrong with it. I recently said to somebody, I said, "We have enough
music. If we don't have any music for the next five years it will be okay." I said, "What we
don't have is enough audience." I'm very interested in a audience and I'm very interested in
a new one. I'm not, no longer interested in an audience, in a sense, that wants to hear that
which they already heard. This is not an educated audience. And to insist on some interest,
you're insisting on interest mind you, you're not asking to take an adult education course,
you're asking for interest doesn't mean that the music is elitist. I'm a New Yorker, it's
impossible for a New Yorker to be an elitist. [laughter]
You never know who the audience or what it is. This is a very true story. It seems contrived
for the moment but it's true and documented. I was having a conversation with my teacher,
I wasn't studying at the time. His name was, a fabulous guy by the name of Stefan Wolpe.
And Stefan came out of a 1920 Weimar Republic. He was Marxist and he had a studio on at
that time, more so now, one of the more proletariat streets in New York. It was on 14th
Street and 6th Avenue. And I brought him a new piece. I wasn't studying with him but I
was still seeing him, bringing him my music. I brought him a new piece and he says,
"Morton" he says, "it's so esoteric, you're so esoteric. Isn't there such a thing as the man in
the street?" He was on the second floor. And we're looking down and who's walking across
14th Street and 6th Avenue - Jackson Pollock. [laughter]
The man in the street. Jackson Pollock was the man in the street and he was nuts about my
music. A lot of people have problems with it. A lot of people don't have problems with it.
What's interesting about modern music is that if nobody likes it they just can't shut it off.
They have to go on raving about it, against it. I think that modern music should exist and
everybody has the right to just shut it off. Just shut it off. But it should exist like anything.
Just like I shut off light music or jazz. I'm shutting it off all the time.
But as far as the audience and the composer ... I mean I don't think the audience really had
a chance. I don't know who the hell the audience is. I'm having some very interesting
experience. You know I told you earlier that I asked myself some terrible questions. One, is
music really an art form? Or is it just a music form? That means - a form that we already
know and we feel that the proportions are right and everybody is an expert about it even
though you don't know anything about music. Only because it's like everybody else's
music. And now if it's not an art form, what is it? Okay, we're not going to settle this at this
particular meeting. We're never going to settle it. Another question that I ask myself is
"Can we get rid of the audience?" How do we get rid of the audience? I was once sitting
with a great friend, they were doing a string quartet of mine many years ago and the
audience was fidgety, was annoying. I heard some quiet hisses beginning after ten minutes
and I turned to my friend and I said "What's this I hear about a live audience?" I said,
"There's nothing like a dead one."
I mean that generously. I don't know who's fault it is. I don't think it's anybody's fault.
Someone once described, "Tragedy for me, is when two people are right." [laughter] It's a
question of, I don't know, it's just a question of, I think it's a power play really. There's a
marvellous Jewish joke I love about Sam owes Ben twenty thousand dollars and in the
middle of the night his wife wakes up and sees Sam walking the floor. And she says what's
the matter. And he says "I owe Ben twenty thousand dollars and I have to pay him, next
morning, I don't have it." "Hello, Ben this is Sadie. Sam doesn't have the twenty thousand
dollars so you walk the floor all night." [laughter] So you see. And I think in art too, really,
seriously, it's a question of who walks the floor.
I mean I see tourists coming into New York. Going to the Whitney Museum, the
Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and they see
modern art, modern art, modern art, modern art, modern art, Madison avenue, 57th street,
modern art - they feel they're in a lunatic asylum ... They're walking the floor in New York.
[laughs] Essentially in terms of what's going on here. You see. So I think it depends on the
community, who walks the floor. You know, in a place like Cologne evidently it's the
audience who walks the floor. Because there's official support for it. Or an element of
tolerance.
I consider very much like a newspaper the cultural life of a country. And though I live in
Buffalo the reason I get the New York Times is because it's a newspaper. And I sit down
for an hour and I'm reading this damn newspaper - It doesn't let up. One section after
another on every category. And I feel that a society must make that available. For example
if they're counting heads in my university because they spent millions of dollars for access
to musical facilities which are not used either by the college students, by the faculty or by
the community, everybody's very upset. So the first thing they wanna do is say take away
the funding from my music concerts. On the other hand nobody uses the library either.
Nobody, I don't think anybody uses anything. In a sense I think we'll just have to close
down everything. Essentially [laughter] ... just ride around in automobiles. So again it's a
question of who walks the floor.
I think the public has enough. I think the public has everything ... They got it all and I think
there's an effort that has to be made. And if they don't want that effort then it's perfectly
fine, being that they have it all. It shouldn't deny a public that wants the other. That
considers their right to have the other. So it's a big problem. And I don't think it's an artistic
problem. I think it's a social problem and I think it's a political problem and ultimately I
think it's a financial problem. I have no idea. I don't think it's an artistic problem at all. I
have had enough experience to realize it is not an artistic problem.
I don't think that anybody has the right to define, to already, should define what the public
likes, doesn't like and should like. I don't think one has that right. I don't have that right
even in my selection when I give a concert. I give concerts across the board. Especially in
the university. And a lot of people are very upset because of my avant garde position and I
keep on reminding them that as far as I'm concerned the university is like a museum. This
is not a private art gallery. And I try to keep my university with all kinds of people coming.
Conservative. The conservatives when they make a talk usually sound radical. And when
the radicals make a talk they usually sound conservative. [laughter] We had John Cage and
Aaron Copland come. [laughs] Aaron sounded like some kind of terrorist. And John Cage
was more or less modifying his position. [laughter]
The audience. Big, big problem. I mean if you grow up in saying there's an audience. If
you're growing up to say, "Who wants to write music if there's no audience?" Music doesn't
want ya. "If you need an audience to write music we don't need you".
Again, that was a very long aside actually from the point that I wanted to make. Another
question I said, well the only way to really get rid of an audience is to alienate them. And
for the first time I ever consciously pursued a course of action only because there were
really no problems artistically for me to solve. It was a life problem, it was a social
problem. And I solved it number one, by only writing for dear friends, well it turns our that
the dear friends were some of the finest musicians in the world and so I wasn't taking any
chances there. So I wanted to eliminate the musician. The musician is a big problem, they
dictate the taste, they dictate how much they could afford to rehearse, how much they want
to rehearse. They want to play things that make them shine. They are not necessarily that
gung ho with the composer. Big problem with the performer. So I'm not thinking about the
performer per se anymore. I'm just thinking about a few people who I know for the past
thirty five years. They're nuts about my music and they play it beautifully.
Okay so that problem is solved. And the second problem is, the whole idea of what is the
real length of a piece, given the opportunity. If you really want to write a piece and you're
not thinking about an audience, you're not thinking about the performer, then how long is
the piece. If you're not kind of unconsciously programmed that a half a side of a record is
twenty minutes or twenty five minutes, how long could this piece be? I then pursued this
very fortunate direction and my pieces became an hour, an hour and a half, and I wrote a
string quartet - an hour and forty minutes. And we got this marvellous quartet to do it in
California. There was silence throughout the piece. There was never silence in a twenty
minute piece of mine. But you know, it was like Nicholas Nickleby, I suppose they thought
there was some kind of media event. And it was an hour and forty minutes and I had a
standing ovation. [laughter] I was told I had a standing ovation with the same piece in
Venice a year ago. Now in Toronto I'm going to have my new string quartet which is two
and a half hours. [laughter]
Wait a minute, what's really happening in this, I did one of these long things in Berlin.
Anybody who's lived in Berlin knows that you're kind of a captive audience anyway,
speaking of an audience anyway. Unless you go to the Academy der Kunst you're out on a
street or in a beer hall. So they just loved it. They just grooved on this hour and a half or
two hour piece. And I noticed the longer my pieces became, I started to develop a new
audience. For whatever reason. Alright it might be too expensive for the, and it was only
the expense of the Boston Symphony to do my new violin concerto but an outfit like
Frankfurt Radio is doing it. It doesn't seem to be a problem that it's an hour and a half and
things like that. And I think these long pieces are going to develop a new kind of audience
that is listening, that wants to listen, and that needs to listen. Where because intellectually,
artistically and certainly musically in the past twenty five years unlike the audience with a
capital "A", being that they're the audience with a small "a", they need it. You see. So that
was one formula where I'm getting a new audience, but quite by accident. I was really, I
didn't know that I was going to get a new audience, I just wanted to really get rid of the old
audience. You know its like paying alimony you just, it's as if you're never finished with it.
The same twenty minute piece. Five years go on, twenty years, thirty years - the same
attitudes. [laughs] That's music in America.
You know Milton Babbitt who was a very important American twelve tone composer wrote
an article, a very famous article in the States called "Who cares if they listen?" [laughs] I
really wanted to write one that really said "Who cares if they perform it?" [laughter]
Because what's the point, what's the point of performing these things, it's like vote, it's like
people ... in the sense ... I know ... I have friends who are active in the democratic party.
And I'm always very annoyed. They always say, "Why don't you get active?" I say, "What
do you mean "get active"? We're not going into the enclaves of people who're against our
position. We're having parties and fund-raising things amongst ourselves, I mean we're
already going to vote democratic party. So what do you mean by we should be active in this
thing?"
And I think it's the same thing with a lot of composers, that we've created a kind of ghetto
for ourselves only because we just can't cope with the problem, and we don't know how to
cope with the problem. See one of the ways of coping with the problem, for example in
Italy, is where the establishment puts on something avant garde. And then because the
establishment puts it on then everybody has to cope with it. And that'll happen here
actually. There's very little audience for contemporary music in America. Some of the
audiences, I don't know, I don't know exactly what the reason. I would say that maybe in a
place like New York there's just too much activity. I mean every night there's just too much
activity. Places like Paris it's a little different. They're really big events. I know that in
London when I hear the, if I'm in town and the London Sinfonietta's playing, I see a lot of
young people at the concerts just as if it was in the sixties. I think the price of admission
adds to it. Rather than fifteen dollars that they would charge on Carnegie Hall to hear Phil
Glass or someone. Twenty five dollars at the last concert, it was jammed.
I would say that Phil Glass is a media rather than an artistic phenomena in America. You
know America is essentially. The formula for America, and if you kinda take my word for
it then you'll never have to go there and you'll know everything about it, is essentially: It
developed, exploited and invented middlebrow. No place in the world, just think of it.
Popular songs from George Gershwin to Jerome Kern to Cole Porter. And they know how
to update it without costumes, like Chorus Line. And America has two sides, that very
swanky middlebrow, that unless you live there and know the kind of middlebrow people
that had a good education, they got a BA and are making a lot of money and they don't, you
know, they really want to have a good time but they don't want to have a silly good time.
They don't want to see "Naughty Marietta". And America is great at that. And the movies
are certainly demonstrating it now. But there's another side of America. A fantastic side. It
has two sides. And the side I would say is deeply religious and deeply committed to
exquisite values. Like Thoreau, Emerson. The painters in the fifties. And those are the two
Americas actually.
But what's happening in contemporary music is that the middlebrow is winning out.
Because there's a natural, it's in the DNA, the DNA you know, you start off in graduate
school, you're writing twelve tone music, you know, how long are you gonna write twelve
tone music? You don't really have a feeling for it and you kind of wanna find your way you
know, and you finally wind up in this vast open field, you see, of very high class,
middlebrow, type of music, not something silly like London years ago who developed a
kind of Constant Lambert. We never had those types. [laughs] Kind of silly, kind of silly
kind of music a little bit. And that's essentially America. Deeply spiritual, deeply non-
commercial in the true sense of the word and commercial in the true sense of the word and
that is making a very good competitive product. And the young people in a sense, there's a
new leisure class in America - the young. And they're a captive audience for these events.
And Steve Reich, Phil Glass, in a sense I feel, without insulting them too much, represent
this. And it's very attractive stuff, very attractive. In fact I wrote a letter to Universal, my
publisher, about Phil Glass's last Opera and I said you know it's unfortunate that it has an
avant garde reputation because there's nothing avant garde about it. What's avant garde is
that it's Soho and different kind of types writing it. But in the letter I wrote them I said,
don't quote me, I said, "Benjamin Britten could never have done it, and the damn thing
should have opened up in Covent Garden, not in Brooklyn someplace." Because it's
sensational, as theatre, as entertainment. With a great middlebrow theme like Mahatma
Gandhi, which is a middlebrow theme. And peace, isn't it crazy how peace has become
middlebrow. And it's just the right theme, right theme. And it's a fantastic thing to hear.
Forget that it's simplistic and that certain parts sound like Verdi and some parts sound like
Monteverdi [laughter] and that some parts sound like southern India. Forget about that. It's
just terrific theatre. [laughter]
And I think that one of the things against originality, also it's so difficult. I think it's a kind
of you know, the hatred of the rich or the hatred of the poor. I think there's a hatred of the
avant garde, or a hatred of originality because it is so hard to do and what are you gonna do
after Jackson Pollock threw the paint. You can't compete really with me or with Boulez or
with John Cage or Xenakis. You're wasting your time. I mean it's as if you're dealing with
Chase Manhattan bank, you're dealing with ... [laughs] you're dealing with big power
structures in trying to deal with these people. The only thing you could do is like Bunita
and just put it on the sign on the wall and say, "This is the enemy, gotta remember that this
is the enemy." The same time that she's not a third world composer, so to speak. How does
she exist in the midst of all these people. Rather than getting rid of them the way the media
is and the way so many people are happy to.
But you see if you're not talking about broad issues and you want to give things names.
And you don't want to do things like that, then you see the conversation one could have is
very, very difficult you see because then you really have to go out on a string and arrive at
certain opinions about certain work and really in a sense forcefully in a sense support the
work you believe in. Most people are pretty ambivalent about that.
One of the things that I always do in my seminar, I'm so fed up with analyzing what
something is and then having the student when a recording of something is played for an
examination not recognize it. After writing an A paper of what it is but not recognizing it
when they hear it and this has happened over, time again. Phasing me almost out of the
university is what I do many times if Takemitsu or someone else comes through. I don't
ask, "What is it?" I usually ask, "How good is it?" Of course no one ... no one has anything
to say. All my doctoral candidates have nothing to say how good it is. And that's wherein
the problem is in our particular time. So I think a whole new value system has to come
about. No one is really fighting for Steve Reich. You're writing about him, but you're not
fighting for them, you know. You pick the London Sunday newspaper and see that idiot
write some glowing article on Stockhausen again. The way it was at one time. Really going
out for it and really, you know ...
Names, who are the names, where are the names? I only know two names: Bunita Marcus
and Jo Kondo. Both absolutely different, absolutely nothing to do with each other. Those
are the only two names I know. And very envious of things in both. I'm envious of Jo
Kondo's lack of dependence on instruments. That he's picking out notes without
instruments, which for me is inconceivable. Unless I know what instrument is playing a
note, I don't know the note. But he writes these cra ... you know these beautiful ... And very
very unusual type of way of working and thinking.
The big problem is, and one of the problems we're going to face this week, especially
having composition discussions in a sense is that ... what develops that particular instinct to
give someone's research or what one wants to do artistically in their music a certain degree
of validity. What the great English psychiatrist Ernest Jones and his wonderful book,
biography on Freud has a marvellous section on how did Freud know and how could he
find the cause and effect, you know. And he talked about Freud as this mineralogist who
knows that platinum was platinum and gold was gold and this and that, that instinct to
know. Again that sense of material, in a sense what's needed. But not what's needed in
terms of a society or a social structure or, you know, writing for your professor or writing
for an arts council or writing for an audience. You see how to write without that given and
still come up with, you know, I understand that if we dig long enough we're going to come
up with something in this town. [laughs]
So how we do that in our own work is essentially the big problem today. Not what's
happening in Cologne and what is Cage doing these days and where do you think things are
going and that kind of business. Because what we've been talking about for the past thirty
years and evidently things have, went really nowhere because it's essentially the same
names, it's the same reason. And if it's not originality which is a determining factor then
what, how do we explain the phenomena of what music travels and what music doesn't
travel? Outside of thinking of it as either a Jewish or a homosexual conspiracy [laughter]
against the composers in Chicago or Montreal for that matter in Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires can't figure it out at all because the music has everything the music has
rhythm. Has everything, it doesn't travel. The minute ... someone told me that even the
music of Montreal by the time it reaches Toronto - it's dead. [laughter] Very important
factor. In other words, if you say originality is not the factor then you can't complain if you
don't travel. I hope we cover and argue and discuss this. Where is the criteria? I give a
seminar about once every three years and the seminar is called "What's allowed and what's
not allowed". In it I tally on the blackboard all the boogie, all the fantasies all the notions,
all the hallucinations that the graduate students think is either allowed or not allowed. And
it's actually a very fascinating thing.
Okay you've been very patient with all my serious ramblings. Thank you.
Morton Feldman in conversation with Michael Oliver, November 1984
The following short conversation between Morton Feldman and the presenter and writer on classical
music, Michael Oliver, was broadcast as part of BBC Radio 3’s Music Weekly programme on 4
November 19841. The item was linked to a broadcast later in the same week of Feldman’s Rothko
Chapel. After giving a short introduction to Feldman and his music, Michael Oliver began the
interview by asking Feldman about the structure of his pieces.
MF: I was just reading a letter Schoenberg wrote to Rufer2 years ago, in which he said, “Well, even if
they don’t understand the music, no-one talks about my beautiful form.”3 You see? [Laughs] So,
it’s as if the form would be the metaphor, in a sense, someone could work with. I don’t work that
way. I put things together very much like a body is put together. [Laughs] I don’t know, which
comes first? Are we built up from the feet up or from the top down? I don’t know! [Laughs] But
I think this is a fantasy that a lot of young composers and a lot of professional musicians have
about how something is made in general. In fact, I spend a seminar telling my students how, for
example, War and Peace was made. Otherwise, how a certain painter painted. They don’t know
how things were actually made. They have some kind of idea that things begin like in embryo,
like a natural growth so to speak, and the form and everything is just like handed down.
MO: But don’t works of music in some ways grow like an embryo, from a seed, gradually taking
shape?
MF: Yes, but that’s the arena, that’s the historical arena. For example, Picasso actually is working
with a ready-made rectangle, a ready-made protagonist. And his ingenuity is the way he cut it up,
so to speak. Some people acted as if the rectangle didn’t exist and created a piece as if to get rid
of it, say like Rothko, the way he would bleed. They would just use the rectangle and then forget
about it. Some people start from the middle and work out. Some people just work around the
edges, you see? [Laughs] Each one playing the dance of death around the rectangle! And in
music it’s essentially one concept in Western civilisation; it’s beginning, middle and end. I had an
elegant piece of Henze’s for percussion4. He begins in an off-hand way, because he’s a pro, he
doesn’t want to show that he’s actually beginning. And his middle is interesting, because he
doesn’t want to really make an obvious development. And the ending, the ending either would...
er... I said to a student sitting next to me as we were listening to this Henze piece, now let’s see,
he only has two alternatives; either he’s going to come back to A, or he’s going to go into a coda.
Well, he went into a very short coda. [Laughs]
MO: Was there any other alternative?
MF: In that context, no.
MO: But even your works [Feldman laughs], even your works start at a given time and end a
predictable time later.
MF: Yes. I’ll tell you how I worked as a kid. I would start on one of my piano pieces in the early 50s,
and like everything was just too marvellous; you open up, you get that chord, you get that little...
After all, I used to play late Beethoven. I mean, I know what it’s all about; that two notes, or the
three note little thing that can make a piece. And what I did was... There was only one way I
could circumvent this one way that we all walk in music. It was too much of a set-up. It wasn’t
direct enough, you see. And I wasn’t Beethoven. I just couldn’t open up with a diminished
something... He only did that... How many times did he do it, you see? But I wanted that
immediacy. You know, for teenagers in New York at that time Kafka was very important. He was
1
Transcribed and annotated by Chris Villars from a tape recording of the broadcast made by Tudor Wright.
2
Joseph Rufer, Austrian musicologist (1893-1985), pupil and one-time assistant of Schoenberg, who wrote extensively on
Schoenberg’s music and the twelve-tone method of composition.
3
Schoenberg to Rufer, 16 December 1931: “For it is really very odd that no one has yet discussed the obvious beauty of my
form. And yet it is something that ought to be evident to many who will never be able to follow a melody or a theme by ear
or in their imagination.” Arnold Schoenberg Letters, edited by Erwin Stein (London: Faber and Faber, 1964, and New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1965), Letter 132.
4
Hans Werner Henze, German composer (born 1926). The piece was probably Prison Song (1971) for percussion and tape.
a big influence. I wanted that opening, that “Someone was telling lies about Josef K”5. I wanted
that immediate opening. And there was always this set-up, this preparation. What I did was write
six measures, seven measures, and then I found myself there, and at there was the beginning of
the piece. In recent years, not so much now but ten years ago, I like to put, not beginning-middle-
end, but... Oh, I like codas, and I started to put codas in certain pieces. And I liked it very much.
As a kid I was always very impressed with the ending, for example, of Ionisation6. I got very into
the best aspects of composers in handling the triangle of beginning, middle and end. I actually
tabulated who was good for beginnings, who was good for ends. Varèse’s beginnings are
sensational. Stravinsky’s endings are sensational (I think out of boredom, he wants to get out of it
or something!). Nobody has a good middle really.
MO: You can’t avoid having a middle can you?
MF: You cannot... Yes, you cannot avoid having a middle.
MO: It’s the thing that comes between the beginning and the end.
MF: But I think a lot of it has to do with what we think is interesting... I mean, I had an extraordinary
experience in my own four-hour String Quartet7. There are natural tendencies, but I don’t know if
they’re artistic. I think they’re anxiety. You have to begin effectively, and you have to end
effectively. Like you’re as good as your endings! Most people, they don’t remember too far
behind the ending! But I think it is an anxiety. Here I am in this long piece, I have a certain sense
of the time and there’s a natural clock of anxiety, not artistry, that tells you it is three-quarters in.
If you have something to say, you better say it now! [Laughs] Three-quarters into the piece that
bell rang for me as well, but instead of becoming “interesting” in quotes, I just repeat two notes
over and over again with different spelling, you know, harmonic spelling, different kind of
doubling, different kind of registration. And it goes on for about ten or twelve minutes and it’s
one of the most interesting aspects of the piece, because at that time we’re focussed in, like under
a high-powered microscope, and where if I opened up with just that two notes in the beginning,
we wouldn’t hear it. Now we could hear it, you see, and I think it is one of the most interesting
parts of the quartet. There is a possibility that music is not an art-form, that it has to do with
musical forms, which are essentially memory forms. The implication of how we try to work on
our concentration in terms of memory forms is absolutely... er... is just incredible. What I’m
interested in is not so much memory now, but what happens in a long piece that becomes
memorable. And I’m always asking myself, you know, just because you want to say I want to
have a madeleine, to taste it again, or I want to go out and smell a flower to... Just because you set
it up, you see, doesn’t mean in a sense that it’s going to become memorable. And I keep on
bringing back things, almost as if I’m asking myself, is this the line that’s memorable? And you
don’t know what is memorable, what’s not memorable. I was very touched years ago when I saw
Krapp’s Last Tape. The thing is just going along, just rolling along, and then he talks about
seeing a girl on the other side of a station, a provincial station. And he kept silent. He brings it
back, the girl in the green raincoat. And I forgot it. That’s all it was, it was the girl in the green
raincoat. That has influenced me very much in my work8.
MO: Now, how is that paralleled in music?
MF: Oh, the way in my Chromatic Fields9 you’ll certainly hear an unbearably beautiful consonant
type of reference over and over again, in the head. Or some little modal configuration just out of
consciousness, emerging as they... as an image so to speak.
5
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K”: Opening line of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (1925).
6
Edgard Varèse, Ionisation (1929-31) for percussion ensemble.
7
Feldman’s String Quartet 2, referred to here, lasts around four hours in the shortened version he prepared for the premiere
and subsequent performances by the Kronos Quartet. The UK premiere of this piece by the Kronos Quartet took place in
London on 12 August 1984, just three months before the present broadcast.
8
“What remains of all that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform? No?” Samuel Beckett,
Krapp’s Last Tape (1958).
9
Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) for cello and piano.
Morton Feldman: Interview by Han Reiziger, 1985
Transcribed by John Snijders
On 5 November 1985, during the New Music America festival in Los Angeles,
Han Reiziger interviewed Morton Feldman for a composer portrait
programme he was making for the Netherlands radio station, VPRO.
Feldman’s monumental String Quartet 2 had been given its West Coast
premiere at the festival by the Kronos Quartet on 2 November. The transcript
below was made from a recording of the programme broadcast on VPRO
Radio 4 on 17 June 1987. The original interview was significantly longer, only
30 minutes of it being used in the programme. Dotted lines below indicate
where cuts were made. In the radio programme the interview fragments were
interspersed with recordings of short piano pieces, and the programme
concluded with a complete performance of For Bunita Marcus.
MF: I feel that many, many people, if they do like my music, they like it for
the wrong reasons. For example: most of the people that do like it, like it
because they feel it’s meditative.
HR: I think so, yes.
MF: I don’t feel my music is meditative. I feel my music has to do with…

