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2LP
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GODREC 071LP
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Morton Feldman's last composition, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, was completed in 1987; although its instrumentation largely corresponds to that of Piano and String Quartet, with one instead of two violins, it differs in almost every other respect from the composition written only two years earlier, for here, in contrast to Piano and String Quartet, Feldman makes every effort to integrate the piano into the string section, and the basic formal components of the composition are no longer staves, as they were in Piano and String Quartet. Double LP with 4th side etched.
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6LP BOX
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GODREC 050X-LP
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Limited restock; 6LP box with black cover. Excerpt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren: "When Morton Feldman wrote his second string quartet -- or String Quartet II, as he titled it in the score -- in 1983, he found himself at the height of his career: prior to this, his long form compositions, of which the majority lasted around one and a half hours, had not isolated him or let him disappear from concert and festival programming, as he had expected, but were on the contrary celebrated as a major 'breakthrough' and a big 'step forward' . . . Like the long pieces that preceded it, Feldman's String Quartet II consists of repeated patterns, which usually surface at a certain point in the composition without preparation, are maintained over a given period, and then abruptly abort to possibly return later. In this context, Feldman has always emphasized the interplay of 'reiteration' and 'change' in his music -- two aspects that in his mind had been decisive criteria of the music of the twentieth century as 'repetition' and 'variation' (Stravinsky and Schoenberg). He even claimed Schoenberg's concept of 'developing variation' for his composition technique..." Live Recording! 317 minutes over six LPs. Personnel: Morton Feldman - composition; Pellegrini Quartet: Antonio Pellegrini - violin; Thomas Hofer - violin; Fabio Marano - viola; Helmut Menzler - violoncello.
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6LP BOX
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GODREC 050LP
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Excerpt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren: "When Morton Feldman wrote his second string quartet -- or String Quartet II, as he titled it in the score -- in 1983, he found himself at the height of his career: prior to this, his long form compositions, of which the majority lasted around one and a half hours, had not isolated him or let him disappear from concert and festival programming, as he had expected, but were on the contrary celebrated as a major 'breakthrough' and a big 'step forward' . . . Like the long pieces that preceded it, Feldman's String Quartet II consists of repeated patterns, which usually surface at a certain point in the composition without preparation, are maintained over a given period, and then abruptly abort to possibly return later. In this context, Feldman has always emphasized the interplay of 'reiteration' and 'change' in his music -- two aspects that in his mind had been decisive criteria of the music of the twentieth century as 'repetition' and 'variation' (Stravinsky and Schoenberg). He even claimed Schoenberg's concept of 'developing variation' for his composition technique..." Live Recording! 317 minutes over six LPs. Personnel: Morton Feldman - composition; Pellegrini Quartet: Antonio Pellegrini - violin; Thomas Hofer - violin; Fabio Marano - viola; Helmut Menzler - violoncello.
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CD
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NW 80794CD
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"The intense individuality of Morton Feldman's (1926?1987) art and its 'painterly' aspect have tended to push his rich output of works into a zone all of their own, surrounded by a moat of stillness. This recording attempts the reverse process -- to bring his choral works (the previously unrecorded Chorus and Instruments, Voices and Instruments 1, Voices and Instruments 2, and The Swallows of Salangan) into a 'gallery' of other choir compositions of his times. Through the interaction with works of other characters and aspirations, mutual illumination might become a new Feldman experience. Two of the five other works confront Feldman's textless choral singing with words. These, however, carry their own special musical intent. Three early twelve-tone gems [Three Statements] of Will Ogdon (1921?2013) move with Walt Whitman 'into the wordless . . . away from books, away from art,' and reluctantly away from human desire, as embodied in the central poem by Thomas Campion. Robert Carl's (b. 1954) The City brings a transcendentalist layered sound to the mystical reflections of the architect Louis Sullivan, contemplating the natural and the built-human in the lake and city of Chicago. The notion of wordless chorus fans out in varied directions in the other three works. As one of Feldman's closest associates in the New York School, Earle Brown (1926?2002) intrigues us as much for the stark differences from Feldman shown by his abstract choral mobiles (Small Pieces for Large Chorus). The Sound Patterns of Pauline Oliveros (1932?2016) are less abstract than their title might imply -- moving in and out of singing itself into extended vocality, and towards newly-suggested verbal exclamations of a non-semantic kind. Warren Burt (b. 1949), a former student of both Oliveros and Ogdon at the University of California, San Diego, contributes with his Elegy the most recent piece, also the closest to Feldman's simple successions of chorale-like chords. His harmonies, however, acquire their elegiac qualities from chromatic memories and their contradictions, moving along unfamiliar paths."
