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Tag: Morton Feldman

2011

Saturday, 4/2/11

favorites
(an occasional series)

Here—with a shout-out to my brother Don, with whom (at the age of 15) I saw the MC5  in Chicago’s Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention (when nobody outside the Detroit/Ann Arbor area [including us] knew who they were)—is an awfully good cover, from what might seem an unlikely source, of one of their “greatest hits.”

Jeff Buckley, “Kick Out The Jams,” live, Chicago, 1995

And here, courtesy, apparently, of the Department of Defense, is (silent) footage of the scene in Lincoln Park on August 25, 1968—the day the MC5 (who appear here fleetingly) played.

(Originally posted 9/7/09.)

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lagniappe

on the road

Last night, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve been since Sunday, I heard a concert, on the Harvard campus, of contemporary music featuring two different groups (Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble and Ensemble SurPlus) and works by six different composers, including Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams (who was present). Virtually every time I hear live music—last night was no exception—I leave thinking that I really need to do this more often. I love recordings, but live music breathes.

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Tonight, in Boston, I’ll be in the front row for this production of Merchant of Venice. Tomorrow I’m seeing a series of short works by Samuel Beckett, directed by the legendary Peter Brook. So that’s three straight days of live music. (What’s theater, after all, if not musical speech?)

Vodpod videos no longer available. 

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2011

Sunday, 3/20/11

Sherman Washington Jr. (Zion Harmonizers)
December 13, 1925-March 14, 2011

Zion Harmonizers with Aaron Neville, “Wonderful,” live, New Orleans (Gospel Tent, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival), 1991

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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lagniappe

Sherman Washington Jr., the leader of the Zion Harmonizers and the godfather of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’s Gospel Tent, died early Monday at his home in Boutte after a long illness. He was 85.

sherman washington 2002 fest.jpg

What Ellis Marsalis is to jazz, Mr. Washington was to gospel. For three decades, he hosted a Sunday morning gospel show on WYLD-AM that served as the gospel community’s town hall. He led the Zion Harmonizers, New Orleans’ longest-running gospel vocal group, since the 1940s. The Harmonizers appeared at the very first Jazz Fest, staged in 1970 in what is now Armstrong Park.

After the festival moved to the Fair Grounds in 1972, he oversaw the growth of the Gospel Tent, building it into a cornerstone of the festival’s roots-music presentation. The tent introduced a music largely unknown outside the African-American churches where it was born to a much broader audience.

Until deteriorating health finally slowed him down in recent years, he administered the Gospel Tent with a steadfast integrity and intimate knowledge of the music, musicians and singers. Given that many acts consist of large choirs, the tent features more performers than any other stage at the festival.

“Gospel, even after jazz and blues came down to the front of the bus, was still in the back of the bus,” said Jazz Fest producer/director Quint Davis. “To a large extent, Sherman’s work through the Gospel Tent has helped bring gospel music to the front of the bus. An enormous debt is owed to him by the festival, and the whole gospel world.”

Davis expects the upcoming Jazz Fest to feature a tribute to Mr. Washington.

“You can talk about soul with either a lower-case ‘s’ or an upper-case ‘S,'” Davis said. “Sherman had soul with a capital S.”

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In the late 1960s, the Harmonizers roster included a Mississippi-born bass singer named John Hawkins. In early 1970, Hawkins met Quint Davis at Mason’s Hotel on Claiborne Avenue and came back to Mr. Washington with news of this young music fan who was organizing a music and heritage festival.

Mr. Washington went to meet Davis and partner Allison Miner, and the Zion Harmonizers were booked for the first Jazz Fest at Congo Square. The forerunner of today’s Gospel Tent was a 15-by-20-foot open-sided tent with an upright piano and no floor, stage or sound system.

When Jazz Fest moved to the Fair Grounds in 1972, Davis approached Mr. Washington with an idea.

“Quint said, ‘I had a dream,’” Mr. Washington recalled. “And I thought, ‘This isn’t Dr. King, is it?’ He said, ‘I had a dream that I’m going to build a Gospel Tent, and I want you to run it.’ ”

Mr. Washington’s diplomatic skills came in handy. In the early 1970s, gospel choirs rarely performed outside of churches or church functions. They certainly didn’t perform at “hippie” events where beer was served. Pastors resisted the idea of choirs performing at Jazz Fest.

“The preachers were against me,” Mr. Washington said, “because people would drink beer in the Gospel Tent. I would ask the choir’s president or manager, and he’d tell me yeah. Then he’d come back and say, ‘Our pastor doesn’t want us to sing in the Gospel Tent.’ ”

So instead of church choirs, Mr. Washington booked vocal quartets that weren’t affiliated with churches.

“Those are the ones I had to depend on,” he said. “They would tear the place up, pack it out. We didn’t pay those preachers no mind. We kept going.”