Well, let’s put it this way, because we were just looking at a review in a
German music magazine on a book of my essays that Walter Zimmermann
just put out, and on the cover is a caricature of me, or rather a painting of
me by my friend Philip Guston who died a few years ago. And Philip’s main
theme, or if it’s not a main theme it’s his main concern, let’s put it this way,
was the impossibility of painting a picture today. That it’s actually
impossible to paint something because to some degree everything has
already been painted. A lot of people feel that there’s no problems, they just
find a style and they just paint that style. But if you don’t begin with style,
www.cnvill.net/mf-reiziger-interview.pdf 1
and you say, ‘I wanna paint the picture’, and your cop-out is not a look or a
style, then it’s pretty impossible to think about what in heaven’s name am I
gonna paint? And I think what my music demonstrates for me, I have no
idea really you know, what other people really hear in it, but what my
music really demonstrates for me is the impossibility of going ahead and
just writing a purely abstract piece of music that is not, for example,
metamusic, or involved with so many things that are extraneous to music.
One of the most interesting things about this point of view is that I once got
in an argument, when I first started to go to Europe, and people would say,
“Well, this is not music”. And I would say, “Well”, I said, “I think that John
Cage and myself are the only ones that are really writing music, because
we’re not doing anything else.” I said, “It’s not like Boulez, that has written
very few purely abstract pieces, that they’re all literary, and that some of
the greatest music we have or we know is either based on other music, like
Stravinsky, or it’s based on literary things or it’s based on extramusical
considerations.” I said, “As far as John Cage using for example the I Ching,” I
said, “You know, most people don’t know why John uses the I Ching. John
uses the I Ching because it’s very flexible. But more than being flexible it
demonstrates the yin-yang aspect of existence in terms of things equalising
out. That’s why he uses the I Ching.” The fact that I don’t use any known
processes doesn’t mean in a sense I’m not involved with process. But I am
involved with my responsibility… Let’s put it, again, this way: when
Schoenberg said that he wanted to extend the Germanic musical tradition
for another hundred years, I just want to extend music for another ten
years.
HR: Not longer?
MF: Oh, I’ll settle for ten years. I was recently at some big tractor company
in America, and they had all the tractor parts connected with a computer,
and it had to work for a ten year cycle. So I’ll settle for ten years. I’m not
extending any tradition, Cage is not my tradition, Ives is not my tradition,
everything is my tradition. So in other words, it’s like the nuclear... I don’t
wanna have a system that will determine no more wars. I just don’t want
any more wars, you see? Without a system! [laughter] I don’t wanna say,
“No, I wanna kill you because you don’t want my system to stop wars.” I
remember reading a soviet poet, I thought it was quite nice, where he said,
“We must kill to stop killing.” But I do have a system, and my system
essentially is thought. It is a system, that is, it’s a system in terms of…
HR: It’s thought, it’s philosophy?
MF: No, not it’s philosophy, but just thinking, as I’m writing. Rather than
living thinking, rather than dead thinking, or prethinking. I don’t wanna
have the piece already written so I don’t have anything to think about as I
write it.
HR: So you never have in mind ahead what you are doing, you have no idea,
just when you write you think?
MF: Look, it is absolutely not mysterious. We have everything even before