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2LP
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GODREC 027LP
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2022 restock. Lenio Liatsou performs Morton Feldman's composition "For Bunita Marcus". In the 1980's, Morton Feldman composed two large-sized pieces for his favorite instrument, the piano. Both pieces, "Triadic Memories" (1981) and "For Bunita Marcus" (1985), clock in at about 90 minutes. Both compositions are excellent examples of the group of works that they belong to. "Triadic Memories" demonstrates the complexity and tonal opulence of Feldman's pattern compositions from 1977 through 1983, whereas "For Bunita Marcus" shows the stripped-down, almost dismissive structures of his last works created from 1984 to 1987. Feldman himself described "For Bunita Marcus" as a piece in which he "seriously grappled with the idea of meter. I was very interested in this whole problem of meter and the bar line. I was so interested that I started to write a piece in which I took meter very seriously. I saw that nobody knew how to notate. Sometimes, Stravinsky! In my notation I'm close to Stravinsky; that is, meter and rhythm actually being simultaneous and also being more grid-oriented, a balance between rhythm and meter. 'For Bunita Marcus' is essentially made up of just three-eight, five-sixteen and two-two. Sometimes the two-two would have musical content, which was at the end of the piece. Sometimes the two-two acted as silences, either on the left side or the right side or in the middle of the three-eight and the five-sixteen, and I was using meter as a construction, not rhythm but meter and the time, the length of what is going on." - Excerpt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren .
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CD
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SLT 002CD
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Saltern returns with a gorgeous new recording of Morton Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet (1983) performed by Anthony Burr (clarinet), Graeme Jennings (violin), Gascia Ouzounian (violin), Che-Yen Chen (viola) and Charles Curtis (cello). This performance highlights Feldman's interest in notation by treating the slight differences in intonation and rhythm literally and specifically. Recorded by Tom Erbe in the living room of a friend of the musicians. Edition of 400. Housed in jackets printed at Stoughton and featuring a cover image by artist Raha Raissnia.
From Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis's liner notes: "Near the end of the final Contrapunctus in The Art Of Fugue, Bach introduces a new four-note countersubject which, in the German note names, spells B, A, C, H (in our note names, B-flat, A, C, B-natural). To those within Bach's circle, and probably to any attentive musician of his day, the notes thus sounded would have unmistakably articulated Bach's name -- an embedded signature, not just a melodic motif but a salutation in musical code. Morton Feldman begins Clarinet and String Quartet with the same four notes in reverse order -- H, C, A, B, if you will. These four notes are repeated over and over by the clarinet and the cello simultaneously, the two instruments in minutely different rhythms and phrasings. These notes, however, are given anomalous names: in the cello, B, D-double flat, G-double sharp, A-sharp; and in the clarinet, C-flat, C, A, B-flat. Whether or not Feldman placed the retrograde B, A, C, H motif intentionally, it fits seamlessly into the pitch world of his late music, in which chromatic clusters (often four notes) are obsessively restated in different permutations, like anagrams."
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CD
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BRIDGE 9446CD
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"Feldman's last work, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, displays the qualities of the 'late style': complete mastery, utter assurance, and a kind of luminous melancholy. Like Palais de Mari, written a year earlier, it unfolds at a leisurely pace, with similar uses of repetition and recurrence, gentle rocking figures, and a somewhat restricted range. The measured unfolding of the material, without emphasis on dramatic contrast or large fluctuations in the rate of change, enables the listener to focus on the work's many subtle and beguiling details."
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2CD
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FR 001-2CD
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Restocked. In 2000, Eberhard Blum (flute, alto flute, bass flute), Nils Vigeland (glockenspiel, vibraphone) and Jan Williams (piano, celesta), American composer Morton Feldman's close friends and collaborators, came together once more as The Feldman Soloists to perform Crippled Symmetry, the trio Feldman composed for them, on the 25th anniversary celebration of June in Buffalo, the festival he founded. The recording of this concert is now finally available on CD, and is destined to become the reference recording of this work. Required listening for all fans of Feldman's rich, hypnotic world of enigmatic harmony and mnemonic echo. Mastered by Denis Blackham, and presented in a card package which unfolds to reveal the musicians' "butterfly-like" arrangement on stage. "This turned out to be one of the best performances that we had ever given together. The rare and indescribable 'magic moment' of occasion and ambience seems to have inspired us. The recording of the concert belongs to my most valued sound documents. When I listened to it for the first time, my immediate reaction was: this performance ought to be available on CD. Now, ten years later, it is." --Eberhard Blum
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DVD-AUDIO
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MRDVD02
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Featured works: Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) and Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987). "As these performances of Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello amply demonstrate, however well we think we know Feldman through his statements, his music is impossible to carry in your head and remains essentially unknowable. 'Essentially' in the sense of: that is the essential thing about it. The basics are simple enough. Composed in 1981, Patterns in a Chromatic Field is for cello and piano. Feldman prefaces his note with: 'Take an object/Do something to it/Do something else to it/Do something else to it' before outlining the patterns he places within a 'chromatic field': the raw data of pitch groups, time signatures and chord durations. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello was his last piece. The motifs are arguably sparser, and certainly there are less of them than Feldman typically used; but the relationship between text and sound remains characteristically inscrutable. The published score has 34 pages paginated with orderly consistency: three systems, each with nine bars. But this visual uniformity bears no correlation to what we hear. Displaced, changing time signatures and double-bar repeats torpedo the rationality of the grid. Into that equation factor in those imponderables of structure and sound I mentioned in relation to Patterns in a Chromatic Field, and a fundamental truth about Feldman's music emerges -- however faithfully one analyses his scores, however forcefully Feldman persuades us that his music could be a sonic adjunct to the New York School painters he admired, experiencing his sounds is always quite different. " --Philip Clark
Format: DVD-audio disc, can only be played on a DVD player or computer. European PAL format only, region free.
