liner notes

Morton Feldman All Piano (1950 - 1986)
John Tilbury

4 CD set
LondonHALL do13

CD1

Early Piano 1950-1963
recorded 95/04, 96/10: Innsbruck,
Tonstudio Ströher,
Klavier: Steinway NY 1926

1. Piano Piece (To Philip Guston) 1963 3:59
2. Three Pieces for Piano 1954
I 1:36
3. II 1:29
4. III 1:37
5. Extensions 3 1952 6:20
6. Intermission 6 for one or two pianos 1953 3:21
7. Intersection 2 1953 7:59
8. Last Pieces 1959
I 2:58
9. II 1:19
10. III 4:27
11. IV 1:16
12.Piano Piece 1956 A (for Cynthia) 1:52
13.Piano Piece 1956 B 1:58
14 Intermission 5 1952 4:10
15.Piano Piece 1955 1:24
16.Piano Piece 1964 7:07
17.Two Intermissions 1950
I 1:25
18. II 1:23
19.Vertical Thoughts 4 for piano 1963 1:52
20.Intersection 3 1953 2:45
21.Piano Piece 1952 3:35

CD

recorded: 96/10, 97/03; Innsbruck
Tonstudio Ströher
Steinway NY 1926

1. Piano 77 28:55
2. Palais de Mari 1986 23:58

CD3

recorded: 96/10, 97/03; Innsbruck,
Tonstudio Ströher
Steinway NY 1926

1. Triadic memories 1981 79:28

CD4

recorded: 90/10; Innsbruck
Tonstudio Ströher
Steinway NY 1926

1. For Bunita Marcus 1985 77:00

Producer/Recording: gerhard Crepaz. recording Engineer: Hanno Ströher

Morton Feldman's Early Piano Pieces …

… neglected for a number of years, have poetic and painterly qualities which place them right at the heart of his extensive output, They are utterly transparent and quite without vanity, Predominantly slow and very quiet, they are also rich, subtle and elegant.

For those who know Feldman's music, the reference to slowness and quietness seems both unnecessary and inadequate. There is usually a pulse (of a sort), and one not far from a heartbeat. Where there is sufficient regularity (as in Last Pieces, for example), notes can be left unstemmed, with grace notes brought into play to effect chords with lie beyond the span of two (large) hands, or to serve as refinements. This gentle syncopation can lend the music a sort of jazz "feel", given the added-note character of much of the chordal material. Where the notation takes more conventional form, a regular three-in-a-bar metre is used. This ensures an easy, completely natural flow to the music There is no need for a time signature, This metre is so familiar that (like an old suit) it becomes invisible. Indeed, in Piano Piece 1952, the bar-lines are dispensed with, leaving the procession of dotted crotchets not stranded, but floating free. The impression is one of waltz-like, if unpredictable, circularity.

There are always exceptions The most notable! are the two "graph" pieces, Intersection 2 and Intersection 3. Feldman viewed the graph piece as "a totally abstract sonic adventure". Numbers within boxes stipulate the number of notes to be played, but there Is no indication of precise pitch. The position of the box indicates register (high, middle or low). Dynamics are free; and there is rhythmic freedom within the confines of the box. In practice, given the pace of both pieces, with each box lasting about a third of a second, this rhythmic freedom allows for little more than occasional displacement.

Piano Piece (1964) is also exceptional. It is a grand and spacious piece. Metric and non-metric passages alternate. There are stemless notes alongside notes of precise duration and grace notes of two types (white and black). The piece is marked by imposing silences. The sounds both speak for themselves and articulate the silences. The changing metres lend the score an air of formality, even a semblance of structure. In this respect, it seems to anticipate the grid-based concerns of the long pieces of later years .

No composer's works fall neatly into "periods", and Feldman's gave a greater consistency of character than most.

There are shifts of emphasis, of course, and the contrasts of scale between, say, the lyrical Piano Piece 1955 (a single page) and For Bunita Marcus (1985) is extraordinary. In the final works, Feldman develops his interest in rhythm and form. The early pieces aspire whole-heartedly to the condition of painting. He once said, "The new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore." Many of Feldman's friends were painters and there was a strong temperamental affinity: "Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft".

Philip Guston was, for many years, one of Morton Feldman's closest friends. Piano Piece (to Phillip Guston) and Vertical Thoughts 4 both date from 1963 and suggest a loosening-up, a freer use of the medium, a move away from the fragmentation, delicacy, liveliness and linear leanings of the Two Intermissions of 1950 and the Three Pieces of 1954 towards a fuller sound.

A surprising feature of some of the early piano pieces is the use of loud sounds In Piano Piece 1956B, they point to the possibilities of touch. In Extensions 3, following a distinctive, stratospheric opening and stretches of repeated notes and repeated figures, they can seem almost dramatic Intermission 5 dates from the same year as Extensions 3 (1952), and is similar in its use of repetition. The ending is notable for its sense of repose.

Morton Feldman's music celebrates pitch and touch. We cherish it for the character of its pitch material and its lightness of touch. This is composing of a high order. Feldman may have written disparagingly of "the composer's vested interest in his craft", but his own craftsmanship was impeccable. It takes precision and care to float the music over the bar-lines; to acknowledge pulse and yet somehow, through rhythm, to transcend it.