we think. We have the automobile, we have the instrumentation, that might
be the automobile, we have certain engineering to make them… All we
don’t have is the gas. So thought is like gas. But for composers to think that
they’re beginning and they’re reinventing a wheel… Or as Earle Brown used
to say, I remember in the fifties if you would complain about somebody
he’d say, “That guy just reinvented the fountain pen.” But we have
everything. I tell my students we’re all Duchamp: we didn’t invent major
sixths, we didn’t invent major and minor sevenths, we didn’t invent the
violin, we cannot build the forty-thousand dollar Steinway, we cannot print
the money to pay the Kronos and the Aki Takahashi to play in the festival.
[laughs] So there are many things that are already preinvented. All we have
to do is to drive the car. However, many people feel that in art you don’t
have to know how to drive. I have students that defend the worst… I don’t
know what “Scheiss” is in Dutch…
HR: Well they’d understand!
MF: They’ll understand “Scheiss”! [laughs] And they feel they don’t have to
know anything. So I went into my classroom the other day and I looked at
them, I said, “God forbid, if any of you get very sick, and you need an
operation, I have the right person for you. They never studied medicine, but
they love to cut up people, and they love the sight of blood, so let me
recommend this person. They’re very sincere. They believe that medicine
should be free expression, and they feel that they should be able to do it
any way they want.” I asked one student, “What do you think it is all about
in the university?” He said, “I insist on my academic freedom.” I said, “Don’t
you know that in a university academic freedom is the freedom to be
academic?”
MF: It’s a discovered length. I’m not in the middle of Amsterdam where real
estate is very expensive. I have all the time in the world. Again, I feel that
music is not a house. It’s not gonna cave in, I’m not renting space. I wanna
discover my form. I feel that every piece I write I have to rediscover its
form, its scale. I’m not into form, form is… We know form already, we know
the division of things into parts. Form is easy. I’m into many things, scale,
what I would feel its natural proportion. I’m into new aspects of memory.
One of my problems with a lot of forms is that I feel that musical forms
were really memory forms, and I feel that the longer the piece is the more
you remember things in the piece. In fact the memory works better, you
could reflect, you could think about things you heard. Maybe they’re more
like novels now.
HR: Because of the length of the novels?
MF: Because where one moves out the experience, rather than just like
poetry where it’s the quintessence of experience. I’m a big Proust lover. A
friend of mine once said... I remember once, like any other nervous young
person when I was eighteen of nineteen, I picked up Proust and I put it
down. And I said “I just can’t read Proust.” And my friend said, “You don’t
read Proust, you sip it, like wine.” It’s not beer, it’s wine! I was giving my
seminar a week ago. Half of it was on Beethoven’s hundred and one, piano
sonata. And it was edited by Hans von Bülow, and he writes something in
the footnotes, in the programme notes, he says, “You don’t play this sonata,
you sing it,” you see. Well, maybe there’s something about… I always felt
that the old music, or the reason that Boulez is successful, especially
Boulez, is that they are hearing for you. They say, “Sit back and relax, you
don’t have to hear any more. I’m doing all the hearing for you. I’m doing all
the thinking for you. You don’t have to do anything but pay 25 dollars for a
seat.” Now, with that particular type of orientation you’re not going to a
concert to hear a piece of mine, and pay 25 dollars and have to hear it! I
mean, you’re not used to it. You’re paying 25 dollars, it would be, you know
what it would be? As if you pay 25 dollars to go to a tennis game and they’ll
ask you to play the game! “ [laughter] “I didn’t come here to play tennis, I
came here to watch tennis!” It’s the same thing really.
HR: That’s the way the audience reacts.
MF: That’s the way the audience reacts. I don’t wanna listen to you, it’s too
exhausting. I didn’t pay to exhaust myself.
HR: And you said listening to a Beethoven sonata the audience must have
the same experience as listening to your music?
MF: Late Beethoven is so crazy. One hundred and one is the work of a
madman. John Cage has never written anything as crazy as 101. [sings
fugue subject from last movement] And then he goes into something happy,
and then he goes into something... [sings] That’s not a fugue subject! [sings]
It’s a crazy dance! It’s like you’re walking the street and you see some man
just dancing for no reason, without any function, without any purpose. And
it moves from one mood to another like a manic depressive. If we had a
relative that acted like that, we’d call the fire department! [laughter] And
they’re tapping their feet. [sings] They’re nodding their head back and
forth...
MF: Maybe my music is for records or for in archives. I don’t think my

