What Does Music Owe Us?

 

Right now I am listening to Piano and String Quartet by American composer Morton Feldman. It is well over an hour which is actually short by the standards of his later works, some of which extend to Wagnerian length. We are used to thinking about music as, at very least, some kind of event. By this I mean an exciting, interesting, diverting, consoling event. This event is embodied in certain patterns. One of these is melody. Alas, there is almost nothing in the Piano Quintet that could be called a melody even in the most basic sense of that word. Well, we also like rich satisfying harmonies, at least if we are of European extraction. There are only the barest outlines of harmony in this piece. There is a pulse, I suppose, though it is not the kind of pulse we could consider a discernible rhythm. There is nothing to hum here and nothing to dance or even move to. A composer of the last century would expect complex and innovative musical forms using advanced compositional techniques. Feldman refuses us this too. His music generally defies analysis and if a music theorist has nothing to analyze he may well wonder what it is he is supposed to appreciate or enjoy. Does Feldman play with interesting dynamic contrasts? No, his pieces barely rise above a whisper. Are there passages of virtuosity we can appreciate? No. Do tempo vary? No, alas, his pieces move at a glacial pace. Events happen but they are pointillist clusters of sound that seem to have little overt relation to each other. They are, in fact, like individual brush strokes or splashes or drips of paint. Feldman, it seems, was happy to associate his art with abstract painting.

We might wonder, then, if some contract exists between listener and composer that Feldman has violated. What, in fact is he giving us? What do we have a right to expect from him? What can he demand from us? Is his music anything but wallpaper? Following Satie, the father of muzak, Feldman has sometimes welcomed the comparison. To quote Cage, he has nothing to say and he is saying it. Of course, as you probably suspected by now, there are those, myself included, who find works like Piano and String Quartet or Triadic Memories or Coptic Light achingly beautiful and indeed a deep meditative experience. Are we fooling ourselves about that? Is there too little there to justify our transports? I scarcely know. Should we be able to justify our response to music of this sort which eschews just about every conventional marker of artistic excellence? If this is good music, if it CAN be good music, then what on earth is music? If this is excellence what is excellence and why does it matter? Perhaps the answer lies in the one demand that Feldman DOES make on his musicians which is on their concentration in sustaining his tones at the preferred dynamic and tempo for hours on end. Feldman is said to have yelled at musicians who played his music too loudly and this must be profoundly taxing in a five hour work like his String Quartet Number 2. Perhaps this unique kind of attention is the thing we participate in as listeners: the intense focus on single sounds (or small clusters of sounds like two or three note patterns) as almost unique events without any sense of moving forward or backward in the piece or being anywhere at any given time. Perhaps this takes ‘genius’ after all though if so it is of an unusual sort and in fact, a deeply self-effacing sort.