Howard Skempton, 2nd October 1996

On Playing Feldman by John Tilbury

Almost all Feldman's music is slow and soft. Only at first sight is this a limitation. I see it rather as a narrow door, to whose dimensions one has to adapt oneself (as in Alice in Wonderland) before one can pass through it into the state of being that is expressed in Feldman's music. Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour which is the material of the music. When one has passed through the narrow door and got accustomed to the dim tight, one realises the range of his imagination and the significant differences that distinguish one piece from another…

Feldman sees the sounds as reverberating endlessly, never getting lost, changing their resonances as they die away, or rather do not die away, but recede from our ears, and soft because softness is compelling, because an insidious invasion of our senses is more effective than a frontal attack, because our ears must strain to catch the music, they must become more sensitive before they perceive the world of sound in which Feldman's music takes place.

It seems wholly appropriate to quote these words ot Cornelius Cardew from the early sixties. In an interview in the summer of '85 Feldman recalled, "Cornelius played my music beautifully and I don't think anybody wrote about my early music as beautifully as he did."

In fact, Cardew's description refers equally well to the later works. Notwithstanding all the profound changes Feldman's music underwent during the last ten years; for it is above all to this world of sound that the music owes its strength of continuity and its unique quality.

As performers o contemporary music we can move comfortably from Boulez to Carter. to Henze, and we can compare and contrast their methods, techniques, modes of expression, indeed their personalities; but essentially they inhabit the same musical world, a world moreover inherited from their great predecessors. For the mode of sound production in which we have been trained over the years through tuition and examinations at our conservatories still stands us in good stead. We can retain our traditional, time-honoured methods of phrasing and articulation, too. If we can make sense of the HAMMERKLAVIER sonata we can also make sense ot Boulez' 2nd piano sonata. But above all what characterizes these composers is their acceptance of and dependence on received instrumental sound, the execution of which is taught and honoured in our music colleges and which bears an aesthetic which intervenes at the most crucial stage of music-making, at the very point of production, to produce a quality of reassuring familiarity and respectability.

This is what Feldman was referring to when he remarked, Most of the music you hear in London is official music, as if it was written for the London Sinfonietta… For London read also Paris, or Milan, or Cologne, or Vienna… In the hands ot executant experts the authority of received sound will legitimize and sanction even the most brutal extravagances of modernism, such as the monstrous serial edifices spawned through Darmstadt in the fifties.

And herein lies the world of difference between Feldman and, in particular, his European peers; because through the infamous softness and slowness of his music and a radical commitment to the muscular physical and essentially sensual qualities of the art of performance Feldman thwarts the attempts at expressive reduction and control which our conservatory training operates.

When David Tudor or Cardew played Feldman what you heard and experienced with great intensity was the limb as it performed, the fingerpad — that most erotic part of a pianist's body — and the resulting sound was raw and thrilling. In too many performances one is all too conscious of a culture intervening between body and instrument.

Tudor and Cardew were virtuosi, which has nothing to do with velocity or petty digital scramble (Barthes), by virtue of the extraordinary sounds they drew from the piano. Their performances steered a hazardous course generating risk and excitement: the phrasing and articulation 'situational', determined spontaneously by the idiosyncrasies of individual sounds at particular moments, by ambiance and acoustics, by the imperfections in the instrument and the dimensions of the room. And this is Feldman's way.

From ancient China there is a description ot a vibrato technique: Remarkable is the ting-yin. where the vacillating movement of the finger should be so subtle as to be hardly noticeable. Some handbooks say that one should not move the finger at all, but let the timbre be influenced by the pulsation ot the blood in the fingertips pressing the string down on the board a little more heavily than usual.

Such extreme sensitivity of touch is of the essence in a performance of Feldman's music. In the piano pieces the depressed key is gently eased back to position to minimise the obtrusive sound of the key mechanism, time is allowed for the minutest of harmonics to resound, and at the ends of phrases fingers steal away from the keys noiselessly.

Repetition is one of the formal characteristics of FOR BUNITA MARCUS; sometimes immediate and sequential, often through the deployment of the same melodic and harmonic material throughout the whole piece. The repetition of a phrase may be subtly varied through rhythmic displacement, or the lengths between a number of repetitions are varied. In FOR BUNITA MARCUS the metre is constantly changing. The purpose is not rhythmic characterisation, however; rather it is the way Feldman controls and influences the flow of the music: a way of notating rubato. And in the final section he brings the music almost, but not quite, to a standstill: phrases fragmented, separated by the only (near) silences in the whole work which is played with just two changes of pedal.

The ending foreshadows the last measures ot PALAIS DE MARl-—Feldman's last work for piano; the rising intervals gently propel the music upwards and away, floating through an immense space.

In rehearsal Feldman would help his performers by describing the sounds as sourceless. He wanted them to take on that precious quality of transience, of uncatchability (Cardew's word), to be free but not arbitrary, elusive but compelling.

We are reminded of an old Taoist dictum:

The greatest music has the most tenuous notes.