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CD
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SR 280CD
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"In the summer of 1990, I released on Sub Rosa a recording of Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman (1926-1987). It was one of the first recordings of this long work for solo piano completed on July 23, 1981. The score I used had been published by Universal as number UE17326 in 1987. Shortly after my CD came out, Universal published a new edition. At the bottom of page 2, under a dedication to Aki Takahashi and Roger Woodward, is a small-print mention: 'corrected edition: 14.2.1991.' I disregarded it for a long time. I had carefully read, annotated, analyzed, labored over, performed live, and recorded my 1987 score. The work sounded great, the design of the edition was flawless, the composition was coherent from A to Z, and no erratum had been published. In my eyes, that score was the work. Many listeners said they liked my meditative album, and I was pretty proud of it. But there was something lingering in my mind... I went on to several other projects, and I considered the matter closed. However, much later, due to a few incomprehensible exterior signs, I decided to order a new score of Triadic Memories. I immediately noticed the 'corrected edition' mention. The score's layout looked exactly the same -- except for a tiny detail: starting on page 5, small digits start to appear above most of the repeat marks. These numbers, which were omitted in 'my' score, obviously indicate the number of times some passages should be played - not twice, but 3, 4, 5, 7, up to 11 times! This tiny notation detail has tremendous consequences on the form of the composition. Universal had not even cared to inform me of this issue. I was mortified. With incredible generosity, Sub Rosa offered me the chance to produce a new recording of this work, exactly 20 years after the first one. So here it is. I did everything possible to tap into the spirit of the 1990 recording: same piano, same recording engineer, same working method, same approach to the keyboard, but now with the right score: my own 'corrected version.' The truth is, it's all different. To me, there is no possible 'corrected version.' The 1987-1991 edition was simply a different work, one that had not been completely drawn by its maker, and which presented different issues to its performer." --Jean-Luc Fafchamps
Morton Feldman was born in New York on January 12, 1926. In 1949 the most significant meeting up to that time took place -- Feldman met John Cage, commencing an artistic association of crucial importance to music in America in the 1950s. Cage was instrumental in encouraging Feldman to have confidence in his instincts, which resulted in totally intuitive compositions. He never worked with any systems that anyone has been able to identify, working from moment to moment, from one sound to the next. His friends during the 1950s in New York included the composers Earle Brown and Christian Wolff; painters Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg; and pianist David Tudor. Today he is considered one of the most important composers of the century.
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CD
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DWAB 004CD
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2018 repress; originally released in 2001 by the Dog W/A Bone label, this release features these 2 long pieces: For Samuel Beckett and The Turfan Fragments. Performed by: The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, with Petr Kotik, conductor. For Samuel Beckett and The Turfan Fragments are Morton Feldman's only chamber orchestra compositions. Both were commissions: The Turfan Fragments by the Swiss-Italian Radio Orchestra in 1980, For Samuel Beckett by the Schönberg Ensemble, Amsterdam, in 1987. Both titles are descriptive and suggest how Feldman arrived at a particular concept for each piece. The Turfan Fragments is a succession of short sections, which could indeed be described as fragments. The title relates the composition to manuscripts from Turfan (the southwest region of present-day China), which are in the collection of the Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. These calligraphic remnants, going back to the 9th century, were brought to Germany before World War I and Feldman must have seen them while living in Berlin in 1971. In contrast, For Samuel Beckett is based on a single idea of several chord progressions unfolding continuously for almost an hour. In 1977, Beckett wrote a text for Feldman, to be used as the libretto for his opera Neither. Feldman's description of Beckett's writing most eloquently suggests what was on his mind when composing For Samuel Beckett: "here's something peculiar about it [Beckett's text]. I can't catch it. Finally I see that every line is really the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you're doing, in an almost Proustian way, is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought." Includes an 8-page booklet with liner notes from Petr Kotik and an extract from Morton Feldman from Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change). The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble; Petr Kotik, conductor.