music is ever gonna have any success. I think my music might have a
success like Satie. A few little pieces here and now for aficionados, if they’re
not all killed off by AIDS, these aficionados that love Satie… I don’t think I
have a future.
HR: But that’s very pessimistic, what you’re saying now. When I say in the
whole musical world wherever you go, well in the Western world, in
Germany, Holland, Morton Feldman is a name.
MF: Yes, but like perfume, like Arpège. What is Morton Feldman? He’s quiet.
And now he’s quiet and long! [laughter] Before he used to be quiet and
short, now he’s quiet and long. Like Arpège, Chanel No 4, 5, 6, 7. But Boulez
is only one thing you know, but they don’t feel it. Boulez is fast. It’s like the
motor races, very French music, they love those motor races, those films
with motor races. His music is fast, there’s not that much else in his music.
Forget about construction, forget about putting notes together, forget about
instruments, that’s given. I’m talking about that special voice, that
authenticity that it’s Boulez that he brings. It’s because he can handle speed
like nobody else. He’s a fast race driver, he’s a top race driver, the best,
that’s it. I hope he writes one piece. Pierre, I now wanna say this to you
personally if by accident you might hear this some day: just write ten
minutes for me, I deserve it. Just ten minutes. And what I’m talking about is
not the opening of Éclat. He was telling somebody in an interview that Éclat
was influenced by my music, in the sense that where things would come
from nowhere and go nowhere, that whole idea, which he feels my music is,
that is comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. Oh I’m just too old, I’m too
old for polemics.
HR: You feel that?
MF: Oh yes, yes! I’m just too old for polemics. Because then I would be
doing everything they did. I’ll be seeing things stylistically, that it’s about
old styles. That’s what polemics is, it’s about old styles. So I’d be on the side
of culture. Everything is style. There is that marvellous remark of Charles
Péguy, he’s a marvellous poet, communist, at the turn of the century in
France, and he said this about Christianity: “Everything begins as a
mystique and ends in politics.” So what’s the use of me talking about the
ethical or the moral or the thoughtful aspect of art divorced from culture?
People would say, “Well, can’t you make a good car and have it safe too?”
That’s the excuse one would give about society, like, “Can’t you marry a rich
girl instead of a poor one?” I mean, all those rationalisations, society is very
smart. They’re pragmatic, they’ve had a lot of experience, thousands of
years, they know what questions to ask and they know what answers to
give. And when they say, “Well, can’t you make a good car that’s both cheap
and safe, and you can really listen to it and it’s interesting, say like Luciano
Berio, or it could be far out and entertain you like Mauricio Kagel? Why do
you have to be different? Don’t you understand we can’t afford a Rolls
Royce and we don’t have the time. Maybe in Middelburg, but in
Amsterdam? We can’t sit for four hours, we have to go for dinner! We have
to go for dinner, there’s a new restaurant that just opened up, right around
the corner from the New Amsterdam Hotel, marvellous place, but you need
reservations.” That’s the new phenomenon now, not art, in New York,
restaurants. That’s the new art form: restaurants. I’m going to Berlin in a
few weeks, I can’t wait. There’s a whole bunch of new restaurants in there
that are fantastic. And New York is restaurants, that’s the new art form.
They don’t go to concerts, they don’t go to the theatre, they don’t go
anywhere. All the people that go to concerts will go to BAM [Brooklyn
Academy of Music]. They’re coming in from Rochester, Cleveland,
Philadelphia, the suburbs, but the real New Yorkers don’t go there. The
only ones that go there are those that wanna be performed there. So there
are thousands, perhaps millions, from all over the world that wanna be
performed at BAM. So the audience is those that wanna be performed
there. Last night with van Rossem we went out for a drink, and I said, “Let’s
go to the Beverly Hills Hotel.” It’s very expensive, very nice atmosphere,
very crowded. Why is it crowded? Everybody wants to get into the movies,
so they all go there, that maybe someone would see them, you see. And
that’s the new audience in New Music America in Los Angeles. Three
quarters of the people that are in the audience coming up from provincial
universities up in Oregon, coming in from the deserts, near Albequerque,
that’s the audience. The audience is those that some day they might
participate. I understand from Carl Stone that there were hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applications for pieces to be done
here. I don’t like it for other reasons. I don’t like what happened to art in
America for other reasons. If everybody in America that did not get a
bachelors degree from a university, Steve Reich and Phil Glass will have no
audience. Especially now that you’ve come into America a lot and you see
this vast country, hundreds of thousands of universities. Everybody is
educated. Anthony Caro, you know, the important British minimal sculptor,
was at this girls school, Bennington. I don’t mean it’s just a girls school, but
it was Bennington, And he was coming and they went and one day they
made imitation Anthony Caros to put – it’s a beautiful campus – as he went
up the street, up the hill around in this beautiful environment, he saw
things that looked like Anthony Caros. They made them overnight. These
abstract sculptures they made overnight. He got very upset.
[interview broken off by lunch]
Morton Feldman: Remarks after a performance of String Quartet No. 1
Transcribed by Sebastian Claren and Chris Villars
On February 26th 1981, the Kronos Quartet played Morton Feldman’s first String Quartet at
the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival . After the performance, Feldman made the
following remarks to the audience.
Thank you very much. Would you like to hear it again? [Laughter] Actually there’s
a marvelous story: When I was a student with Stefan Wolpe he wrote a piece,
and it was a long piece for 1952, about 35, 40 minutes. And René Leibowitz came
to town. And Irma Wolpe was playing the piece. And she played the piece. And I
don’t think Leibowitz liked it. And he didn’t want to say anything negative, and
he said, “Well Stefan, I’d like to hear it again sometime.” And I heard
Stefan’s voice saying, “Irma, noch einmal[once again]!” [Laughter] Thank
you very much. One minute, there’ll be some other pieces. There seems to be
a nee d t o ma ke s peech es i n t h is par t ic ula r i ns t i t utio n! I wa nna s a y a f e w
words. Of course I want to thank the quartet beyond... [Long, enthusiastic ovation
for the Kronos Quartet]. It goes without saying I’m sorry I didn’t bring ’em in...
But for all the young composers here: You’re dead! We’re just something on
paper, you know. And I just plead with you to be a little more calmer and… It’s in the
air, be born again! [Laughter] To acoustical instruments! [Laughter] OK.
Morton Feldman: Interview with Charles Shere (1967)
The interview below took place in July 1967 at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley,
California. Writer, composer and journalist, Charles Shere, was music director at the station
at that time. The transcript by Chris Villars is from the original audio recording, available on
the Other Minds radiOM website: http://radiom.org/detail.php?omid=C.1967.07.01. The
transcript is published here for the first time by kind permission of Charles Shere and Other
Minds.
Charles Shere: Morton Feldman, it’s a real pleasure to have you in California, and I hope
that you find it a pleasure too. And it’s a pleasure to talk to you because you’ve been a
composer who has been... Well, you’ve always made life more hopeful for me than other
composers, and largely because of something that I think John Cage wrote in Silence. He said
that when he first met you, you brought him a piece, and he said, “This is beautiful. How did
you make it?” And you said that you didn’t know, and he said, “How marvellous, he doesn’t
remember how he made it and it’s so beautiful!” Did this really happen?
Morton Feldman: Yes, it did.
CS: What piece was that?
MF: It doesn’t exist, I threw it out! [Laughter]
CS: You threw it away! Do you remember why?
MF: I don’t know... it sounded... it was like the opening of the Berg Violin Concerto.
[Laughs]
CS: Oh, well then I can understand how you might not have known how you made it! I
assumed that you were talking about something like one of the Projections.
MF: No, the whole piece in a sense was... It wasn’t Feldman. No, I mean it was an early
piece, and I wasn’t happy with it.
CS: How old were you then?
MF: I wrote the piece when I was about 22, 21.
CS: So would you say that you got off to sort of a late start, composing?
MF: I matured at 24.
CS: At 24... on Tuesday! [Laughter]
MF: I was a late starter.
CS: A lot’s been said, and principally by Cage, about the Cage-Feldman-Wolff, and Brown I
guess...
MF: Yes, definitely.
www.cnvill.net/mfshere.pdf 1
CS: ...School in New York. And some people who talk about this think of it as a Cage School
with sycophants. And other people who talk about it think of it as a well worked out... sort of,
what?... quadrivirate? ... of four, you know, really individuals, who are working at sort of
separate problems in a more or less shared manner... with shared attitudes, let’s say.
MF: Well, what would Jackson Pollock and Rothko have in common?
CS: Well, this I suppose is really the question, you know. What, for example, do Cage and
Wolff have in common?
MF: Yes.
CS: And even, what does Wolff and Wolff have in common, because, you know, one Wolff
score will be considerably different from another. And yet when you listen to them, you can
certainly identify Christian Wolff’s music.
MF: Yes. Well, I think that the big impetus, the Karl Marx of our inspiration, was sound.
CS: And his prophet? [Feldman laughs] Did he have one?
MF: And we took it from there. OK, this is the name of an Earle Brown piece - From Here.
CS: You say “sound”, but silence must have been included too.
MF: All sound was just a question of how we breathe as individuals. All silence was taken
for granted.
CS: I don’t know Earle Brown’s music very well, and I know Christian Wolff’s music not
much better, but it strikes me that Cage’s music tends to be either absorbed in what it’s doing,
or else quite nervous. That Wolff’s music seems to be more or less reflective and, to a certain
extent intellectual, while your music seems to me to be really breathing, more than anything
else. Does this seem an adequate description?
MF: I think that’s very fine. In fact, speaking of Christian Wolff’s music as being
intellectual, let’s say he... it’s intellectual in so far as that it’s not hidden. And, in this sense, I
always think of Christian as being the Webern of the future.
CS: A lot of his music is something like refined Cartridge Music. Refined to the point that
the instructions are very clear, and sometimes almost elegant. His music, in other words, is
more staged than performed, but not staged anywhere near in the same sense that Cage’s
music is.
MF: Yes.
CS: Whereas your music isn’t, it seem to me, staged at all. It’s really more concerned with
sound than it is with procedure.
MF: Yes, I feel that I’m the closest to Karl Marx! [Laughter] Not that they’re revisionists!
[More laughter]
CS: I have sort of been thinking in the direction that the difference that I guess 1948 or 49
has made, when the new School was made, or whatever you want to call the events, was that,
before then, classical music was concerned with a sort of germinal construction, taking
something and building something out of it. Building maybe an elaborate construct sort of
thing out of it. Whereas afterward, and now, people seem to be more concerned with passing
time.
MF: Yes.
CS: In other words...
MF: I was talking about this just last night with a friend. And he was asking me the
difference, in the painting and in the music. And I said that you could actually catch the
change of the era where, with the new stuff, there became less anxiety about time. It’s so. So
I think, where someone like Stockhausen has great anxiety about what he does with this time,
a kind of historical anxiety. You see, Cage doesn’t have anxiety.
CS: Is it fair to generalise and say that, to a great extent, this is the difference between an
Eastern and a Western way of thinking about things in general? I mean, sooner or later, the
question of Zen is going to come up.
MF: What do you mean “Eastern”... New York?
CS: No, no, no.
MF: Or Tokyo?
CS: Yeah. [Laughter]
MF: No, I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I think it’s a question, for example, I know in
painting things changed when the painter no longer went, well, he could take his brush off the
canvas.
CS: Actually, this is as Western and European an idea as Mallarmé is, and as Marcel
Duchamp is.
MF: I think so. I don’t think it has anything to do with Zen...
CS: Yeah.
MF: ... whatsoever. But I think this anxiety about time and the need to... You know that great
W. C. Fields remark, “Let’s get the”... What was it? “Let’s get the cow by the tail and face
the situation”?1
CS: Yeah. [Laughter]
MF: I always thought of tradition as getting the cow by the tail. Anyway, for me that’s a very
significant difference.
CS: Well, it seems to me that it implies a different attitude toward justifying what you’re
doing. It seems to me that as long as a painter is terribly concerned about staying on the
1
W.C. Fields: “There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the
situation.”
canvas, and within the edges, and as long as a composer is terribly concerned about justifying
what he’s doing...
MF: His continuity.
CS: Yeah. ...in terms of sort of a teleological attitude...
MF: Exactly.
CS: ...of working from something to something, that this taken at its extreme can almost be a
psychosis.
MF: I feel it was tending toward that.
CS: Yeah, and I think possibly Schoenberg was, you know, the, hopefully the logical end, of
this tendency. Because even when he decided he was going to get out of the, you know, out
of tonality, he did it in the same procedure.
MF: And remember that he was very happy. And he said that, oh he was happy because he
was extending Germanic musical tradition for another hundred years, unquote.
CS: Right. Yeah, and staying with the same forms, the same rhythms, and all of this business.
I wonder how he really felt about Webern. I wonder how he really felt about, you know, the
last... about the Cantatas and the Variations for Orchestra, and things of that sort. It must
have been difficult for him. And this doesn’t put certain American academic, international-
style composers in a very hopeful situation, does it?
MF: If I just could skip back, and get back to what you just said, what he might have thought
about Webern. I think that the European mind, say for example what Messiaen told to
Xenakis, he said you could do anything as long as you could justify it logically, you see. And
I think being that Webern did justify what he did so logically gave Schoenberg a sense of
relief.
CS: Of course Webern is a very ambiguous figure because you can look at his music in a
completely sectarian way if you want to, although I can’t imagine wanting to. On the one
hand it’s terribly involved, and terribly logical and precise, but all you have to do is just sort
of turn that function of your mind off and Webern can be completely ad libitum.
MF: Well, that was the whole situation in the early 50s. Don’t forget that the whole Cage
‘orphan asylum’ went through - meaning Christian Wolff and myself, you know - went
through the Webern experience, as well as a Milton Babbitt, or a Boulez, or a Stockhausen.
CS: What’s the difference then?
MF: You know, as you were saying before, we turned it upside down. We saw something
else.
CS: Well now, there’s somebody in the audience at this point who always says, well, you
know, obviously you did, and obviously the reason for that is that it makes life much easier
for you. You don’t have to think so much.
MF: We thought more.
CS: You can observe the imperfections in the paper instead of taking your inspiration from,
oh, you know, I don’t know...
MF: The imperfections of other masterpieces! [Laughter]
CS: Right. Precisely. In other words, it all comes down to imperfections. And whether these
are to be considered in a moral light, or in simply, you know, the cold light of the observing
eye. With no moral imputation at all.
MF: You know, it’s very interesting, why was the moral role always such a conceptual one?
CS: Well, I suppose because it’s the only road that we know.
MF: But perception was left to the dilettante.
CS: That’s true, isn’t it? And then there are always some of these great figures in the past
who were both a dilettante who could perceive, and also intellectual or clever enough to come
up with some kind of generalised results. And I’m thinking of people like Laurence Sterne,
and, you know, maybe Shakespeare, and well, maybe Mozart even - late Mozart - who
somehow in almost a childlike, naive fashion - Shakespeare excepted - could travel both of
these roads. Could see the stones for what they were, and could also see the people, who were
stumbling over them [Laughs], for what they were. And nevertheless able to do their work.
But this gets off into a little philosophical business that probably won’t go much of any place.
But, you know, what do you do with the people who say, like Robert Frost, that they’re not
interested in playing tennis with the net down?
MF: You mean his reference to free verse?
CS: Free verse, yeah.
MF: I’ve never really thought of any kind of final solution for these problems. I mean, I
don’t think about it, actually.
CS: And you don’t play chess with them, you just let them watch?
MF: It was always those fellas, in a sense, throughout history that were the ones that began to
consolidate, and add, and take what they need, you know, from history. I always thought it
was very charming when T. S. Eliot says, you use or take from history what you need. I once
said to a friend, “Well, why do they need so much?” [Laughter]
CS: Particularly, T. S. Eliot!
MF: You know, kind of remark as if here on this really independent figure...
CS: Are you speaking against eclecticism?
MF: No. I’m saying how they don’t wanna play with the net down, but, little by little, they
found ways of playing the net-down game with the net up.
CS: Written out chance music.
MF: Exactly! You said it, not me! [Laughter]
CS: Which reminds me that while I was trying to figure out some way of dealing with the
problem of Pierre Boulez [Laughs], I was reading back issues of Perspectives of New Music.
And somebody had an article on... I guess it was on your recording of your music on Time
Records, Durations. No, it was a Columbia album. It was, Projections. And so what they did
was simply write out the performances that they heard, and then discuss them. Of course, this
is all very well if they want to analyse a performance, but it doesn’t really have all that much
to do with the composition. Do you agree with Cage when he says, composition’s one thing,
performance another, and hearing a third; what do the three have to do with one another?
MF: No, I don’t. I find my composition one thing.
CS: Including the other two aspects?
MF: Yes.
CS: Well, let’s see, we...
MF: That’s why I’m less oriented to the concert hall than John is. In fact, if anything...
CS: He’s a performer.
MF: Yes.
CS: And you’re a composer then, you say?
MF: Which one is a dirty word?
CS: Oh, I like them both! [Laughter]
MF: Then I’m a composer! [More laughter]
CS: I find it easier to understand composers because performers... Well, let’s not go into that.
MF: Yes, but this is another age of the great composer/performers. I would say that there is a
kind of marvellous, brilliant balance between the both, as, for example, in Stockhausen’s
music.
CS: Momente is sort of the point at which composition and performance, and even the
audience’s function...
MF: Exactly.
CS: ... really come together.
MF: And when Boulez conducts his own music now, there is that aspect.
CS: Or even, sometimes, other people’s music. I even heard a performance of Zeitmasse that
was beautiful. And when that piece can be made beautiful, you’ve got somebody who’s, you
know, composing it and conducting it at the same time.
MF: And then, the more flashier, Hollywood-ish types of talents like Luciano Berio and
Lukas Foss. It’s all performance.
CS: That’s true,...
MF: Almost in the Cagean sense.
CS: ...although I do think that in the one case there’s more behind the performance than in
the other. I mean, it seems to me that Foss is much more performance oriented than...
MF: Berio.
CS: Yeah, than Berio.
MF: Yes.
CS: Well, it seems to me, by the way, that some of these attitudes, speaking particularly
about Boulez and Stockhausen, who, over the years, have come to be more and more
identified with performance, as well as with composition. It seems to me that, and this may
be a coincidence, that their composition has changed considerably. Boulez gave up the total
serialisation, and so did Stockhausen.
MF: Yes, they got involved with the realities of performance.
CS: Yeah.
MF: But, you see, I didn’t. So maybe I’ll arrive at total serialisation, eventually.
CS: Do you think it unlikely? Do you think it as unlikely as I do?
MF: I don’t mean it as a joke.
CS: Really? This would be just about the first case of anybody... Well, no, of course there’s
always Stravinsky! [Laughs] But that was earlier. This would be just about the first case of
anybody reversing that particular road. Most of the people I’ve talked to seem to think that
total serialisation was a historical necessity at one point, but is no longer viable.
MF: It’s a very interesting thing, you know, this whole business of historical necessity comes
around only because there’s very little alternative.
CS: So that you can say that Mount Everest is a historical necessity!
MF: Exactly, there’s very little alternative. But to me, once you walk up Mount Everest, or
once you go to an indeterminate music, with all the new alternatives, what’s wrong with the
total serialisation of these alternatives?
CS: Well, then what’s wrong with writing a piece in E Major?
MF: That’s another story.
CS: Even a sonata-allegro in E Major. Why is that a different story?
MF: Because that’s really had it, I think.
CS: It was bled pretty white. And yet it seems to me that there were...
MF: I wouldn’t mind a piece in E Major, but they’re just not happy with just staying in that E
Major.
CS: Well, I meant more in the Mahler sense than the Schubert sense, you know. [Feldman
laughs] I don’t know that it was completely exhausted...
MF: Maybe everything, maybe everything is in E Major.
CS: Well, the reason I said E Major is because, lately, to me everything has sounded like E
Major! It’s true! [Laughs]
MF: I know in one of the pieces which you’re probably gonna play in connection with this
interview. A piece, a new piece for three pianos2. As I was writing the sounds they became so
thick, that as I went from one sound to another, it had the feeling of a five-one, five-one, five-
one, five-one. Regardless of what the sound was, I was making a gesture, a five-one, five-
one... everything seemed. I actually felt I was working the way I did when I was fourteen
years old.
CS: Well, this is a terrible problem, because it seems to me it stems from the fact that there is
a gesture, which in the past has been called the dominant-tonic gesture, the cadential gesture.
Consequently, we don’t call it, you know, we don’t call it that gesture any more - I’m waving
my hands. You can’t see but I’m waving my hands. Instead we call it the five-one. Now, if
you make the gesture in 1967, it has the same function, it does the same sort of thing.
Somebody will say, ah that’s a five-one, when in fact it’s not a five-one at all. But since that’s
what they’ve been calling it for several hundred years, that’s the only thing they know to call
it by. And then they transfer its meaning...
MF: Yes.
CS: ...from the one context to the other.
MF: Yes, I mean if you would go from a very thick chord - for example, a cluster-type chord
- into a thinner chord, there is a gesture of five-one.
CS: Resolution.
MF: Of some kind.
CS: Well, there’s a question which I guess I’m sort of working toward all along which I can’t
really formulate very well. Another way of going at it is going to be to point out that your
music is sometimes criticised for being rather limited in scope, i.e. all those piano sounds, all
those pianissimo sounds. So that, I don’t know, to be flattering I suppose, as a composer
you’re like Emily Dickinson as a poet. In other words, a painter of a restricted colour. The
same criticism was levelled at Webern for a long time. And I think people are beginning to
stop doing that, finally, because they’re beginning to realise that, even though the brass
always has the mutes on, there’s still a lot of other differentiations going on.
2
Two Pieces for Three Pianos (1966).
MF: Well, you know the Nietzsche remark, “the lie of the big form”3... I think that’s a valid
criticism. I don’t know what they mean by limited palette. Actually, I never really knew what
they meant, when it becomes obvious, in a certain context of a certain type of work, that the
work exists on its own terms, you see.
CS: Well, you know...
MF: It’s trying to discuss something on terms that... You can’t discuss something, you know,
on your terms, you see. So, when they say about my work that it’s a limited palette, then
immediately they’re thinking about something else.
CS: Yes, but they’re not thinking of each work individually, they’re thinking of the
catalogue.
MF: I see.
CS: The composer of... You know, the small sound specialist. The composer without big
climaxes.
MF: The big climax was the first note of the piece.
CS: Ah yes, it’s funny that we finally have got back to this realisation that for a long time
people thought the climax was in the last movement. You know, late Romanticism, the last
movement’s the very important thing. And then, people began to realise that actually it was
the slow movement, the epicentre of the composition, is where the climax is. Which makes
analysis very easy. You simply measure from the end and from the beginning, and when you
get to the middle, that’s it. And now we’re finding out that the climax - you know, the
frightening gesture - is the first gesture. Once that’s done, anything can follow.
MF: Yes, once you enter into the work. You know, “Someone has been telling lies about
Josef K”4... Now anything can happen! [Laughter] So my first note is saying, someone has
been telling you lies about music! [Laughter]
CS: Well, except that it’s very difficult to defend a position that says that there are lies and
there aren’t truths, about music.
MF: I’m very moral, you see, in a sense. I’m more moral than my enemies. Because they
would listen, and they’ll be interested in ideas. I don’t listen, and I’m not interested in their
ideas. I’m cold.
CS: Well, morally speaking, that seems to me a much more satisfying attitude. Because it’s
not open... It’s not subject to hypocrisy! [Laughter] Anyway, the point remains. So it seems
to me that if a piece is concerned about doing something, and it does it, then that’s all you ask
of it. You know, you don’t ask of, well, let’s say Die Fledermaus, that it be Don Giovanni.
That’s foolish criticism. And there are very few critics left who are subject to this kind of
error, although they do ask of Sonatas and Interludes that they be the Hammerklavier. That
happens occasionally. And, it seems to me that each piece has to find, you know, its own bag,
and to operate within it. And then by extension, it seems logical to say that this is true of
3
Nietzsche: “the lie of the great style” – a criticism of Wagner, made in, The Case of Wagner , Section 1,
Paragraph 4 (Walter Kaufmann translation).
4
Opening line of Kafka’s novel, The Trial.
composers. But here the situation breaks down, because then what do you do with somebody
like Babbitt, who, it seems to me, has decided he’s going to do something, and has gone
ahead to do it, untiringly, but it just doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem to relate. Do you
think that there is some kind of necessity for music to relate? Is there a function?
MF: Well, in a sense, that’s why I feel much closer say to Milton Babbitt than I would to
Stockhausen. Because that element of relating is a very easy thing to get. All Milton has to do
is put in a vibraphone, instead of four very arid instruments. Let him put in a vibraphone to
relate.
CS: And suddenly, he would discover that he was Luigi Dallapiccola!
MF: Or something or other. And I think it’s his, it’s his marvellous, unyielding talent that
makes him a very interesting composer for me. Because I think these other things are just a
question to what degree the composer’s on the make in relation to his audience, in relation to
his reputation.
CS: Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way. And that certainly imputes not only an extra-
musical, but also, possibly an injurious attitude to the composer who is, as you say, on the
make. And it’s easy to think of composers who have been and who haven’t been. But...
MF: I don’t know. I mean, you kind of, you kind of know. Oh, I’ll tell you, historically, the
big on-the-make composers are the one’s that’s made it.
CS: J. S. Bach...
MF: Well, I think that’s finished. And I think that for a lot of people, after ten or fifteen
years, Milton Babbitt is gonna be considered the most important serial composer. Without
any extra-curricular cream puff element.
CS: Yes, but this brings us back to the question of sound, you know. And it brings us back to
the question of the three operations. You know, composition, performance, and... what?
Audition, hearing. And, when I say related, it seems to me that, what you call, you know, the
cream puff areas, extends to the attitudes that are aroused from the audience by the sounds. I
mean, your music, for example, it seems to me is very accessible . Very accessible. Anybody
can listen to and enjoy Feldman. Because it has, you know, it’s simply beautiful and
accessible music. Whereas Babbitt’s music is inaccessible to the layman, because he resists it,
in other words. And it’s not really a function of the music. It’s a function of the person who’s
listening - whether he’s going to resist it or not.
MF: No, I was being unusually - which is unusual for me - more specific. I was relating it to
serial music, Babbitt. The whole sense of serial music. The whole quality, feeling of serial
music, as being represented by Babbitt, and not the more luxurious, you know, opiate
Europeans.
CS: Who are abandoning the Babbitt position, which they...
MF: No, abandoning, abandoning their Webern purity.
CS: Well, how do you differentiate the Babbitt serialism from the Boulez of Structures Book
I serialism then? How do you differentiate them? What’s the difference between Babbitt’s
attitude toward total serialisation and the early Boulez’ attitude?
MF: Well, Structures I is much more... it’s not as subtle as early Babbitt. It’s a kind of
rudimentary follow the, you know, right down thing.
CS: Yeah.
MF: And, colouristically it’s more glamorous, just by its instrumentation, with the two
pianos.
CS: That’s what I was thinking of, among other things. There is still a concern with - even
using an as much pre-composed schema as possible - there is still a concern with coming out
with a late Beethoven sonata. With coming out with, you know, an overpowering effect.
Which may be based on the succession of movements, or on maybe the colours of the
instrumentation. However it’s based, there...
MF: Yes, there is a very literal element in relation to the technique in those early Boulez
things. Boulez, you know, in those early days, got a lot of impetus from poetry. The early
sonatas were very much involved with Artaud. Then he went on to René Char. Then
Mallarmé.
CS: Hmm, I wonder where he goes next?
MF: Well, being a European, Europeans are very literary. That’s European art. European art
is literary.
CS: And ours?
MF: It’s not. I mean, we really were really involved in finding some kind of hidden dialectic
in the causality of what happens to sound.
CS: Well now, it seems to me that the differences between the New York School and the
European tradition - already I’m making a big difference! - is that the European is concerned
with... Alright, a literary germinal idea, or the tradition of the music that’s been composed,
you know, in the past, or systems of aesthetics. Whereas the New York School seem to be
less concerned with ingredients of this sort than with process, than with interplay. And I
mean this both on the social and on the artistic level.
MF: Yes, I... You see, the reason my music is limited is because I don’t believe in Hegel.
CS: Oh, thank God! [Laughter]
MF: So I’m not looking for another element, on which to make my synthesis.
CS: Well, what does this do to continuation within a piece? You know, how do you get from
the beginning, you know, to the end?
MF: If you don’t believe in Hegel, how do you write a composition?
CS: Right, yeah.
MF: You know, because the whole business if you believe in Hegel, like the Soviet Union
believed in Hegel when they signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. They thought
they were going to swallow them up, being as they believed in Hegel. But then they realised
that they might be swallowed up!
CS: Since Germany believes in Hegel.
MF: Since Germany believes in Hegel. It’s the same thing when you set up with this
multitudinous idea of how you’re gonna utilise all these things, you know, and eat ‘em up in
a gargantuan way in writing a very impressive composition. But if you don’t believe in that,
then all this other stuff becomes indeed very superficial.
CS: And so, when you’re sitting down at your drafting table, or wherever you write your
music, what do you do with the paper? You don’t start at the beginning and work through in
some Hegelian fashion to an end?
MF: What is process? Process is how to get the hell out of it! That’s process.
CS: Oh, of course, the easiest way is simply not to begin. So, is there a little bit of Hegel left
in everybody who begins?
MF: Yes.
CS: And a difficulty, it seems to me, in choosing not to believe in Hegel, is simply the
difficulty in getting on with those who still insist on it.
MF: Exactly. If people want my work to be more impressive, they want me to believe in
Hegel. That’s what it amounts to.
CS: Yeah. [Laughter] And this of course comes into every relationship with a conductor, or
with a critic, and with nine tenths of the audience.
MF: I mean, the most beautiful example - myself at this particular time is not a good
example! [Laughs] - but I think the most beautiful example is someone like Mondrian, in
relationship to Picasso.
CS: Well, except that Mondrian is almost in a Webern position of being very ambiguous. It
would be easy for me to believe that he had a very Hegelian attitude toward filling up his
canvas. There’s such carefully - or, it seems, carefully - worked out balance, construction...
MF: It’s not worked out, it’s felt out.
CS: Oh, then it comes down to a question of intuitive, as opposed to knowledgeable

