Morton Feldman - Why Patterns? (1/3)

Why Patterns?, for flute, percussion & piano (1978)

Eberhard Blum, flute
Jan Williams, glockenspiel, vibraphone
Nils Vigeland, piano, celesta

Morton Feldman completed Why Patterns? in 1978, and it is scored for flute, glockenspiel, and piano. Its title denotes the structure of the work, which was, like many of the works of his last ten years, inspired by his passion for abstract expressionist art and Middle-Eastern rug patterns. Abstract expressionism became a fascination for the composer in the early 1950s, when John Cage introduced Feldman to a circle of artists that included De Kooning, Rothko, and Guston. The Canadian-born Guston and Feldman, a native of New York, shared aesthetic views. Both were Jewish and had strikingly unique approaches to their work, able to conjure unique forms of expression with each new piece. Their friendship was strained in the mid-1960s when Guston abandoned abstract expressionism in favor of a new kind representation, proclaiming, "I got tired of all that purity." Feldman felt betrayed, though Guston's paintings were no less original than his previous work. Meanwhile, the composer was gradually drifting into the world of rug collecting. He felt that the patterns found in rugs from Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East had properties that could be applied to music. The master rug weavers, to Feldman's eye, laid out a set of patterns to be woven concurrently, with no pattern holding precedence over another. They coexist in the final product, running their course on the rug with separate rates of recurrence. Why Patterns? follows the same procedure. Each instrument has a separate rhythm, and the instruments are never synchronized until the final bars. They each follow their own logic. Perhaps this is what Feldman was alluding to when he said that his role as a composer was to not "push the sounds around."

Among the many things that the composer admired in the works of Guston was his relationship to the Abstract Experience, a metaphor without an answer. This experience cannot be represented, but the artist can convey the question through visual tensions. The conscience of listeners and viewers can be elasticized if the work is successful and is approached with open ears. Feldman's mature works operate on this level, not presenting a set of tensions that are eventually resolved, but offers up something that amazes with no properties common to the average spectacle. And like abstract expressionist painting, the imagination of the artist is rendered comprehensible at a level that is clearer than verbal explanation. Unlike the bulk of Western music that preceded Feldman, there is no dramatic curve to his music that suggests a narrative flow. Each moment evolves from the last in a set of undulant moments that vary the original idea. The listener is not obliged to remember what happened before in order to make sense of the greater scheme of the music. The point is to exist in the present, to forget what happened before, just as the painter generates an emotional state at a specific moment from an interior world that many people cannot document effectively.

Why Patterns? is the first of four works that Feldman wrote with specific players in mind. They are Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, and Jan Williams. They all worked at the University of Buffalo, where Feldman began teaching composition in 1971. The other works of the series are Crippled Symmetry (1983), For Philip Guston (1984), and For Christian Wolff (1986). [Allmusic.com]

Art by Ned Truss

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