Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Trios
Why Patterns? (1979)
Crippled Symmetry (1982)
For Philip Guston (1984)
GBSR Duo (George Barton, percussion; Siwan Rhys, piano/celeste)
Taylor MacLennan (flutes)
rec. 2025, Wathen Hall, St Paul’s School, Barnes, UK
Reviewed from a WAV download 44kHz/16-bit
Another Timbre AT251 [6 CDs: 400]

In the last ten years of his life, Morton Feldman returned to the same unusual combination of instruments three times. Why Patterns? (1979), Crippled Symmetry (1982) and For Philip Guston (1984) are all scored for flutes, piano/celesta and percussion. The resulting sound is immediately startling: an affectless, bare timbre, but one which also possesses a glacial beauty. Where is colour in all this? In his fabulously entertaining Vonnegutesque essay, The Future of Local Music, Feldman recounts how an elderly composer in Berlin told him he found a certain Feldman composition ‘too colourful’. Feldman’s famous retort was ‘I’m not interested in colour’. He goes on, ‘My definition of composition is: the right note in the right place with the right instrument.’ We have here then, a very deliberately chosen combination possessing a highly distinctive timbre, as opposed to ‘colour’, but in theory at least also a potentially blanched sonic experience that could easily pall over a prolonged period. In this thrilling new release of all three Trio pieces, though, there is absolutely no danger of the listener tiring, for which the composer and the three performers must take huge credit.

Feldman set out to do different things in the Trios. Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetry are both, to some extent, explorations of rhythmic and timbral patterning, but in different ways. Why Patterns? deliberately places the three instruments out of sync from the off, Feldman writing that the ‘very close, but never precisely synchronised notation allows for a more flexible pacing’. To go back to the Berlin encounter above, ‘the right place’ here is only horizontally located, and, as for the right notes and instruments, it’s fascinating to hear how Feldman very deliberately gives to each instrument material he considers idiomatic—there is no interchange with others in the Trio. In this performance, George Barton, Siwan Rhys and Taylor MacLennan give us a breathtaking perspective of the many patterns devised by the composer. The crucial change which occurs in the final pages of the piece, where all three instruments are suddenly brought together, playing rhythmically congruent descending semitones, is perfectly realised here.     

Feldman wrote Crippled Symmetry having thought a lot about patterns in Middle Eastern rugs and how we saw them mediated by our experience of modern Western art. In his essay ‘Crippled Symmetry’ (largely unforthcoming in reference to the composition of the same name), he reflects on how the even/uneven, symmetrical/asymmetrical patterns on a small Turkish rug reminded him of Matisse’s ‘mastery of his seesaw balance between movement and stasis’. The performers here are attuned to every temporal shift of that balance, their separate progress evoking a beguiling combination of déjà vu and a glimpse of what’s to come. That’s in part made possible by the fact that tonal and rhythmic material is shared—unlike Why Patterns?—and is most vividly demonstrated in two pages of the score which have all instruments playing identical rhythmic patterns, but because of the asynchronous nature of the score, reaching them very considerably apart in timing terms, each arrival adjusting one’s sense of that equilibrium. There’s another critical consideration again, I think, in the approach to the piece as a whole—more balancing—between what I’ll call monumentality for lack of a better word, and delicacy. What strikes me most about this performance is how every change of pattern over the piece’s ninety minutes both contributes to the austerely beautiful edifice that Feldman is constructing and is an exquisite experience in itself.

‘Programmatic elements in late Feldman’ sounds like an uninviting PhD thesis, but we’re forced to confront them in For Philip Guston. Guston was, of course, a highly important figure in twentieth-century art and also Feldman’s closest friend. Their friendship ended abruptly when Guston moved from abstract back to more figurative art. Asked by Guston what he thought of a painting in the new style at a major exhibition in 1970, Feldman muttered, ‘Well, just let me look at it for another minute,’ and ‘with that’, he wrote, ‘our friendship was over’. The two never reconciled before Guston died in 1980. What Feldman set out to do in For Philip Guston was to tell the story of his friend via his work (which Feldman knew intimately and on which he wrote a superb critical essay), but also Feldman’s own story. In a touching pre-concert talk before a performance of the piece in 1986 Feldman said that he wanted to tell ‘“a tale of two people”, two types of artists that are telling their stories continually, either with notes or with images or with styles and fluctuating from one to another’.

His execution of that narrative was radical in several ways. First, length. The piece is over four and a half hours long, Feldman feeling that it was only possible to achieve his aims in a long work. Second, language. Feldman uses diatonic elements as well as his own idiomatic harmonic vocabulary. The opening of the work, for example, is predicated on the pitches C-G-A flat-E flat, establishing a sense of C minor but also serving as a cypher for John Cage, who first introduced Feldman to Guston’s art in 1951. Finally, formal. The work’s second half is broadly a varied repetition of the first. So many possibilities arise from all of this.

Are the tonal elements representative of Guston’s return to figuration? Are the more obviously Feldmanic elements there to relate the composer’s ‘tale’, or is it more complicated than that? (Almost certainly.) And what of the work’s form? Feldman intriguingly explained the second half thus, ‘If I had my life to live all over again, would I live it the same way?’ If that’s so, then I wonder if there’s any sense in that second half of a worldly reconciliation?

In the performance on these new discs, all of these questions and more make for a deliciously ambiguous and rewarding encounter when coupled with playing of such sensitivity and skill. Sometimes I felt close to something that I could absolutely parse, a coherence that was within my grasp, only for it to dissipate and reform as an apparently unconnected idea. At other times, I found myself pleasurably caught up in timbral mesh whose existence was surely outside the programmatic, something purely aesthetic and self-justifying. And the experience during the second part of the piece, where refracted memories of music one had heard sometime before were triggered, was both unsettling and exciting. Oh, and length. Well, let me quote Feldman one last time: ‘It’s a short four hours…there is an [unspecified] hour-and-ten minutes piece which is a very long hour-and-ten minute piece—but this? This piece doesn’t give you the feeling that it’s four hours.’ It assuredly doesn’t in this performance.

I’ve talked a little bit about each of the three pieces and tried to give some sense of what is behind them and the exemplary nature of the performances. I think I need to amplify, though, my sense of what a gift the performers and Another Timbre have given us, enabling us to actually hear this extraordinary music. In his excellent booklet notes, the Trio’s percussionist George Barton talks about how Feldman brings listeners ‘inside the tent’, enabling them to share the experience of the performers, and that’s absolutely what happens here through the skill and commitment of GBSR Duo and Taylor MacLennan —playing with astonishing technical ability, rhythmically and dynamically —and the excellently engineered recording produced by Simon Reynell.

Dominic Hartley