October 26, 2003
By Kyle Gann
Is it really necessary for a string quartet to be six hours long? Of
course not - it would be an easy matter for someone to take a pair of
scissors to Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 and cut it down to a
far more efficient, concise, nonredundant piece of three hours or less.
But one of the points Feldman made with his usual breathtaking eloquence
is that art is one of those areas of human life in which efficiency is
not an asset. As author John Ralston Saul has argued, efficiency is not
a good thing in itself, but something we should apply only to aspects of
life we don't care about. It's the opposite of love. We want our garbage
taken out efficiently, we want our driver's license renewed efficiently,
but someone who advocated efficient child-rearing - eliciting maximum
good behavior in return for a minimum of parental attention - would be a
heartless brute. Likewise, it would be brutish to want efficiency in our
artistic experience, and Feldman's panoramic quartet is a celebration of
inefficiency, of what art could become had we only world enough and time.
Just in case you've missed out on the last 25 years of contemporary
music - and I could hardly blame you, so little attention is drawn to it
- Morton Feldman was the greatest composer of the late 20th century. Or
at least he looks that way. More significant than the accuracy or
prematurity of the assessment is the fact that a remarkable percentage
of young composers would concur with it. In the current Babel of musical
styles, Feldman is almost the only composer (another might be Nancarrow,
whose mechanical methods of writing for player piano, however, have not
been as widely assimilated) whose music appeals across stylistic
boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts,
electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ
artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels. His cross-cultural appeal
comes from the fact that he created a postmodern sense of form - long,
slow musical continua played in uniformly quiet dynamics - while holding
onto the basic modernist pitch vocabulary of dissonant intervals. In
other words, he deftly sidestepped the crisis of ever-increasing
modernist complexity without giving in to what was seen as the vapid
anti-intellectualism of minimalist consonance and tonality. Even more
than that, by writing in his late years works of a continuous 90
minutes, three hours, four hours, even six hours in length, he reclaimed
for the disspirited modern composer a sustainable measure of magnificent
ambition, a pride in occupying an audience's time. Quietly but
vehemently he asserted for all of us that new music is worth sitting
still for, practicalities be damned. In addition to which, as his friend
John Cage said, his music is "almost too beautiful."
The Second Quartet, dating from 1983, is a vast musical quilt of
recurring sonic objects - ostinatos (repeating melodic snippets) of four
chromatic notes over and over; brief, returning atonal melodies;
rotating progressions of three chords with a waltz-like feel; Webernesqe
motives that cancel each other out in quiet arguments; quick, rustling
pizzicato textures; even one extended moment of jazzy syncopation. The
work was given a truncated, hurried runthrough by the Kronos Quartet at
New Music America in Miami in 1988 (the full piece was beyond their
physical stamina), but received its real full-scale premiere in recent
years from Manhattan's fearless Flux Quartet, who were brought back to
recap the achievement in Zankel Hall October 25 as part of the festival
"When Morty Met John" (as in Feldman and Cage). The instantaneous
standing ovation and outburst of bravos that greeted the Flux players
after six hours of pianissimo intensity was as rousing a recognition of
heroism as I've ever heard at a concert. Violinists Tom Chiu and Jesse
Mills, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Dave Eggar played from 6:12 to
12:05 without any but the most momentary break, yet if they were any
more tired during the last hour than during the first there was no
audible sign of it, just an occasional neck or shoulder stretch. Hour
after hour they played harmonies and little fragments of counterpoint in
exact rhythmic unison, as with one heart, and with the extraordinarily
sustained tension that Feldman's music requires. Through this and other
recent feats, the Flux - if they can only keep their personnel together
- have proved themselves an American Arditti Quartet: not as hip, pop,
or vernacular as the quartet Ethel, perhaps, but the people you need to
bring in when someone's given the quartet repertoire a particularly
difficult nut to crack.
