During a recent performance of “Triadic Memories,” a solo piano piece by Morton Feldman, the composer and pianist Amy Williams looked at the next page of music and thought she was lost.
Williams has been playing Feldman’s music for almost 30 years. Her father, the percussionist Jan Williams, was good friends with Feldman, premiering some of his most important works. When Amy was a child, she would listen as the composer told stories at their dinner table in Buffalo, N.Y. She has played “Triadic Memories” 10 times in the past three years.
But the piece is about “formalizing a disorientation of memory,” she said in an interview, and the music had disoriented even her. Although her fingers played the right notes, she experienced a kind of unmooring from the moment onstage.
“Did I already play this?” she recalled wondering. Was it new? Did she play it yesterday, or today?
“It messes with your whole sense of time and memory,” she said, “in such fascinating ways.”
Feldman was born in New York 100 years ago and died in 1987. The son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, he was an unmistakably American musical voice and one of the most important composers of the 20th century. In his time, many composers were preoccupied with structural rigor. His quietly sensual works were humanist, exploring the common yet profound experiences of distorted memory, wonder and loss.
His influence on music has arguably outstripped that of his mentor, the great downtown philosopher-composer John Cage.
“He’s actually eclipsed Cage in terms of music,” said Ryan Dohoney, a professor of musicology at Northwestern University who has written two books on Feldman. “Cage’s ideas are more important, but Feldman’s music is more important in terms of what people actually want to listen to and play.”
This is an unlikely trajectory for a kid from Queens whose family worked in the clothing business. When Feldman was a child, his father, Irving Feldman, had a job in the garment district. Later, he opened a factory near LaGuardia Airport that manufactured children’s coats; Feldman worked there well into adulthood.
As a child, Feldman would imitate Jewish folk melodies on the piano, and he began composing his own pieces at 9. At 12, he started piano lessons with Vera Maurina Press, a Russian pianist who had known Scriabin. As a teenager, Feldman attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan.
Though money was tight, his parents bought him a piano. “You can’t imagine what that price meant, and I’ll never forget another thing,” Feldman later told an interviewer. “They didn’t come along and tell me which one, what color, anything. I picked it out myself.”
When Feldman was in his early 20s, he attended a performance of Webern’s Symphony (Op. 21) at Carnegie Hall. Most of the audience hated the piece. Feldman went outside to catch his breath, and he spotted Cage.
“Wasn’t that beautiful?” Feldman asked him. It was his entry into the downtown arts scene.
The moment wasn’t quite as serendipitous as Feldman later made it seem; he and Cage already had many friends in common. But Feldman loved telling stories, and the people he met through Cage — artists like the composer Christian Wolff and the painter Philip Guston — profoundly shaped his approach to music. Feldman would go to the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village at 6 p.m. and leave at 3 a.m., talking about art and especially painting.
He was a big, gregarious man who liked to hear himself talk. Yet his music is inward, haunting and coolly beautiful. “I can’t think of an example in history of a composer whose personality was quite so different from his music,” Amy Williams said.
In 1972, Feldman joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he got to know Jan Williams. (As a teenager, Williams once saw Feldman talking to the composer Edgard Varèse at Town Hall but was too shy to approach those music legends.) Eventually they became musical collaborators and often toured together.
Feldman traveled in 1977 to Iran with Williams and his trio members, Eberhard Blum and Nils Vigeland, for the Shiraz Arts Festival. Feldman bought a rug as a wedding present for a nephew at the local bazaar. Back in Buffalo, he liked to show Williams his latest carpet purchases. “He’d be down on the floor with a cigarette hanging in his mouth,” Williams said, “and the ashes dropping on this incredibly expensive rug.”
He became an obsessive collector of carpets. His music reflected that fascination: Its patterns seem repetitive at first, but on closer examination they reveal constant small variations shaped by the human hand. Feldman enlivened his phrases with small adjustments, changing a note, skewing a rhythm and adding or subtracting a voice. That makes even his longest works feel supple and alive.
Feldman’s late works were preoccupied with the unpredictable workings of a listener’s memory. They became longer, which Amy Williams said his outsider status gave him the courage to try. “He had that kind of confidence in his materials that maybe comes from being an autodidact,” she said. “He was not following what a teacher told him to do, but he trusted his own instincts.”
That confidence sometimes struck others as arrogance. In 1970, Feldman went to see a Guston exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, where the painter was showing newly figurative works. When Guston asked Feldman what he thought of them, the composer, who adored Guston’s abstract pieces, hesitated. They never saw each other again.
Though Feldman loved paintings, his vision was always extremely limited, which shaped the way he composed. Writing at the piano, he had to hunch over the instrument to see the keys. For Williams, the low volume and lack of accents in Feldman’s music reflect his need to put some separation between his ears and the instrument.
His vision meant that he could write only one page of music at a time. “He turned the page, and it would go away, and he couldn’t see it,” Williams said. “But what he did was remember parts of it.”
Feldman’s late works, the composer Dmitri Kourliandski said, are about “the trial of recovering memory, and the difference between the recovered memory and the real.”
In “Triadic Memories” (1981), Feldman makes listener and performer alike question their memories. The piece lasts nearly two hours, with fragile phrases woven into an elaborate and often dissonant tapestry. Near the middle, the pianist repeats two alternating chords. The first of them sounds strangely familiar — because it’s tonal.
He repeats this pattern seven times, and then nine times. After that, we never hear it again. And because “Triadic Memories” is not a tonal piece, that chord seems increasingly strange the more time passes. Remembering it after another hour of dissonant music is like trying to reconstruct a dream in the afternoon.
In “Three Voices” (1982), Feldman simulates the sudden reappearance of a life-changing memory. This hourlong work is scored for a female singer, accompanied by two more parts, prerecorded by the same vocalist and played through loudspeakers. The first 20 minutes of the piece are a song without words. Its austere counterpoint expands, contracts and changes register. Hints of melody rise out of gentle clusters.
Then the performers sing a line from “Wind,” a poem by Feldman’s friend Frank O’Hara, who died at 40 after he was hit by a car on Fire Island. “Who’d have thought,” they sing, “that snow falls.”
The shift from wordless vowels to plain-spoken poetry is such a revelation that it’s like seeing snow fall for the first time. And Feldman makes it hard to predict when the change will happen, so it stays surprising. “Three Voices” allows the listener to repeatedly regain something like a child’s wonder.
His String Quartet No. 2 (1983) simulates the erosion of memory. At roughly five hours, it’s probably the longest quartet ever composed. Forty minutes in, the musicians play a pristine chorale for about four minutes. At the time, it feels generous; it’s easy to take the music’s beauty for granted.
Afterward, the chorale repeats only in “ghostly forms,” Dohoney said, and you start to miss it intensely. He has heard the whole quartet live three times. He cried every time.
“You’re given this beautiful thing that’s totally tear-jerking,” he said, “and then you never get it back.”
There is so much time between the abbreviated fragments of the chorale that it’s easy to forget exactly what it sounded like and only remember that it was beautiful. The work’s structure captures the experience of relying on fallible memory when it is the only connection to a person you loved.
“It feels like this really intense sense of loss,” Dohoney said. “It’s very weird that music does that, but beautiful that it can happen.”
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