Hegelianism.
MF: Well, the great bit about say someone like Picasso, and then we could tie it up with
Schoenberg, because if we think, say for example, it’s Cubism related. In other words, with
what ingenuity can you dissect the rectangle, you see, in relation to with what ingenuity can
you dissect the scale, or the row set, you see. Then, where does someone like Mondrian come
into the picture? Where the ingenuity is an intuitive process.
CS: Well now, where you are discounting a Hegelian behaviour... Alright, I’m getting back
to the question of what are you doing at the drafting table. It’s easy for me to understand how
you compose a piece of music, but it’s less easy for me to understand how you compose
either a long piece of music, or a second piece of music. For example, does a long piece
require some kind of formal or structural consideration?
MF: No.
CS: It simply requires that more time pass.
MF: No, I think it requires a sense of scale.
CS: A balance.
MF: No, just the scale, which could be a very intuitive thing. I mean, there’s one thing of
saying, “I’m gonna work on a ten by ten canvas.” And another thing, “And I’m trying to fill it
up.” And another thing, finding that it’s becoming a ten by ten canvas.
CS: Because something was too big in the first place for its original size.
MF: Yes.
CS: And this happens then also in music.
MF: In other words, I don’t say, I’m going to write... I never say to myself, I’m going to
write an orchestral piece. I never say to myself that I’m going to write a piece. But I’m
shrewd enough always to start with twenty line paper, you see. [Laughter] So I can catch
anything in the net, that’s happening. And then, little by little, you know, we’re not that
brilliant, we always wanna try things together, we always wanna make a package. Soon as
you finally settle on an instrumentation, you have a more realistic structure.
CS: Then comes a moment when you realise you absolutely must have an alto flute, in
addition to the instrumentation that you’d already decided upon.
MF: Yes. Then you really begin to hear things.
CS: As soon as you roll out a possibility.
MF: So, my assumption is - and it has always been my assumption - is that this need for
organisational principle is an intuitive one. Which is so strong to begin with, why burden it
with the other. I don’t think we have the talent to be, and I don’t even think that it’s advisable
that it should be such. I don’t think we have the talent to sit down and say, I’m gonna write a
piece that throughout eternity will never have a sense of organisation. Because just the
materials that I begin to use will tie it up in the mind, and in the ear.
CS: Or just the fact that you and only you worked on that.
MF: Exactly. Is the omnipotent organisational process behind the tree, you see.
CS: A couple of year ago, maybe one year ago, Christian Wolff came out here, and did a
concert together with Robert Moran. And, on the programme was a composition called The
Possibility of a New Composition for Electric Guitar by Morton Feldman. And I was very
much charmed by the music, and I said - you know, we recorded the concert - and I said to
him, “I’m really happy that the performance went so well because it’s a nice piece, and we
have a tape of it”. And Wolff said, “Well, I don’t think that Feldman’s finished with the
piece. I think that, you know, there are going to be some changes in it, so you’d better not do
anything about it until we find out”. And we’ve never found out. Have you ever found out?
MF: No, I never found out.
CS: Maybe it would help if you could give it a take! [Laughter]
MF: Christian came to me, and he asked for this piece, and... No, first Christian called me -
he was in Cambridge, I was in New York. You know, he’s a Professor of Classics at Harvard.
CS: That’s right. Yeah, I remember...
MF: That’s how he started the economic bit.
CS: People are getting out of trying to make a living out of music. They do it some other
way.
MF: I’m trying to make a living out of music. As I told you, I’m now going to...
CS: You’re turning into the enfant terrible of this whole...
MF: I wanna make a living out of music.
CS: You’re thinking of total serialisation!
MF: I think of total serialisation! [Laughter] Total serialisation without a grid.
CS: Ah, well, that’s a different matter altogether.
MF: Who was it that could draw a circle, a perfect circle, freehand? Who was it? Was it
Giotto?
CS: I can’t imagine it.
MF: Yes. Who was it? I’ll find out, and...
CS: It was probably somebody who lived in the days before they had compasses.
MF: Well, that’s my dream. In other words, I wanna do total serialisation freehand.
CS: You mean, to compose a piece of music which only upon analysis somebody would
prove to you that it was totally serialised?
MF: That’s right. I’m only half joking, you understand.
CS: Well, this is not so terribly surprising to anyone who’s familiar with your Durations, and
your Projections, which are chance pieces. Now, this is very interesting, because Boulez has
been quoted as saying, it’s not how something sounds that’s important, but how it’s made.
And, you’ve been quoted as arguing greatly with this.
MF: Yes.
CS: In other words, you want how it’s made to be kept a private matter?
MF: Yes. Totally.
CS: And how it sounds should be as public as possible, of course.
MF: Only [that].
CS: Well, then is this a part of the hang-up with The Possibility of a New Composition for
Electric Guitar?
MF: Oh, no! Getting back to that story... No, it’s just a little in thing. The title of the piece
just came from a letter that I wrote back to Christian, telling him that, well, there’s a
possibility of a new piece for electric guitar.
CS: Well, there actually was a new piece for electric guitar, as it turned out.
MF: Well, it wasn’t...
CS: It was heard by a good many people. Was it written?
MF: Yes, it was written, but he’s the only one who has the score. I didn’t give it to my
publisher, and I don’t even have a copy. There’s still a possibility that I might write a piece
some day for electric guitar! 5 [Laughs]
CS: It’s a very fine instrument.
MF: I’m getting to like it more and more.
CS: I think it’s the vibraphone of the future. Well, that was going to be the next question...
MF: You know, that’s always very interesting about music, it... I think that throughout
history its only gonna have a great past. Never a future.
CS: Well, it doesn’t even always have a present. At least, these days, it seems to have a
present of some sort.
MF: Because, you know, like a kid I remember on the New York subways, it was always
great to stand at the end of the train and watch the getting in the station at the last moment, by
looking backwards.
CS: Yeah.
MF: And to me that’s what music is. There’s something about music that is not visionary. As
much as people might talk about the music of the future, there’s just something about music
that only seems to come out of looking backward.
CS: So, it’ll always be simply a collection of historical necessities.
5
Soon after this interview, the only copy of the score of Feldman’s electric guitar piece was lost when Christian
Wolff’s guitar case - with the score in it - was stolen from his car. Just over forty years later, in 2008, the
guitarist, Seth Josel, used the KPFA recording Charles Shere talks about in this interview to reconstruct
Feldman’s score. This was subsequently published: Morton Feldman, The Possibility of a New Work for Electric
Guitar, Edition Peters (EP68492, 2014).
MF: Exactly.
CS: Well, you know, composers, young composers these days are in a terrible situation
because - and I know this is said all the time, but it really seems truer now than at any point in
the past - pretty much everything’s been done. The boundaries have been found. Not erected,
but really sort of discovered. I mean, the minute you’ve got 4’33”, that takes care of one
boundary, certainly.
MF: Uh-huh.
CS: And so, now, there seems to be only a possibility of - at least when it comes to styles - an
eclecticism.
MF: But it was always like that. I mean, Stravinsky paved the way, between joining his
neoclassic mode with twelve-tone elements. The eclecticism of various serial composers
incorporating chance. Consolidation, that’s music.
CS: Well, that’s what composition means...
MF: Yes. You see, my - it’s not my hang-up - my secret is that, at very early life, I became
very friendly with a group of painters, who were terrific painters. I was caught between two
disciplines. And when I would think about music I would say, why is it you get involved in
process, and the musician is always an academician? And why is it that the painter gets
involved in process and he becomes a Cezanne?
CS: When you’re talking about process here, you’re talking about compositional
procedures...
MF: Yes.
CS: ... not about process in the Cage-Tudor sense of the word, where the process is the
composition. You’re talking about the process as distinct from composition.
MF: Yes.
CS: It seems to me a differentiation that it’s really necessary to maintain.
MF: Yes.
CS: In other words, what you’re concerned with then, I would guess, is that the composer
simply allow his music to exist, and to examine itself and its surroundings...
MF: Yes.
CS: ... halfway objectively, and detachedly, but without a sort of analytical preoccupation in
mind. In other words, maintain a procedure which is un-Hegelian. It seems to come back to
that.
MF: Yes.
CS: Un-teleological. The idea of a piece of music in which one can wander. Certain places in
Mahler. Most places in Webern. I think all of your music. All of Cage’s music. Most of
Wolff’s music. This is what you wind up with, this sort of garden of sounds.
MF: Yes.
CS: With no path, no paved path, which it’s necessary to follow.
MF: I wouldn’t say that, at least for myself. I would still say that my mind, my instinct, is a
path.
CS: But, as far as I’m concerned, when I hear the piece, I don’t know that path. You want to
keep the way it’s done private, and leave only the sound public.
MF: Yes.
CS: Isn’t this the reason that you want that? Isn’t this the effect that that produces, namely
that I am left free to wander without, you know, having the thread to hold on.
MF: Yes, because the thread is that which creates a veil between you and the sound. You see,
if I’m anti-process as you defined it, it’s only because... Again on my own terms, being that
I’m totally involved in the sound, I don’t want anything to interfere with my intention. At the
same time, how can I present my work without an intention?
CS: Well, it seems to me that this is a re-statement of a remark that you made earlier, that
there is no future, and that the whole thing will be a collection of backward vistas. Not only
in the large picture of music as a whole, as a tradition, but in the small picture of a composer
at work on each composition, or an audience at work on each performance.
MF: Yes.
CS: And even of the connection possibly between the composer and the performer, which is
another matter.
MF: Yes. Also, I don’t think about art as a kind of living thing. I think about art, really, as a
dead thing, that you look back at.
CS: Rather than as a live process in which you become involved.
MF: Yes, I mean, what’s the point? It’s a very interesting thing... I mean, to talk about
performances that you’ve heard, and then you hear what happens to it after fifteen or twenty
years. Or to walk into an old Franz Kline show in 1950, and then just see individual Klines in
various museums, you know. That initial experience drops dead. Nothing keeps it alive.
CS: Except that it becomes another piece of art.
MF: Yes. In that sense, the Cagean idea. But it’s not a kind of simultaneous division. That
division takes place in big time gaps, the difference between the work and the performers.
Anyways...
CS: Well, we seem to have come full circle, and I can’t really think of any reason to add...
But you maintain a complete sense of detachment?
MF: Well...
CS: I mean, to art, to works of art.
MF: Yes. Well, getting back to what interests me about Milton Babbitt, in a sense, is that I do
admire things that are only what they are. And, in that sense, I do admire him. Just as I would
admire Racine, with all its rhetoric, because it’s obviously...
CS: That’s a part of it.
MF: It is what it is, you see.
CS: Yes. Well then it’s very difficult not to admire anything.
MF: No, it is... Well, you know, it’s like camp, when Susan Sontag would talk about, say De
Gaulle’s speech, as being camp. Only, you have to be very shrewd in your assessment, what
type of rhetoric is aesthetic. [Laughs]
CS: This is a subject for another discussion some day, because now we’re getting into... well,
something that could be called, instructions to a young critic, or to a young historian.
MF: Oh I mean, you listen to a piece, and you say, “Oh gee that’s overblown stuff!”
CS: Yes.
MF: You listen to another piece that’s overblown, you don’t say it’s overblown stuff. What’s
the difference?
CS: Simply what you bring to your decision.
MF: You’re looking at a kind of minimal art, and you say, well this is certainly minimal art.
Then you look at another minimal art, and you say, well this certainly has an aura about it.
What’s the difference?
CS: Well, do you think that it will ever be defined? I’ve never heard it defined.
MF: Well, it’s what separates the boys from boy scouts!
Morton Feldman: Interview with Howard Skempton (1977)
Howard Skempton writes: This is the interview I did before writing “Beckett as Librettist”. In
my appointments diary for that year, I have “Interview with Feldman 3.00” on 13 January.
The location was Bill Colleran’s flat (5 Mansfield Street, London W1). I had a small cassette
tape recorder and a single 90 minute (2 x 45 minutes) cassette. We talked generally for 45
minutes and then I turned the tape over. We talked for another 45 minutes and then I realised
that we were running out of tape and had hardly started talking about “Neither”, so I turned
the tape over again. After another 45 minutes, the taped part of the interview came to an end
with Feldman’s line about Beethoven’s big problem being not just another composer! So, we
lost the first 45 minutes, but I had what I needed for my “Music and Musicians” piece.1
Bill Colleran was Feldman’s publisher at Universal Edition (London) Ltd. He makes a brief -
but hilarious! - appearance [p8]. Feldman brought along a manuscript score of his opera
“Neither” - still incomplete at the time - which he and Skempton consult during the interview.
Page numbers in square brackets refer to this score.2 The premiere of “Neither” (a
commission by Rome Opera) subsequently took place at the Teatro dell’Opera, Rome on 13
May 1977. Skempton’s article appeared in the same month. The transcription below by Chris
Villars currently lacks the final 10 minutes of the taped part of the interview. The transcript is
published here for the first time by kind permission of Howard Skempton. Special thanks to
Lars Werdenberg for providing a copy of the audio recording.
[the first 45 minutes of the interview are irretrievably lost as explained above]
Howard Skempton: What I was saying about your own work is that, in the earlier works,
you were trying to achieve a certain weight; in the graph works, you were actually notating a
weight of sound.
Morton Feldman: Yes.
HS: And you were juxtaposing certain weights.
MF: Right.
HS: Because this was raw sound you were dealing with.
MF: Yes.
HS: And you’ve gone on doing that. Possibly in the graph pieces people would do things
which would distract from what you were trying to do. You were trying to create a weight,
and they would play a major third, or a triad. You would say that’s not a weight of three
notes, that’s a triad. So, this is probably what led you to fully notate works.
1
Howard Skempton, “Beckett as Librettist”, Music and Musicians (May 1977) pp 5-6. Also [Online]
www.cnvill.net/mfskmptn.htm
2
Morton Feldman, “Neither: opera in one act on a text by Samuel Beckett”, for soprano and orchestra (1977),
Universal Edition (UE 16326). The published score is dated: “1/30/77”.
www.cnvill.net/mfskempton-interview.pdf 1 Version 1: 30 January 2017