A couple years ago I wrote an article about the String Quartet II for
the New York Times - about the best thing I've ever written for them, I
think - which can be found here (for a small charge via Qpass), and I
refer the reader to that for a fuller description of the piece. (Also,
Chris Villars maintains a fantastically helpful Morton Feldman home
page, including a list of works that as far as I know isn't published
elsewhere.) What interests me more today, finally having heard the
Second Quartet live, is the strange social situation of being
psychically trapped in a hall with dozens of other audience members and
a six-hour sonic boa constrictor. Before beginning, cellist Eggar
invited the audience to move around, and even to come up onstage and
occupy the rugs and extra chairs that had been provided. When he was
done, an audience member shouted "Good luck!," and Eggar responded,
"Good luck to you too. You have to work as hard as we do, or it isn't
fair." There were those (besides the quartet, I mean) who sat in one
place for the whole 353 minutes, but most seemed to enjoy the freedom to
move, and as soon as someone left a position on those rugs, it was
quickly filled again. I doubt that anyone scoped out more acoustic
vantage points than Times critic John Rockwell, who's had a long history
with the piece (he tried to bring the Kronos to play it at Lincoln
Center, and they reneged), and who checked out Zankel Hall from every
angle. Me, I value comfort over acoustics, and I moved only once, to a
side seat that offered leg room.
You enter into any concert with some expectation of when you'll be
getting up again, but there's a special kind of crisis in knowing that
the music is going to last six hours, nonstop. Such music mandates more
informality than the general classical concert: the fact that I could
have laid down was comforting, even if I didn't avail myself of it. At
any given moment a few audience members were in motion, but everyone was
as quiet and reverent as a room of typically clumsy homo sapiens could
possibly be. For me the most difficult point was around 8 PM, the point
at which a normal concert would have ended. I took a restroom break, and
a longer one around 9:45. At 9 I counted the audience members: there
were 149, not counting the people I couldn't see in the balcony above
me, in a hall that seated (I was told) 750. That was a slightly smaller
crowd than we had started with, I think, though in the evening's final
two hours it appeared to me that we didn't lose a soul. Everyone in that
hall knew what they had come for, and even for the one or two people who
read the Times and Village Voice while listening, staying to the end was
patently a badge of honor. (Not at all like the New York premiere of the
hour-long Feldman First Quartet in 1979, which, according to Sandow's
Voice review, lost much of its audience.) I really wasn't bothered by
Zankel Hall's soft rumble of subway trains that's been so widely written
about - I'm used to that from lots of New York venues - but there was
one bad, long moment in which a booming bass line from the Emmylou
Harris concert upstairs imposed a tonality on Feldman's texture that he
never intended. I like Emmylou Harris as much as anyone (that's a
bald-faced lie, actually), but "no C&W during Feldman festivals" might
be a sane policy for Carnegie to pursue.
By 10:30 something interesting had definitely happened to the audience.
Fidgeting stopped, and focus had palpably increased. Sleepiness was very
little in evidence; my only bout with it came in the first half-hour, I
having just finished dinner. In that last 90 minutes the audience was
reduced, or elevated, to a kind of religious awe, or freed from the
usual need for action, as if resigned to some fate. Musical ideas
repeated, but there was no way to keep track of chronology. Was that
melody one from the beginning of the work, or had it only occurred a few
moments ago? Like walking though a vast, undulating prairie landscape,
we had only the vaguest and contradictory notion about where we were -
until about 11:55, when suddenly the music switched to quiet chords that
had an indistinct air of finality about them. Intermittent silences grew
longer, and finally one arrived that seemed endless, until we broke it
with a fortississimo of applause.
Unlike Feldman's music for piano, percussion, voices, and other things
(For Philip Guston, Three Voices, Triadic Memories, Palais de Mari, Why
Patterns?, Crippled Symmetry), his music for string quartet isn't pretty
- it's grainy, rough, scratchy with harmonics and occasionally even
harsh. It's phenomenal how little his conception of string quartet
changed over a lifetime: so many passages in String Quartet II echo
images from Structures, the repetitive little quartet he wrote in 1951
and which establishes his claim as a precursor of the minimalists. There
are early passages in SQII that just wave back and forth on a whole-step
for many seconds at a time, and several times in the first couple of
hours I couldn't concentrate well, and started wondering what I was
doing trapped in Zankel Hall on a lovely, crisp evening. But by that
final two hours I was, however, not exactly caught up in the music, but
surrounded by it, subdued by it, quelled. If I could have the magical
experience of that final two hours without going through the first four,
I would, but how would that be possible? The music's effect is
cumulative, creeping into your soul as it hardly deigns to notice you
exist. And by the time those final chords come, filling you with an
unexpected panic that the music is about to end, the sonic images you
remember have become - almost too beautiful... almost too beautiful.
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