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4CD
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DWAB 002CD
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2019 repress forthcoming. Originally released in 2000. Looking for just one Morton Feldman CD to give to someone that you like more than yourself? There's more than one correct answer to this elusive question, but this overwhelming set (closing in on 300 total minutes) is an utter classic, with paralyzing sonic power. Feldman is recognized as one of the 20th century's most influential composers. Feldman's artistic principles were shaped in the early 1950s by his association with composers John Cage, Earle Brown and David Tudor, and painters Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few. In keeping with Feldman's aesthetic privileges of scale over form, For Philip Guston, composed in memory of his late friend, expands to a monumental five hours. On the front cover of the comprehensive 4CD set is a reproduction of Feldman's portrait by Philip Guston. The 16-page liner notes include a conversation between composers Walter Zimmerman and Petr Kotik, exploring the many facets of Feldman's music. Recorded in 1995 and performed by S.E.M. Ensemble (Petr Kotik, flute, alto flute, piccolo; Joseph Kubera, piano, celeste; Chris Nappi, vibraphone, marimbaphone, glockenspiel, chimes).
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DVD-AUDIO
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MRDVD01
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The Smith Quartet (Ian Humphries, violin; Darragh Morgan, violin; Nic Pendlebury, viola; Deirdre Cooper, cello) with John Tilbury (piano) live at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, 2006.
Tracklist:
01. For John Cage, 1982 (1:29:01) (Darragh Morgan and John Tilbury)
02. Piano and String Quartet, 1985 (1:29:30)
Total playing time: 2:58:31.
"This is a video DVD, although images are only used for the DVD menu and the first 25 sec of each track. The screen will be black for the remainder of the pieces. The disk can only be played on a computer with DVD drive or DVD player. The DVD format was chosen because most of the works to appear in this Smith Squartet with John Tilbury series are too long for an uniterrupted playback in the conventional CD medium." Region: 0, PAL format.
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CD
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MDG 6131522CD
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Performed by Steffen Schleiermacher (piano). "With volume two of Feldman's late piano works, the recording is devoted to one piece dedicated to the former student and close colleague Bunita Marcus. Feldman's music never is opulent but spare and sparse with few notes that sometimes are stretched over periods of silence. Pianist Steffen Schleiermacher is a specialist in modern music for piano both as a composer and performer. His MDG recordings have garnered an amazing amount of praise."
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CD
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NW 80657CD
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"The music on this recording illustrates the essential integrity of the work of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) and one of its fundamental strengths -- its continuously unfolding unanimity of purpose. There are few composers of his generation whose first and last published work (in Feldman's case 'Journey to the End of Night' of 1949 and 'Piano and String Quartet' of 1986) span youth and final years with such a concentrated viewpoint. There are, however, landmarks in the music of Feldman that are largely technical and notational. There are the graphic pieces, the first from 1950 and the last from 1964, in which some parameter of composition is not specified (often pitch). There are the 'free duration pieces,' both solo and ensemble, in which there is instruction either for sections of the piece or for its entirety. 'False Relationships and the Extended Ending' (1968) is a late example of this kind, although 'Why Patterns?' (1978) is a variant of the principle. There are also the conventionally notated works in his oeuvre, one of which is 'The Viola in My Life' (1970). It may be that Feldman's music will always strike a certain kind of listener as idiosyncratic -- a denial of the time-honored ways in which music articulates itself. I think that Feldman was deeply offended by this response, by this notion that his music was singular because it was, as some might say, 'missing something.' Though it is true that his values of graduation can be exceedingly fine, when one enters this scale and comprehends it, something truly new and wonderful opens up in the art of music -- a world in which the relative and the absolute become engaged with themselves."
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CD
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SR 189CD
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"This new release on Sub Rosa is the third in a series of three concentrating on avant-garde piano compositions (prev. volumes: Triadic Memoris, Piano Pieces For More Than 2 Hands). American composer Morton Feldman, born 1926, is now recognized as an one of the most important composers of the 20/21st century. After he met John Cage in the late forties he developed a method of intuitive composing which allowed Feldman to work on the outside of the strict classical system. On this recording pianist Stephane Ginsburgh plays three piano compositions which capture the essence of Morton Feldman's artistry, pure moments of sound and infinity. Or as Ginsburgh quoted: 'Ask the music first and use your concentration.'"
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