Opinions eventually changed and choirs lobbied Mr. Washington to be included. “I think the choir members got on the pastors about it. Because if a person drinks a beer or something, that’s their soul, not yours. If you’re singing, you’re doing what God wants you to do.”

Eventually, a small staff was assigned to assist Mr. Washington, but he still screened most acts in person. He attended rehearsals and private auditions, offering advice along the way.

“He had never been in a role like this,” Davis said. “He was a true man of God who was not in it to advance himself or build an empire. He worked through his community and spiritual connections to put it all together. He knew who was the real deal, who needed to play.”

Mr. Washington insisted on a high level of professionalism and skill, as he knew any group could well be some Jazz Fest’s attendee’s first exposure to gospel. He wanted the music to make a good first impression.

“This Gospel Tent has brought more white people to gospel than anybody had ever seen, ” Mr. Washington said in 2002. “Now, it’s more white people than black people. And they get into it. It brings the white and black together. People get together and stand up, you don’t know who is who.”

—Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 3/14/11

On March 14, 2011 at 2:36 AM, the music stopped and his lyrics became a reality.

—Obituary (The Times-Picayune)

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listening room: what’s playing

• Bach, Cello Suites, Steven Isserlis, Jean-Guihen Queyras

• Von Freeman, Walkin’ Tuff, Vonski Speaks, Young & Foolish

• Milton Babbitt, Piano Works, Robert Taub

• Buddy & Julie Miller, Written in Chalk

• Nneka, Concrete Jungle

• Jason Moran, Ten

• Steve Lehman, Travail, Transformation, and Flow

• Friedrich Gulda, Piano Recital 1959 (Bach, Haydn, Beethoven)

• Theo Parrish, First Floor

• Theo Parrish, Sound Sculptures, Vol. 1

• Roger Sessions, Works for Violin, Cello, Piano; Curtis Macomber (violin), Joel Krosnick (cello), Barry David Salwen (piano)

• Roger Sessions, Sonatas Nos. 1 & 3; Ralph Shapey, Mutations and Mutations II, 21 Variations, David Holzman (piano)

• Yascha Heifetz (violin), Chamber Music Collection, Vol. 1 (Mozart, et al.)

• Morton Feldman, For Bunita Marcus, Stephane Ginsburgh (piano)

• Sinner’s Crossroads, Kevin Nutt, WFMU-FM (Thursday, 8-9 p.m. [EST])

• Gospel Memories, Bob Marovich, WLUW-FM (Saturday 10-11 a.m. [CST])

• Give the Drummer Some, Doug Schulkind, WFMU-FM (Friday, 9 a.m.-noon [EST]; web stream only)

• Bird Flight, Phil Schaap, WKCR-FM (M-F, 8:20-9:30 a.m. [EST])

• WFMU-FM, Annual Fundraising Marathon

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2011

Saturday, 1/29/11

replay: clips too good for just one day

I’ve tried listening to his recordings while doing something else, but that hasn’t worked. Whatever else I was doing, I just put aside. If it was nighttime, I turned off the light. Some music occupies every available inch of space—there isn’t room for anything else.

Alfred Cortot: Frederic Chopin, “Farewell” (Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, No. 1 [excerpt]); Robert Schumann, “Der Dichter Spricht” (Op. 15, No. 13 in G major [excerpt])

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lagniappe

Cortot looked for the opium in music.

—Daniel Barenboim

(Originally posted 7/13/10.)

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If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.

Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

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lagniappe

I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.

—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)

(Originally posted 10/6/09.)

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Want a break from music that’s busy, busy, busy, busy, busy?

Try this.

Here, it seems, almost nothing happens at all.

Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Intermission 6 (1953)/Clint Davis, piano, live, Lexington, Kentucky, 2009

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lagniappe

To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross

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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman

(Originally posted 11/7/09.)

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mail, etc.

Congratulations on your 500th post. I don’t know how you do it but I’m definitely looking forward to receiving your next 500 posts. Thanks for exposing me to so many great artists. Keep the music coming and thanks for what you do.

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Lovely [Gulda/Mozart clip].

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The Sonny Rollins clip was amazing and amazing doesn’t do it justice!

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Oh, my goodness—and in such distinguished company as well! Thank you so much, Richard.

All best,
David [Kirby]

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Richard McLeese checked in with some nice memories about Son Seals. Click here to enjoy them yourself, including a couple of great videos.

—Andrew Vachss’ website

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2010

Thursday, 9/9/10

Today we move north and west: the music of Mali.

Salif Keita, live, Spain (Cartagena), 7/10/10

Want more Malian music?

Amadou & Mariam

Oumou Sangare

Toumani Diabate

Ali Farka Toure

Bassekou Kouyate

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lagniappe

mail

An attentive reader/listener—someone I’ve listened to music with for over fifty years (which reduces the pool of possible correspondents to, uh, one)—wrote yesterday to tell me about an amazing bargain: a recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus (last mentioned here, previously featured here) that’s available, in MP3 format, for 89¢.

