CDOTD 10/1/2024

 Morton Feldman: Triadic Memories (Mode)

I don't remember where I bought this

There are so may composers I admire whose music sounds nothing like mine, that I wish I could compose like them. Messiaen, Xenakis, at times Frank Zappa and Charles Mingus. I've accepted that I have my voice, modest as it may be. I'm comfortable composing largely in a jazz idiom, working with melodies and sometimes chord changes. If I try to write something that sounds like those composers, I will sound like an imitator at best, or more likely a lame, limp version of what they do.

Morton Feldman definitely fits that category, maybe more than any of them. I couldn't possibly compose something like his music and feel confident that it's anything but a bad version of what he does. I listen to the music, sometimes follow the score, and don't know how he pulls off what he does at times. 

In my more youthful days, I was fanatically enthusiastic about John Cage's work. I loved much of the music (still do) but I was really interested in the idea of creating systems for music making. There are of course many systematic methods in composition. I mean in the sense that the composition would have methods, have commonalities from performance to performance, but could also be very different in each performance and still maintain that sense of its composition. (I feel like I'm not explaining that well.) I loved the philosophy of Cage's music. His book Silence is absolutely essentially reading in my opinion, even if you don't agree with anything he writes in it. 

In my more advanced years I've been listening to far more Feldman, particularly the later works. He doesn't make is easy, considering their sometimes extreme length. I've had on this particular work streamed over Youtube several times now, with the score synchronized. I don't remember who the performer was; in the case of this CD edition, it's Marilyn Nonken. I'm not one to generally compare different performances of the same piece, but I hear subtle differences. It's probably the rhythm.

I also happen to have checked out the score from the library. It's there, you know? I hope a subsequent edition of this score has been corrected, because this one doesn't include the number of repetitions on repeated passages. I can see I've followed along in the past, because I wrote in pencil for a few pages the number of repeats, to give up at a certain point after writing "3X?". (I think it was two, actually.) An important detail to have been left off from the original manuscript! I understand John Tilbury recorded this work too, but used this edition of the score and only played each repetition twice. Oh well. 

One thing that has definitely been retained from the original is Feldman's strange chord voicings. Not the chords themselves, that can be anything in this chromatic world, but that he'll write F-sharp and A-flat into the same chord, next to one another. I'm no expert in writing for the piano, but I take issue with that in general.

Another curious thing: for majority of the work, the meter is 3/8 time, but the notes are expressed as dotted rhythms, or 4/3 polyrhythms. You have to go more than twenty pages into this edition to find a straight eighth note rhythm. What purpose does that serve? Couldn't it have been expressed another way? Is it to give the score a certain appearance? I know that's a factor with Feldman, the way the score actually looks. Feldman generally favors 3/8 or even 3/16 time signatures. But if it's in largely four, why not write it in four? The work would be difficult enough to play accurately without having to sort through that extra information on the page.

I've spent a great deal of time with other Feldman scores, quite a few of them now that I think about it. Most significantly, I listened and followed the score to his notorious String Quartet II with the running time of +/- five hours. I discovered something very unusual about the work. Every page has exactly three systems on it, with nine measures in each system. (Again, with the threes.) The meter in any measure could be anything ranging from 5/32 to 3/2 time. From one system to another, there might be a noticeable change; there's usually a more noticeable change from one page to the next if they're facing; with one exception, there's a dramatic shift in the music at each page turn.

It seems to me that Feldman creates a grid on which he places the music. The grid of one page could be anywhere from twenty seconds to thirty minutes (more or less, I'm doing this from memory), depending on what he places into it. You can't hear it, but it's lurking in the background. Whatever sketches he might have created leading into the creation of the final score, the page itself influences the outcome. It suggests to me that the music wasn't in a fixed state until the score's final rendering. It's possible you might notice this in a performance, if you heard a big change in the music as the page was turned. Just listening to a recording? There would be no way to tell. 

I've noticed this structure in other late Feldman scores, with perhaps greater variation and not so strictly staying with that form. Nonetheless, you can still see these things in the score for other pieces. Which leads me to think, if I studied the original manuscript of Triadic Memories, some of those same elements would also be present. 

I was thinking as I checked out the score from the library today, Feldman probably would have preferred that the listener not have access to the score and instead just listen. Then I thought, maybe most composers would prefer it that way. 

None of this actually speaks to the music. Without studying the notes on paper, I can hear much of his general intention with this work: taking passages with patterns and rearranging those patterns in subtle but clearly different ways. It's not so-called Minimalism as we have come to know it, but it's also not entirely removed from the ideas of Minimalism either. The first several minutes see the same six notes (four in one hand, two in the other) played in a strict order, but with the rhythms varied slightly with each measure. I think of this as almost being like a Calder mobile, with its shapes moving around one another, slowly changing the relationship while maintaining their shapes. Feldman himself was influenced by the patterns he noticed in the Oriental rugs* he had begun to collect, with patterns present but the shapes and distances subtly different from one to another. 

I think the title, unlike his more "still life"-like titles (Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello for example) is significant. It's not triadic at all, but does evoke a feeling of memory. He wrote, "This way of working was a conscious attempt at formalizing a disorientation of memory. Chords are heard without a discernable pattern." (I found that on the Universal Edition page for this piece.) Even when the piece shifts, changes, introduces a new idea, there's always the sense of working over the same materials within a section, of reorganizing the notes in ways that we can discern but never settle. You can hear the working over of similar materials within a time span, rhythmically it never "grooves." (I'm imagining Feldman bristling over the very description.)

The length at ninety minutes does not fit onto a single CD. There is a DVD audio edition of this. The String Quartet II on Mode had a CD release of five discs, or again one DVD. Feldman himself commented that he had heard many twenty minute pieces from other composers, so much of the music was twenty minutes. Does that suggest the length of a long playing record? I guess you'd need more empirical proof to conclusively make a firm connection.

Triadic Memories....memory is fleeting and not always accurate...events come and go through the lens of our memories...perhaps it's not the composer's intentions, but is the work imbued with a certain sadness? Sometimes I think so, sometimes not. It is beautiful and I will be spending more time in its world.

*I think the term is still considered to be Oriental rugs. My Uncle Jim was a noted dealer who authored several books on the patterns used by different nomadic tribes.