MF: I found that - and Cage talks about this now himself continually - people mistake
freedom for licence. And I feel that there’s a problem. There’s also a problem in terms of the
conventional training of musicians. Say, for example, a flute player, who could jump around
much more readily than a clarinet player, huh? Because the training of a clarinettist is
conventional.
HS: That’s right.
MF: They would play a very conventional type of passages, you see. That’s the problem.
Certain instruments had to prepare passages because the whole make-up of the instrument, in
a sense, is diatonic. Like the harp. You know, I’d never adopted a pitch structure, how to get
my pitches. But I hear them. I hear them like this! [snaps fingers] No problem! I hear and I
write down the pitches. There’s no problem! It’s just nothing! So I decided to do it myself.
Also there was a problem where everybody was very metric-oriented.
HS: That’s right.
MF: That they were only interested, and still are only interested, that if they see a note on the
beat, it’s a note on the beat. And everything people cannot understand, say the difference
between breathing a sound and its metric unit. And, to this day, if they see change of
measures they think it’s Stravinsky. Stravinsky in one of his conversations talks very
knowingly about the difference between his concept of rhythm, for example, and Webern.
Even though, in a sense, his work like “Movements for orchestra” looks like Webern. It’s
not! It’s still very beat[snaps fingers]-oriented[snaps again]. And so, those placements of
sounds in this given ictus were still very beat-oriented. The whole idea, in a sense, if they
came down, they would come down on the beat. And it was very discouraging. I gave it a
long time. But at the same time I never did it exclusively. I never had just a long run of just
writing graph music. I was writing notated music at the time. And there was one period where
three types of music was being done simultaneously. There was the graph music, and then the
free durational music, and precisely written music.
HS: That’s right, yes. Sort of late Fifties that would be.
MF: Now, I feel, in a sense, that what I’m doing now is very, very difficult. To take long
blocks of breathing durations, and just get it there, you see. It’s very difficult, without being
de-oriented. For example, the imagery of that very long section between the viola divisi chord
and the solo cello. Do you remember that? That goes on, and on and on. And then the
soprano later on takes it.
HS: Let me see that. That was... [starts looking through the score]
MF: I think it’s the perfect example in time.
[long pause while the score is searched]
MF: Here we go. It begins on page 21... One, two, three, four, five... It goes on essentially for
about six long systems [the six systems with solo cello, pp21-23]. I mean, for me to hear that

particular musical image in that length of time is something that I couldn’t have done in the
Fifties. You see now the Fifties also was very close to the paintings. That is, it was overall.
HS: Yes. And really this is the very interesting thing. I want to see to what extent...
MF: Yes, well, it was very overall. Just like “The Swallows of Salangan” was very overall.
And I loved it. I still love a kind of, er... What’s the correct term?
HS: Static...
MF: No, er... [long pause] When one thing is just one thing completely? What’s the term that
is used for that?... [long pause] With an “M”...
HS: Ah, such mono...
MF: Yes.
HS: Monolithic.
MF “Monolithic” is the word! I love monolithic, you see. And I try to get back to them [the
painters]. And they give marvellous quality. It’s what gives the work the kind of ex cathedra
quality. I’m not saying that ex cathedra quality... I think it’s fake, and could be fake. Or, let’s
say, not the word “fake”. It could be “easy”. The way the sound of a bad a cappella piece
could get by, for chorus, you see? It’s built-in. The homogeneity is built-in. And it’s a little
bit much more safe than one realises. I’m speaking as the composer that’s doing it.
HS: A bit like Palestrina you mean, with flair?
MF: Yes. That’s why they could turn it out by the yard.
HS: That’s right.
MF: And, as the composer I like slightly more possibility for distinction, in something as it
passes in time. Of course, as soon as you lift up your hand from the paper, as soon as you
break the line, it’s very impossible for you to not get involved with a kind of cause and effect
kind of situation, because you’re making a move, you see.
HS: Yes. In a sense you’ve got to concentrate very hard to avoid that.
MF: You have to concentrate.
HS: That’s why concentration is so important. Because you’ve got to.
MF: Right. Now, in my opera, if I’m making moves... Actually, if I’m making moves in the
opera it’s because I feel, in a sense, it’s the theme of the Beckett. Just the opening line of “to
and fro...”. And the work, in a sense, is a little scary. It’s like a dream where you’re in one
world, and now, without any preparation, you find yourself in another world. I think that’s
from the start with things when you look at the page. And I turn the page and it looks like,
“How the heck do you get into this one?” They look startling on paper. It’s gonna be less
startling when you hear it. I hope! I mean, I hope it’s gonna be very natural. You gotta accept

the nightmare! Now that to me is a very important situation, because everybody is
monolithic. Boulez is monolithic. Everybody is monolithic!
HS: Yes certainly, I think of you, in a sense, as the father of a whole group of composers who
work in quite a different way. People like La Monte Young and Steve Reich...
MF: Yes.
HS: ...and Philip Glass.
MF: Yes.
HS: All these composers are doing this. They’re creating these monolithic [the phone rings]
pieces. But of course they’re using a system. They’re using... [phone rings again] And they’re
saying, in a sense, the construction is more important for them than the sound.
[interview interrupted by the phone ringing repeatedly, and the actions taken to deal with it]
MF: [resuming] Now, how do you feel about my recent work in relation to the old?
HS: Well, my enthusiasm dates from about ‘65, when I was about eighteen. And the basic
statements I found very inspiring: “The sound is the experience”. And there’s something else:
“Everything you use to make art is precisely what kills it”. You said that as well.
MF: Yes.
HS: And it’s just the idea of starting with the sound, starting with the instrumentation. You
know, I used to feel that each instrument just had one sound, not three, or four. And that
when you chose an instrument, you were choosing a parameter, all the other parameters as
well. And it was this that I found very inspiring. This very practical involvement with
material.
MF: Very practical.
HS: But also, Cage talks about a quality of tenderness, which is something else. That’s very
important as well. And there is an atmosphere there which is beyond your concentration,
which is beyond your involvement with the medium. Are you aware of creating an
atmosphere in the works, in the works like “The Swallows of Salangan”?
MF: Well, doesn’t Stravinsky say that chromaticism is pathos? Well, maybe it’s because of
my cluster! [laughs] Well, that’s it, that’s the handwriting on the wall, that’s the touch! I
mean, I don’t telephone my compositions in, you see! I sit down and write them.
HS: Actually, “atmosphere” is the wrong word.
MF: There is certainly something there. What do you think it is?
HS: Well, I used to feel that, in a sense, the ‘soul’ of the piece of music lay in its texture.

MF: I read a wisecrack of Stockhausen’s recently where he said to me, or he says to the
interviewer, that my work could be just a moment in his music... [HS laughs] ...but not vice
versa! I think it’s awfully clever, but I don’t think it’s true at all, actually. But I always
wondered about that atmosphere. My girlfriend, Mary, there’s some works that she feels...
Did you ever hear a tape of “Cello and Orchestra”? I don’t know if it was broadcasted here. It
was done at the Boston Symphony.
HS: I don’t think I have heard it, no.
MF: Well, I think Universal has a tape of this piece. There’s also a new tape of “Oboe and
Orchestra” which might be a good idea to hear.
HS: Yes, I’d love to.
MF: She prefers my work, in a sense, when they’re much more abstract. Sometimes she feels
it’s loaded with content. In recent years I’ve had a little trouble with my percussion situation,
where people hear percussion and they have associations with percussion. They feel that
percussion is “ominous”, or... you know. And I’m not upset about it, but I’m odd man out
about it. I listen to the bass drum in a certain way, and I don’t hear it as ominous. But of
course it adds an atmosphere - not to my ears, but to a lot of people’s ears - of being overly
dramatic. I don’t hear it. I’m trying to hear it in their ears, but I don’t hear it, so far. Of
course, I notice lately in my orchestral writing that instead of having one gong... Hey, there’s
a beautiful tape of “Orchestra” which Glasgow did recently. It’s marvellous.
HS: Yes, I heard the broadcast of the performance in Glasgow.
MF: Of that piece?
HS: Yes.
MF: Well, that piece is very close to my music, and I think it’s very close to my early music.
A lot of people feel that my work now is just a little too swank. Well, I can’t help it if I do
things so beautifully! [HS laughs] I mean, there’s still disturbing things. There’s still a little
grittiness. It’s not that clean a piece.
HS: There’s a lot of grittiness in “Orchestra”. There’s a lot of ‘raw’ material there.
MF: A lot of disturbing images. I hate rather being so apologetic about my recent work. I put
so much emphasis on the work ethic. And I have no vested interest, to a great degree. I mean,
when I begin a piece it might come out the same to others - as my other music - but for me
there’s enough margin of doubt to make the working of it interesting for me. In fact, I feel
that my work has too much variety. I wish it didn’t. I mean, I really always wanna sit down
and write that same piece over and over again, but I don’t seem to have the talent to write that
same piece over and over again! I didn’t know where the opera was gonna take me. I had no
idea where I invented a certain type of imagery of a kinda mechanistic nature, which is very
new for my music in that piece. But it happened.

HS: But, in a sense, the variety, this is the fabric of the piece. I mean, in the work of the
Fifties, one was aware of the variety within the piece. There were a lot of new things
happening from moment to moment. But, basically, the instrumentation was the ‘form’ of the
piece.
MF: Yes.
HS: I mean, the form of the piece was the vertical colour. And then this was, as it were,
projected in time. And there was variety within that. But this was the texture. This is what I
mean by ‘atmosphere’ really.
MF: Of course, you know, there’s only the implication of content.
HS: I think the trouble is possibly that in the recent works the implication has been stronger.
MF: But, you know, the intentions of the composer really doesn’t matter. And so, if
Stravinsky would talk about a certain piece of his, say the second piece for the “Three Pieces
for String Quartet”, and he said it was influenced by a famous clown, the kinda asymmetrical,
jerky movement. Doesn’t matter! You’re still listening to it as a piece of music. Let’s take a
piece, in a sense, where I reached a climax, and a crisis of content, say with “The Viola in My
Life” pieces. I’ll never go back to it.
HS: They seem to stand apart. Also, “Madame Press”, and one or two other works.
MF: Yes, well, that, all that, that was it.
HS: I don’t recall whether it was a major third or a minor third in “Madame Press”.
MF: Minor third. Well, I wouldn’t say that it was a crisis of content, I let it happen! Now to
me it wasn’t even a stylistic thing. To me it was just an episode in my life. I mean, because I
wanted to visit the Amazon for two months, I don’t feel that I should pay for it for the rest of
my life! [laughter] And I’m glad that I did it. And I think that, in certain ways, the pieces are
just gorgeous. That it wasn’t conventional for me to just write a tune, that was not the idea.
But I think that the tune in “Viola in My Life” it’s to make something absolutely
asymmetrical, even interrupted with a little snare drum thing. I think it’s an interesting idea.
But any good, tonal composer could do something classy with a melody nowadays. I think
what’s interesting about the piece, for me at the time, and still when I hear it, is that I wanted
the melody to come back not like a piece of music but like a ghost, like a memory. And in
that piece to the melody happens, there’s no preparation for it, it’s there! And it goes away.
And then it’s there! And certainly I would never have written it like that twenty-five years
ago, given the opportunity, you know, the inclination, to include a melody in a piece. And I
saw no difference, at the time, of putting a melody in my landscape, that it should be any
different from Robert Rauschenberg putting in a photograph.
HS: In a sense, it’s still a landscape. It’s still got that landscape quality.
MF: With a photograph, of a melody. But we’re not used to that. I think that was a startling
idea. If the melody was not mine then it would be acceptable. Say if it was a Tyrolean folk

tune, like in Alban Berg. Or if it was a Russian tune, like Stravinsky would use. Then it’s
perfectly acceptable. But if we really listen to the melody, it sounds like a folk tune. It’s in a
crazy A minor. I thought it was an interesting idea. I still think that. In fact, I may even do it
again! [HS laughs] I think it’s a very interesting idea. Why not? Put in a photograph. Which
brings us to a seminar I give in Buffalo. You know, I’m now living in Buffalo. They gave me
a Chair, which I named.
HS: The Varèse Chair?
MF: Yes, the Varèse Chair.
HS: Did you name that?
MF: Yes, I named it. And there were a lot of Polish people living in Buffalo. And the Vice-
President at the time, I don’t know if he was kidding or not, said, “How about calling it the
Paderewski Chair?”3 I said that’s far out, that’s not bad! Now, I’m a culture watcher! I’ve
certainly been in the midst of it these past twenty-five years. Which led me to give a seminar.
It’s not a long seminar. It’s usually two sessions, but I spring it on them without preparation.
And the seminar is called, “What’s allowed and what’s not allowed”. And I would ask some
student, or say in your work, what’s allowed and what’s not allowed? And we start discussing
why something is allowed, and why something else is not allowed. And I finally say, “Oh,
it’s a question of picking your disease! You mean you don’t wanna die, you don’t wanna die
of cancer, it’s too fashionable! And it’s not fashionable enough! Everybody else is dying of
cancer, you wanna die of leukaemia, I understand!” [pause. HS has a question] Yes?
HS: It’s just that I went to a recital of Indian music at a private house in London, and they
said that the one thing that music mustn’t be, for the Indian musician, is flippant. Right, so
they would say that being flippant is not allowed, flippant material is not allowed. And one
could say that, possibly, banal material, or trivial material, should also be excluded. I would
say the marvellous thing about introducing a melody is that it worries you, and you become
more involved with the piece for that reason.
MF: I don’t know if you know a piece of mine called “For Frank O’Hara”? Well, “For Frank
O’Hara” for no reason whatsoever - except I heard it at that moment and it served a
marvellous technical function if you look at the score at that moment - for five sixteenths -
one, two, three, four, five: brrrrrrrrum! One, two , three, four, five: there’s a snare drum that
comes at yer!
HS: That’s right.
MF: And disappears. It was very disturbing. [MF claps his hands together once loudly]
People thought, “What, is that when Frank O’Hara died?” Of course not! That’s silly. We
wouldn’t even discuss that kind of thinking. And I said to myself, why not? You know,
Stockhausen in a recent book would talk about a certain piece, and he wanted something to
happen which ordinarily one would think could, would, should not happen. And what he
3
Presumably to honour Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Polish composer and politician (1860-1941).