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2010

Saturday, 9/4/10

If you listened each day for the rest of your life to a new piece of music, how much music, at the end of your life, would remain unheard?

Claude Debussy, Two Etudes (Nos. 1 & 5)/Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, live

Want more of Pierre-Laurent Aimard? Here. Here.

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lagniappe

listening room

Last night I heard, for the first time, one of the most beautiful recordings of piano music I’ve ever encountered—a new recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus by Louis Goldstein, which can be heard, in its entirety, in the second half of an archived program of  Alternating Currents, a weekly radio show out of Milwaukee. This performance lasts about 70 minutes. Coming out of it, I felt different than I did going in: lighter, clearer, awash in shimmering overtones.

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2010

Monday, 7/19/10

What do I listen to these days?

This more than anything.

Each night it’s the last thing I hear before falling asleep. Having left the Bose on “repeat” (usually Hildegard Kleeb [Hat Hut], sometimes John Tilbury [Extraplatte]), it’s the first thing I hear upon awakening. It seems, sometimes, as if it’s always playing—whether I’m listening or not.

Morton Feldman, “For Bunita Marcus” (1985)/Mark Knoop (piano), live, London, 2010

Part 1

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Part 2

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Part 3

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Part 4

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Part 5

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Part 6

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Part 7

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Part 8

Want more? Here. Here. Here. Here.

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lagniappe

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 light, 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.

—Cornelius Cardew

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Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his Feldman barked, ‘It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.’

—Alex Ross, “American Sublime,” The New Yorker, 6/19/06

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2010

Wednesday, 4/14/10

Originally, Morton Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for the film [Something Wild], but when the director heard the music, he promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the baffled director [Jack Garfein] was said to be, ‘My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?’

—Wikipedia

Morton Feldman, “Something Wild in the City: Mary Ann’s Theme,” 1960

Want more Morton Feldman? Here. Here. Here.

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2010

Tuesday, 3/23/10

looking back

Today, celebrating our 200th post, we revisit a few favorites.

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9/14/09

If I didn’t have kids, would my ears be stuck, forever, on “repeat”?

Here’s something my younger son Luke, who just started college, played for me recently, after first pronouncing it, with quiet but absolute authority, the best thing this guy has done (already Luke’s learned that what’s important isn’t to be right; it’s to seem right).

Lupe Fiasco, “Hip Hop Saved My Life,” live, Los Angeles, 2008

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And here’s a track my older son Alex played for me a couple weeks ago, before heading back to school.

Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is The Move”

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Koan for aging parents: What is the sound of a childless house?

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10/15/09

How to be both solid and fluid, both fat and delicate. How to make the beat breathe. These are things that, as a child, Philly Joe Jones began to learn while dancing—tap-dancing. Just watch the way Thelonious Monk, listening to this solo, rocks back and forth (1:25-1:50), as if he’s about to break into a little dance himself.

Philly Joe Jones, live (with Thelonious Monk), 1959

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lagniappe

He breathed our history as/his walking beat . . . The Man/So Hip/A City/Took/His/Name.—Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones, in Eulogies [1996])

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10/30/09

The first time I stood before a judge at Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building at 26th and California—this was back in the ’70s (when I was working at Alligator Records)—it was to speak on behalf of this man, Hound Dog Taylor. The day before, during a drunken argument at his apartment, he’d shot his longtime guitarist Brewer Phillips (who survived). In his own way, Hound Dog was a pretty canny guy. When he told me about this incident over the phone, shortly after it happened, he put it this way: “Richard, they say I shot Phillip.”

(No, don’t touch that dial; these stills are way out of focus—which, for Hound Dog, seems just right.)

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Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers, live, Ann Arbor Blues Festival, 1973

“Wild About You Baby”

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“Taylor’s Rock”

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“I Held My Baby”

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11/23/09

Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songer-writer, cellist, and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications) and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.

Arthur Russell

“Get Around To It”

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“You And Me Both”

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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”

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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”

(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)

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12/5/09

Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).

Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

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12/6/09

I first heard this guy back in the mid-1970s, after reading a review in the New York Times, by the late Robert Palmer, of his first album, The Gospel Saxophone of Vernard Johnson—and I’ve been listening to him ever since.

Vernard Johnson, saxophone

Live, Texas (Roanoke)

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lagniappe

reading table

Music . . . helped me to go deeper inside myself, to find new things there: the variety which I had vainly sought in life and in travel, yet the longing for which was stirred in me by the surge of sound whose sunlit wavelets came to break at my feet.

—Marcel Proust, The Prisoner (Trans. Carol Clark)

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2010

Saturday, 1/16/10

If I were a piece of music (as Barbara Walters might put it), here’s the one I’d want to be (today, anyway): deceptively simple, continually (albeit subtly) changing, perpetually fresh.

Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories, excerpt (1981)/Aki Takahashi, piano

(Feldman’s late piano pieces, including this one, accompany more of my daily life than any other music. Among other things, they work wonders when sleep won’t come [I mean that as a compliment]: slip the CD into the bedside Bose player, turn the volume down, hit the repeat button, and drift.)

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lagniappe

[Triadic Memories is] Feldman’s greatest piano piece, and thus one of the great piano works of the 20th century.—Kyle Gann

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Some modernist composers such as Stockhausen want to embrace everything in their music. Others work by exclusion, ruthlessly paring their music down until only the essential core remains. The American composer Morton Feldman, who died in 1987 aged 61, was perhaps the most ruthless of all these great renouncers. He didn’t want lyricism or complication or any of the storm and stress and conflict that go with ‘expression.’ What he wanted was to ‘tint the air’ with gentle sounds, revealed in slowly changing patterns.—Ivan Hewitt

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Even if you’re not up for discerning the grand construction in Feldman’s meditative, pared-down music, its medicinal value is so strong that, while I was recovering from surgery, it worked as well as Motrin—or the Mozart piano concertos I have used after a wisdom-teeth extraction. Think of what Feldman could do for hangovers.—David Patrick Stearns

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2009

Saturday, 12/5/09

Here one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century (composer Morton Feldman [1926-1980]) pays homage to another (painter Mark Rothko [1903-1970]).

Morton Feldman, “Rothko Chapel” (composed in 1971; first performed, at Houston’s Rothko Chapel, in 1972)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

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lagniappe

. . . The example of the painters was crucial. Feldman’s scores were close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and, especially, Rothko’s glowing fog banks of color. His habit of presenting the same figure many times in succession invites you to hear music as a gallery visitor sees paintings; you can study the sound from various angles, stand back or move up close, go away and come back for a second look. Feldman said that New York painting led him to attempt a music ‘more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.’ Just as the Abstract Expressionists wanted viewers to focus on paint itself, on its texture and pigment, Feldman wanted listeners to absorb the basic facts of resonant sound. At a time when composers were frantically trying out new systems and languages, Feldman chose to follow his intuition. He had an amazing ear for harmony, for ambiguous collections of notes that tease the brain with never-to-be-fulfilled expectations. Wilfrid Mellers, in his book ‘Music in a New Found Land,’ eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style: ‘Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.’ In other words, we are in the region of Wallace Stevens’s ‘American Sublime,’ of the ’empty spirit / In vacant space.’

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If there is a Holocaust memorial in Feldman’s work, it is ‘Rothko Chapel,’ which was written in 1971, for Rothko’s octagonal array of paintings in Houston. Rothko had committed suicide the previous year, and Feldman, who had become his close friend, responded with his most personal, affecting work. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices, but no words. As is so often the case in Feldman’s music, chords and melodic fragments hover like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distant, dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron,’ or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s final masterpiece, the ‘Requiem Canticles.’ That passage was written on the day of Stravinsky’s funeral, in April, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern. But the emotional sphere of ‘Rothko Chapel’ is too vast to be considered a memorial for an individual, whether it is Rothko or Stravinsky.

Shortly before the end, something astonishing happens. The viola begins to play a keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. Underneath it, celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which calls to mind a figure in Stravinsky’s ‘Symphony of Psalms.’ The song unfurls twice, and the chorus answers with the chords of God. The allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to the sombre spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera, and the luminous, iconic presence of Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman heard beneath the cobblestones of German towns. It might be the chant of millions in a single voice.

But I can almost hear Feldman speaking out against this too specific reading. At a seminar in Germany in 1972, he was asked whether his music had any relationship to the Holocaust, and he said no. He was a hard-core modernist to the end, despite his sensualist tendencies, and he did not conceive of art a medium for sending messages. It was probably in reaction to the communicative power of ‘Rothko Chapel’ that he later dismissed it, unbelievably, as a minor work. But in that German seminar he did say, in sentences punctuated by long pauses, ‘There’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning. Say, for example, the death of art . . . something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.’ He also admitted, ‘I must say, you did bring up something that I particularly don’t want to talk about publicly, but I do talk privately.’

Only this one time, in the last minutes of ‘Rothko Chapel,’ did Feldman allow himself the consolation of an ordinary melody. Otherwise, he held the outside world at bay. Yet he always showed an awareness of other possibilities, a sympathy for all that he chose to reject. Listening to his music is like being in a room with the curtains drawn. You sense that with one quick gesture sunlight could fill the room, that life in all its richness could come flooding in. But the curtains stay closed. A shadow moves across the wall. And Feldman sits in his comfortable chair.—Alex Ross (The New Yorker, 6/19/06)

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