Feldman's paradox

feldman …consists in the fact that a corpulent, jovial, and talkative man is writing music at the limits of audibility. In a century as noisy as ours, Morton Feldman chose to be silent and soft as snow.

Feldman began composing as early as the 1940s, although his early works (often marked by a certain influence of Alexander Scriabin) are stylistically very different from what he would compose later, and which would make him universally known for his highly personal language, different from most of his contemporaries.

It was after his meeting with John Cage that Feldman began to write music that was unrelated to the techniques of the past, nor to those in vogue in those same years (particularly structuralism), using unconventional musical notation systems (often based on "grids" or other graphic elements), delegating the choice of certain parameters to the performer (or to chance) (sometimes Feldman would determine only the timbre and register in the score, leaving the choice of the (He sometimes simply specified the number of notes to be played at certain times, without specifying which ones.)

During that period, marked by his interest in chance, Feldman also applied elements derived from probability theory to his compositions, drawing inspiration from certain works by Cage such as Music of Changes.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, and then definitively from 1967, out of a need for greater precision in the control of his music and to prevent the particular notation from being misinterpreted as an invitation to improvisation, he returned to traditional musical notation. Due to his frequent use of repetition, he was often considered a precursor of minimalism.

He often found inspiration in the work of his painter friends linked to abstract expressionism, so much so that in the 1970s he composed numerous pieces (often around twenty minutes long) under this specific influence (including Rothko Chapel from 1971, a piece written for the building of the same name that houses works by Mark Rothko, which you can listen to in the video. The paintings are, in fact, the work of Mark Rothko, who is also seen in person at the end of the video. The instrumentation is soprano, contralto, choir, viola, percussion, and celesta).

In 1977, he composed his only opera, Neither, based on a text by Samuel Beckett.

From the late 1970s, he began producing very long works (rarely shorter than half an hour, and often much longer), generally composed of a single movement, where the concept of duration is dilated to the point of almost wanting to cancel the very perception of time; these works include Violin and String quartet (1985, approximately two hours), For Philip Guston (1984, approximately four hours), up to the extreme String quartet II from 1983, whose duration well exceeds five hours (without any pause). Its first complete performance was given in 1999 at the Cooper Union in New York by the Flux Quartet, who also recorded the same piece in 2003 (for a total duration of 6 hours and 7 minutes). As is typical of his late production, this piece does not present any change of mood, remaining almost entirely at extremely reduced dynamics (piano or pianissimo); Feldman, moreover, has stated in recent years that low-intensity sounds (quiet sounds) were the only ones that interested him.
[partly from Wikipedia]

Morton Feldman – Neither, Opera in one act (1977)
text by Samuel Beckett
Sarah Aristidou, soprano
ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien
Roland Kluttig, conductor

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