came up with was somebody coming on the stage with a drum. He came up with theatre. The
only thing he could think of at that particular time that would be extraneous to the sound
world was a theatrical one. There’s nothing wrong with this. This is not a criticism for this.
But it’s very difficult to come up - once you’re bogged in and you’re role playing - it’s very
difficult to come up with situations that work, regardless who you are, unless the whole
conception is one of non sequiturs, you see, in a kind of collage situation. It’s very difficult in
a piece, in a kinda monolithic piece, to come up to something which seems out of context to
the piece. Those were one of the few moments in my career that something happened where I
said it doesn’t belong and I’m going leave it. Now this is something painters would do.
HS: Yes. Well, you used it in your early works. You had sudden loud sounds. For example,
in “Extensions 3”.
MF: Yes. Out of context. This is the question of what is taste? For example, take a very
tasteful painter like Robert Motherwell. You see a new picture of his, everything is exquisite;
the imagery, the proportion, the scale. Everything is absolutely fabulous. And on the bottom,
you’ll have some kind of purple. He’ll take a rag, and he’ll just “swish”, you see. Kills it! No
use trying to kill a piece! I mean, really. I’m trying to disturb its surface. I’m trying to make it
worry. I think a piece of music should worry. And I’m against role playing. And many
composers teach in terms of role playing. They say, “Well, the piece... and you start off with
this, and why are you doing this?” My teaching, in a sense, is anti-role playing. And I’ve
noticed that culture accepts anything, so long as it’s consistent.
HS: This is why...
MF: I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m getting very excited about “The Viola in My Life”! And
I’m telling you, I think it’s terrific!
HS: Yes, in fact, we must go on about that, because I was going to say...
MF: I mean, I never really thought about it [except] in a little kinda, defensive to somewhat
way. I remember when I did the big version, with orchestra, in Venice, Franco Donatoni
came up to me, and he said in his broken English, “Why? Why!?” And I looked at him and I
said, “Amore!”4. [laughter] Terribly upset!
HS: Extraordinary!
[Bill Colleran enters the room]
Bill Colleran: Is the interview still going on?
MF: Sure, why not?
BC: Tape still working?
MF: Why not?
4
Italian: Love!

BC: Can I say something?
MF: Of course! [laughter]
BC: Your contract’s cancelled! [much laughter] I’ve done the washing up! [more laughter
and friendly banter]
HS: Yes, we’re talking about “The Viola in My Life”.
MF: Yes, I was being defensive. I said, actually I think it’s a fantastic moment. Why in my
natural landscape can’t a melody happen in the way a photograph happens in a Bob
Rauschenberg world? I said, why if the melody does happen it has to be a folk melody, like in
the Berg Tyrolean folk song, or it has to be something which you don’t like. I mean, it’s an
interesting point. Why can’t it happen? And it can only happen, in a sense, if it’s anonymous.
HS: In the early works, you had a recurring sound at times, and you formed a plane through
repeating the sound.
MF: It’s second nature. I had to do it.
HS: But, instead of that, you’ve got a recurring group of notes, which is a melody. So, in a
sense, it’s a similar situation in “The Viola in My Life”.
MF: It’s a photograph.
HS: It’s a photograph rather than an isolated colour.
MF: I never even thought it was a melody. It’s not prepared. Only once is it prepared. Only
once, with an accompaniment figure, and then it starts. But most of the time you’re just hit
with it, like in a dream sequence. Now, when I hear the piece live it reminds me of a dream. I
don’t know why it’s there. And it disappears. I don’t know if it’s gonna come back or not,
because I don’t remember my musics. A lot of times I think it’s gonna come back, and it
doesn’t come back! [laughs] I’ll never do it again. I really mean it. That was a period of my
life. The possibilities of other experiences!
HS: Yes.
MF: Why not? The whole problem, you see, the whole problem with a reputation is...
There’s a marvellous remark of Nietzsche’s: “If you make me change my mind about you,
I’ll make you pay for it”5. And I think that’s what it’s all about. John Cage was telling me
recently that one particular friend, there was some difficulty because he would write a new
piece and she would get very upset because it wasn’t like his last piece! Because she thought
like the last piece. And it’s a big, big problem. It’s a big, big problem, in a sense, that, er... I
can’t find words for it! I haven’t thought about it at length. I just can’t find words for it. A lot
of my reputation was, you know, if my music is changing people say, “Well it’s impossible!”
It’s amazing, you know, we’re so prejudicial. We all are. And I think a lot of composers are
5
Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”, section 125: “When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold
the inconvenience he causes us very much against him” (Walter Kaufmann translation).

having similar problems, of people wanting them to be just where they was. You’re not
allowed a television change in your mind! You’re not allowed to really work freely.
HS: This is where Cage is such a marvellous example. He said recently - in talking about
Mondrian - he said that it was marvellous the way he [Cage] had changed, that he’d moved
away from what he was doing, he was now performing a new music. And what was so
exciting about this was the fact that he was changing. You know, that he was prepared to do
something quite new, although of course it was there to begin with. His early music arose
from a love of Indian music anyway.
MF: We have a history of it in terms of painting. I mean, even Mondrian changed drastically
through the years. The whole early Mondrian is still nature-oriented. The early abstractions
were still abstractions of facades of buildings. It took him many years before he really
became absolutely abstract. Then, in the Forties, especially, you know when he was in
England. And then he came to America, and the whole “Boogie Woogie” series. He got
involved with the stroke, less of the brush stroke. Then he starts using the coloured things.
HS: Little cubes.
MF: And he got away from the touch aspect. And within what seemed to others as a limited
world, there was vast, dramatic changes in my opinion.
[interview interrupted by the phone ringing again]
MF: [resuming] Why don’t we go on to the opera?
HS: Yes, we haven’t got much time actually. We should really talk about that. I had it on my
mind that we might talk about this. I’m writing some material which will be appearing about
the same time [as the opera premiere].
MF: About when is this?
HS: This is May.
MF: Great. This is for a May issue?
HS: This is for May “Music and Musicians”. But really, you know, I was quite interested to
know how you worked on this. I mean, you were given the text. Beckett gave you the text...
MF: Yes.
HS: ...and said you’re free to do what you like.
MF: Yes.
HS: And you then worked on it in the way you’ve described. You had the pages on the wall...
MF: Yes.
HS: ...gradually filling them in. And you mentioned the grid, which is important.

MF: Yes.
HS: What about the pitch material? You mentioned that as well. You started talking about
that. You said there were three intervals.
BC: Can I just cut in?
HS: Of course.
BC: Morty, on the flights to Cologne... There’s a 9:45 or a 14:45.
MF: 2:45.
BC: Right.
MF: Thanks, Bill.
[BC leaves the room]
HS: Would you like to say something about the instrumentation? Was that fixed in advance?
MF: Well, they pleaded with me to use just a set orchestra. There was only one thing I
couldn’t comply with. It was the bassoons. In other words, I could use two oboes and an
English horn, rather than three oboes, which I usually use now, and an English horn. I usually
use three [bassoons]. Because of those three notes. In fact the opening page, you could see
the... [searches in the score] A, A flat, G.
HS: That’s right, yes. So you have to use a bassoon.
MF: D, C, D flat. The timpani is the only one where I use - you know, on the top - I use a
tritone, G and C sharp, and I use G flat and C sharp. I would’ve liked to have used three
oboes and an English horn, three clarinets. But there was something about the bassoon, where
the third doubles to double bassoon. There you see, three horns, three trumpets.
HS: That’s right.
MF: The classic opera has two harps. Which I was very happy about because it became very
important at a pivotal point in the piece. And I do some beautiful work with the harps,
especially later on, against the voice. I usually feel that orchestras should have four
percussion players, but I didn’t ask. And regular strings. I didn’t ask how many cellos. I was
worried about how many violas and how many cellos they had, but I didn’t ask. And I put in
ten violas, and a big divisi section. I just figured they just have to have ten! If they only have
eight, then I shall have eight too.
HS: So, in a sense, you had fixed instrumentation. You had the text.
MF: I didn’t have the text. That’s why the piece begins voiceless. I was waiting for the text.
HS: Oh, I see, you were waiting for the text when you wrote the overture?

MF: Yes, that’s why I discovered what an overture is: Waiting for the text! [laughter]
HS: And then you reacted to the text, you worked on the piece, you took bits of the text as
they came really?
MF: No, he sent it all together.
HS: But I mean, you selected bits to work on at a time.
MF: Well, no one believes this, but it’s true. I pinned up the text on my wall. And the text is
written where he has one line, and then there are like a little line in between, you see. And
they are just like single lines that do connect. But he has that particular type of visual
punctuation. And no one believes this, but I only read - with my bad eyes it’s pretty easy - I
only read one line at a time. And wrote it down in big letters on the top of a music sheet: “to
and fro from shadow to - whatever it is - inner to outer shadow”. “to and fro from inner and
outer shadow”, I wrote down. Now, I must tell you something about my meeting with
Beckett, and the conversation, because it’s both humorous and very interesting in relation to
my treatment of the thing. Because I wanted to slavishly adhere to his feelings as well as
mine. And there was no compromise because [we were] in complete agreement about many,
many things in conversation. For example, he was very embarrassed. He said to me after a
while, he said, “Mr Feldman, I don’t like opera”. And I said to him, “I don’t blame you!”
[laughter] Then he said to me, “I don’t like my words being set to music”. And I said, “I’m in
complete agreement. In fact”, I said, “it’s very seldom that I’ve used words”. I said, “I’ve
written a lot of pieces with voice, and they’re wordless”. And then he looked at me again, and
he said, “Then what do you want!” [more laughter] And I said, “I have no idea!” He also
asked me why I didn’t use existing material. We had a mutual friend he wrote to, and who
told him that I wanted to, you know, work with Beckett text. And he wrote back to this friend
suggesting various things, and he said why didn’t I take these suggestions. I said, ”Well, I
read them all, but they were like a flashlight that you just had to follow”. I said, “They were
impregnable. They didn’t need music”. I said, “What I’m looking for is the kinda
quintessence”. I said, “I’m also looking for something that...”. I don’t know if I used the word
“directional”, but it was close to it. That just hovered, so to speak. And, I don’t know if he
remembered or not, or whatever. It was very interesting when I finally got the material that
there was this line between sentences. So what I did, I looked at the whole thing very briefly.
Why I didn’t read it through I have no idea. I have no idea. I can’t fathom that one out. But
something told me not to.
HS: Before we go on, this is really very useful for the article. Shall I start again? This is the
only tape I’ve got, which I thought ninety minutes would probably be enough, you see.
[laughter]
MF: You wanna erase the beginning?
HS: Can we erase the beginning?
MF: Of course!

[end of tape side]
MF: [resuming] I got the text. And the moment that I got the text I stuck the continuity over
here on page 11. I got the text on page 10, and I knew we began on page 11. It wasn’t a
structural idea, or theatrical idea, why I began the text there. I began the text because I
received the text in the morning’s mail. [laughter] Again, a very practical reason.
HS: That’s marvellous. So this brings us right back to the sort of work you were doing in the
Fifties, where each measure was fresh. And you would take what was fresh and probably
stop.
MF: Right. Exactly.
HS: Or if you wrote something that wasn’t fresh you’d work on it, and extract material from
it until it was fresh. But, basically, you’re working on each measure, each system, as it
comes.
MF: Now, the grid really suggested itself. First of all, like a conventional composer, I started
to scan the first sentence. And I said, “to... and... fro... in... sha... dow: to and fro in shadow”
[turns page] “from... inner... to... outer... sha... dow”. And, you know, Beckett is very into
timing, he did the timings. And those timings are usually quickly. And I said, “Well, I’m
gonna cut it in the middle. I’m not gonna say ‘to and fro in shadow from inner to outer
shadow’. I’m gonna cut it in half: ‘to... and... fro... in... sha... dow’”. At the same time I felt
what was quick was that pulsating figure that’s continuing in the cello. So that’s more or less
as if it’s quick, you see. So I had the feeling of quickness, and I set this within this quickness.
So it will sound much quicker. And I saw, “to... and... fro... in... sha... dow... from... inner...
to... outer... sha... dow”. And it seemed to me - and this was where my experience in the
kinda free durational period entered - it seemed to me as one long period, to try and envision
it as one long period of time. So I had the whole period of time as one thought. And I noticed
that it fell into a grid. And then I found that particular rhythm. Now, I wanna have the feeling
that she’s just coming out of, coming out of it. I don’t want the feeling that she’s coming on
it, in terms of the word. So I found a kind of durational value, rather than a rhythmic entity.
And that’s the reason, in a sense, I have this quarter-half [sings from soprano part, p11,
wordlessly]. And I saw that it worked for each word [sings same, with words] “To... and...
fro... in... sha... dow”. It worked. Now, what did I want? I wanted it neither stretched thin. I
didn’t want parlando. I wanted it sung. I wanted a beautiful tone on that. And I wrote to
Beckett, and described this. You know, he is an amateur musician.
HS: His cousin is a very well known musician here, John Beckett.
MF: And he’s an amateur musician. I showed him some ideas I had in the overture, even
before I ever expected to get any text. I had the opening page of “Neither” with me. And I
wrote him, and I told him of the opening pages. And I said, “I want to create the feeling that
she’s singing and you have the feeling that there is a melody and yet there is no melody. But
if there was a melody, a kind of, as if you’re hearing a melody and there was no melody, you
see”. And I said, “That idea of the colour changes that’s going around her”.

HS: Yes. You’re changing the context and she’s a fixed point within the context.
MF: Yes. You see, here it’s going along, with this crippled symmetry of these passages. And
she’s still singing and you hear all these things, you see. Now, [Harrison] Birtwistle I thought
caught something in my music recently in Glasgow, where at a seminar we gave together - or
whatever it was - he mentioned how in my music there is no background and foreground.
Which is absolutely true.
HS: Absolutely.
MF: And here, just because that orchestra’s going doesn’t mean it’s background. It’s not. She
is on that same plane with them. So you get the feeling when the orchestra’s coming that
she’s singing something. And she’s all intermingled with these other things, you see. So, do
you get the feeling I have?
HS: Except that, when you talk about.. I mean, she’s a fixed point in this case and the
orchestra is the changing context.
MF: Yes. But that G [that the soprano sings] is merging all the time in this changing context.
The G is part of the chordal structures in the clarinet and the bass clarinet. At the end of “fro”
we hear that high solo F sharp with a kinda... The colour of the basses, the colour of the tam-
tam, and the cymbals with their sprays, in words and out of words, give the feeling that there
is a change of light, so to speak, every time she sings a G. So, superficially, it looks like a
parlando, but it’s gonna be very lyrical, and yet there is no melody. That’s the way I hear it,
and I don’t think I’m wrong in that. And, let’s see... [searches in score] ...perfect example of
the grid on page 13: “from... impenetrable... self... to... impenetrable... unself”. Look at how
perfect it is. The only thing I see that’s different is that the last two measures in time doesn’t
really equal the first two measures. But that’s not important. But you can see the way it’s laid
in there. For example, “from... impenetrable”, and “self” is virtually, except for a hair’s
breadth, very close to the triplet figure, you see. Why I didn’t put a triplet figure in there was
only because the tam-tam acts like a kind of anticipation. Where she ordinarily would come
in that beat is on the tam-tam, and then she kinda... she’s off the tam-tam colour. Just a hair’s
breadth away from, say, the opening line. But she does repeat with the triplet figure, to the
three-eight, exactly the same, you see. And so forth and so on. A very important thing, which
I think I’m gonna miss [out] now, is that if you look at what I referred to as - which I think
was not a bad term - the ‘crippled symmetry’ of those figures in the cello. Let’s save that for
a little while and notice what happens in the middle of the piece when that crippled symmetry
becomes actually machine-like, and stays while we get later on. So... [searches score] I’ve
found that many times it’s only in a few places that I really got involved with wordplay with
the score. And I’ve found that many times accidental things happen that either unconsciously
I wasn’t aware of, or it just happened. We come to a very important place where that would
happen. For example, we have: “as between two lit refuges”. Two lit refuges - and I found
that she’s singing it between the divisi cellos. And even where she is, even sonically... Here
we only have two, you see. Here: [p15] “between two lit refuges”. And here she is, this G.
And this B flat is high.

HS: That’s right.
MF: And in effect she is between two! I wasn’t aware of that at the time.
HS: Gosh!
MF: That was creepy! That was creepy! Then she begins on page 17 again. And he has this
sentence: “doors once neared gently close”. And then he went on to the end of the sentence:
“away from gently part again”. And I broke that in half, in time. I split that sentence in half,
that was enough: “doors once neared gently close”. I told you that earlier. And I finally got
off the note, the G. [sings from soprano part, p17, wordlessly] And I found the breathing, the
right timing. [sings again p17, with words] “doors... once... neared... gently... gently... close”.
And what I would do is take the most difficult one, like [sings again repeating the last
syllable] “gently-ly”. You wanna hold on to it. In other words that tying feeling of the -
usually, naturally - the last syllable. And that determined the whole overall rhythmic
structure, you see. Because of that one thing, “ly”, you know. “doors” - that you could hold
on to; “once” - you could hold on to; “neared” - you could hold on. “ly” [sings] “ly”. Not too
much. [sings] “close” - that you can hold on to. So here it was “gently”. The difficult words,
to timing the overall pattern. And I noticed that everything fit in gorgeously if I found the
equivalent of that particular figure. The sentence, or the half a sentence, fit in very nicely.
[sings] “doors... close...”.
HS: So this is another way the text, as it were, took part. The difficult word dictated the...
MF: The difficult word.
HS: Like “gently” would be...
MF: Yes. Now here [p18/19] there’s no problem: “once... turned... away... from...” Here we
have it now [“gently” again]. And now we have an interplay. Before notice we just had the
three eighths, right?
HS: That’s right, yes.
MF: Three eighths and then the half triplet, right? Now we have an interplay between the
triplet quarters and the eighths: [sings p19] “away... from... gently part... again”. A little,
slightest variation. It’s quite lovely the way it’s done. What made me determine the length of
the intermezzo interlude between her singing, that I can’t answer really in any kinda way. A
world from “gently part again”. It’s almost as if I’m just like reflecting on it. Evidently I’m
just reflecting on it. And the fact that I didn’t know what was gonna come next, in terms of
the next sentence, was very important. I didn’t want a cause and effect continuity, a kinda
glue that would take me from one door to another. I wanted to treat each sentence as a world.
And there was much to think about, because I noticed that as the work went on it became
much more tragic. It became unbearable. While here it’s just, it’s tolerable now. And “gently
part again”. OK, so evidently I was affected to it very personally. And I then go in on a very
gorgeous and very lengthy trip between solo cello and divisi violas [pp21-26] . And the viola
is changing all the time, the chord is changing all the time, in the inner voices. But the solo

cello is not. And cello, in a sense, has its own duration. You see now, that a certain Beckett
word had a life in terms of its duration. The instrumental work then developed its own
duration. And that was the dialectic between me and Beckett, you see. In other words, the
durations that I picked for the words were not necessarily the durations that I would pick for a
sound, you see. Now I give the duration. I give its equivalent.
HS: This is the Feldman equivalent!
MF: The Feldman equivalent. And so the solo cello also starts off but, instead of ending, say
after the three-eight, continues for another two beats until it’s decayed, you see [p21]. It
needed that for decay. And the Feldman equivalent of course goes on for a long, [turning
score pages] long time. Now we get into another situation. Notice the way these sounds are
on a grid, every other measure. You see?
HS: That’s very beautiful, yes.
MF: Huh? Looks gorgeous, doesn’t it? It’s gonna be lost in printing. Maybe we should keep
it in printing. It’s a beautiful, visual thing [pp24/25].
HS: Yes.
MF: And the grid was very important, because the grid is part of the Beckett breathing, you
see. So there’s like another dimension here, the Beckett breathing, and little by little -
remember, this is new for me - I’m getting used to dealing with words and durations, in a way
that I haven’t for years. And I’m turned on.
HS: But you are relating the words and durations to the page.
MF: Yes, even though it’s wordless. This page here is wordless. But if it wasn’t for Beckett I
doubt that I would have made this duration. Now I’m giving the instrumental time, and
certain durations I will have given the voice. You know, I mean I’m come closer. Closer. To
what I would give the sum duration. And we continue this to some degree, with another
sound world. Remember the solo cello is still there. These are that page. These are the next
page. And it continues... I love the imagery in the harps, one and two [p26]. Only because
they gave me two harps. See against the solo cello, that chord, it’s lovely! And now she’s
back again. Notice where she takes up the dotted eighth. All those previous pages, those
isolated, every other measure pages, on page 26 in the bottom she reminds you of those other
durations. But she’s still on a grid. Notice the way it’s working out. Except the grid is much
more complicated. It’s not helter-skelter, but it’s made up of the dotted half and now the
dotted quarter. It’s that characteristic triplet figure and the eighth, without a tie. [sings p26]
“between[sic]... back... and... forth... and... turned... a-way”. Lovely! Much more
complicated. Almost as if it’s off the grid. Huh? Yet on! A little more lopsided in the time, on
the grid. It’s amazing how people think that I don’t think about these things! [laughs]
HS: Well, is this new? You said that this is probably something quite new?

MF: No. I mean I work this way. Given another context, I mean. And now begins another
section, or what seems to appear to be another section. [turns score pages] And I didn’t
realise it was so long! [turns more pages] And now begins what I call the ‘Beckett material’.
This is new for me only because I never worked with this type of material before, this type of
imagery before. And this I derived from other Beckett writings. His tempo, the way the words
are spoken, and the way they... the continuity of it in time, you see. In other words [sings
from p29]. Could be almost like, could be from a player piece. A certain type of tempo. And I
just continued this thing. And it breaks off, and we’re back again to that F sharp G A flat
[sings from soprano part, p30, wordlessly] “dee-da-da” . And I’m nuts about this one! I love
the figure of the three-eight into the two-two held over into the three-eight figure. It’s one of
my favourite, and it comes back over and over again. I like it. [sings same with words]
“heed... less... of”. Perfect duration. [continues singing] “the... way... in.. tent on...”. Now we
still have that kind of asymmetrical feeling now, the beginning of a nightmare, if I may use
that term. And this is now where I started to get an actual symbolic content in terms of
material. It wasn’t until page 30 that I had a glimpse of the juxtaposition of what “to and fro”
is, in his text. Now when he says, “to and fro”, in plain words what he’s talking about is the
impossibility, in a sense, of either fathoming the self or the unself, and you’re in unlit areas.
You’re back and forth, back and forth, in this trip. And I said to myself, “Well, the self, I
certainly know more than anybody of my generation what the self is, in terms of personal
music”. And I had to invent the unself. And I saw the unself as a very detached, very
impersonal, perfect type of machinery. That’s how, you see. Now, I couldn’t introduce this
perfect machinery just like that! And so what I did was superimpose it in a kind of
polyrhythmic situation with what’s happening on top. So it’s still the opening pages, but there
is a new element here, a periodic element, in the sense that eventually does emerge and we’re
hearing it in the body of it. And so we hear this [clicks fingers to illustrate the rhythm]
against these crazy... OK. Now we have this figure of the ostinato now, but it’s in double time
[p32], so that [sings phrase in original timing, p29] it’s now [sings same in double time, p32]
against very periodic... like we know the piccolo couldn’t attempt it even! The way it’s:
[sings] “Bm... Bm... Bm... Bm...”. And now we start making that trip. Now, another thing
which I don’t like about operatic writing is that the words take over, and the action, the
narrative takes over. And there’s not enough time for the musical situation to really express
itself. And this is something, in a sense, that Berlioz had, Berlioz. And one of the reasons he’s
not successful is that she’ll start to sing and the unaccompanied cello... Like in “Faust”
there’s one section with an unaccompanied cello and he just makes that trip, and it goes on
and on and on and on! It’s because I think he’s thinking it much more musically! Than
dramatically! And he’s trying for them to meet some place. But he lived in a Delacroix era.
Couldn’t do it! Just couldn’t do it! But this is something which I realised in writing a
dramatic work. I decided I’m not gonna let the narrative take over. And if the music had a
place to go, let’s see where it went. And that’s what happened here. That’s why it’s just going
on and on [turning pages] and on! And we’re back again, 36 [p36]. And we’re back to the
beginning on the high G. But it sounds different now because we’ve heard so much. And
now, in the beginning [p11], she’s against a kind of rhythmic pattern, now she’s just against
these chords that come in [p36].

HS: That’s right, yes, with the empty bars.
MF: She comes against... the chord happens after every word.
HS: That’s right.
MF: That’s a grid idea, where the chord happens every, you see: [sings p36 ] “the...” chord
“one...” chord “gleam...” chord “or...” chord “the...” chord “other...”. That’s it. A complete
picture in itself. And I remember I showed you this other grid where she’s wordless [p37].
Because I don’t want to set Beckett to words. He doesn’t like it and I don’t like it. And I want
her to trip. And this is the big moment for her. It’s one of the moments of her long... this
continuity. Very important part. I like the idea. Do you realise how long, in a big opera house,
the length of time those tam-tams are speaking [pp37/8].
HS: I think this is what I meant by ‘atmosphere’. When you think of an opera you think of
the whole situation, the dramatic situation, the stage and the size of the place. But it’s not
drama in a narrative sense, It’s the idea of a performer on a stage projecting something, which
is obviously attractive. I mean, this is something you’ve seized on. But you’re opposed... I
mean, people have expressed surprise when I mention the opera. They can’t believe it. But I
think it’s the narrative, they think it’s narrative when they think of opera. They think of
rhetoric, and they think of...
MF: Well, I don’t feel this is narrative.
HS: No, not at all. But this is when they think of opera in general.
MF: When we finish I’d like to ask you a few key questions. Let’s go through it very
quickly. How’s the tape running?
HS: Actually we’re quite near the end of this side.
MF: Well, why don’t you ask me some questions? I think the whole idea is, as the text
continues, and is getting this whole business of losing itself, the “to and fro”, and that there’s
no getting together. Only occasionally there is musical imagery that the words suggest. For
example, why don’t we turn to page 45? Now, I don’t think I put the actual kosher total
amount of time values. But notice that that particular sound gets far-er and far-er and far-er
away in time. Very important moment in the opera. I would say that this is the most literal
and dramatic moment, to hear this whole business of “Bm...” That it’s all losing a beat, you
see. Just losing an eighth-note: [demonstrates] one - two[clipped] “Bm... Bm... [getting
softer] Bm... [softer still] Bm... Bm”.
[the last 10 minutes of the second tape side are missing]

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Morton Feldman: Toronto lecture, 17 April 1982

Transcribed by Linda Catlin Smith

[From the audience: ‘Yes.’]

[From the audience: ‘The ’80s.’]

[From the audience: ‘Play them simultaneously?’]

I’m afraid not. I don’t like collage too much.

But Triadic memories is fantastic. [more laughter and applause]

[The tape recording of Flute and orchestra is played.]

[Question, inaudible on tape, from the audience.]

[More from the audience.]

[More from the audience, inaudible.]

26 Feldman probably means the ICA: Institute of Contemporary Arts.

[From the audience: ‘Joshua Reynolds?’]

It's a wonderful series you're having here. Who else is coming?

[inaudible audience remarks]

Transcribed by Rüdiger Meyer

[A tape recording of MUSIC FOR JAPAN is played.]

Sounds like a sermon. Born again. [laughs]

Transcribed by John Snijders

HR: I think so, yes.

MF: I don’t feel my music is meditative. I feel my music has to do with…

HR: Not longer?

HR: It’s thought, it’s philosophy?

MF: Look, it is absolutely not mysterious. We have everything even before

HR: Well they’d understand!

HR: Because of the length of the novels?

HR: That’s the way the audience reacts.

MF: Maybe my music is for records or for in archives. I don’t think my

HR: You feel that?

[interview broken off by lunch]

Transcribed by Sebastian Claren and Chris Villars

Morton Feldman: Yes, it did.

CS: What piece was that?

MF: It doesn’t exist, I threw it out! [Laughter]

CS: You threw it away! Do you remember why?

CS: How old were you then?

MF: I wrote the piece when I was about 22, 21.

MF: I matured at 24.

CS: At 24... on Tuesday! [Laughter]

MF: I was a late starter.

MF: Yes, definitely.

CS: And his prophet? [Feldman laughs] Did he have one?

CS: In other words...

MF: What do you mean “Eastern”... New York?

CS: No, no, no.

CS: Yeah. [Laughter]

MF: I think so. I don’t think it has anything to do with Zen...

CS: Yeah. [Laughter]

MF: His continuity.

CS: Yeah. ...in terms of sort of a teleological attitude...

MF: I feel it was tending toward that.

CS: What’s the difference then?

MF: We thought more.

MF: The imperfections of other masterpieces! [Laughter]

MF: But perception was left to the dilettante.

MF: You mean his reference to free verse?

CS: Free verse, yeah.

CS: Particularly, T. S. Eliot!

CS: Are you speaking against eclecticism?

CS: Written out chance music.

MF: Exactly! You said it, not me! [Laughter]

MF: No, I don’t. I find my composition one thing.

CS: Including the other two aspects?

CS: Well, let’s see, we...