Quick Analysis No.5
Morton Feldman - Durations I
How does one analyse a score that fundamentally does not present the work as it will sound? Often we will end up talking about concepts such as potential, chance, interpretation, concept and process but will be unable to accurately discuss the exactitudes of the resulting sound. Morton Feldman’s Durations series is an interesting one in this regard, as it presents a core indeterministic conceit within an extremely reserved and precise aesthetic language.
LISTEN TO DURATIONS I HERE
So what is happening in Durations and why does it pose a problem for analysing the score with any accuracy? Well, the core principle of the whole Durations series is that the duration of each pitch is at the discretion of the performer (but with some specific further directions). The Durations series (or cycle) comprises five numbered works for different small instrumental groups all prescribing the following rules:
‘The first sound with all instruments simultaneously. The duration of each sound is chosen by the performer. All beats are slow. All sounds should be played with a minimum of attack. Grace notes should not be played too quickly. Numbers between sounds indicate silent beats. Dynamics are very low…’
And with these preliminary notes in mind we are then presented with a sequence of pitches for each instrument, on an invisible grid with no bar lines or rhythms, appearing as simultaneous chords but knowing they will not sound as such in practice.
What then is the use of this innovation in conception and notation? What does it give us? How does it limit the music? What agency over the music must we give up and what do we gain in its place? Well, principally this method gives up its control over moment to moment harmony in a very interesting way; some control of multiple simultaneous pitches is maintained due to the use of piano and the fact that it is given specific chords throughout to play in exact order. However, all other instruments are treated as almost exclusively monophonic, and as such, immediately following Durations I’s opening simultaneouty, all of the material for each instrument begins to intentionally go out of phase based on the whims of each performer and how long they decide to hold each note and pause. And so, in giving up one generally understood rigidity of notated music, Feldman allows a kind of Cagean chance-based performative freedom into these pieces. Fitting, as the two (Feldman and Cage) were famously close contemporaries and friends exploring interlinked forms of musical indeterminacy throughout the 1950s and 60s (alongside other important New York Avant-Garde figures such as Earle Brown and Christian Wolff). The indeterminacy of Durations, however, seems highly controlled when compared to some of Cage’s all encompassing chance procedures or Earle Brown’s mobile forms. It is as if, with Durations I, Feldman sets off four parallel strands of self-similar material that each quietly ebb and flow across a shared temporal space with no way to anchor themselves to one another after the single primary coincidence of the opening chord. It is not about controlling the vertical instances of harmony, it feels more like witnessing overlapping instrumental lines in suspended animation.
In removing the grid of common rhythm Feldman has removed any sense of pulse or counting from the music entirely, even subconsciously. There is no common tempo, there can be no shared pulse and thus the sounds in Durations I seem weightless, floating, in a sense truly ‘free’. And yet with this freedom of rhythm and duration, along with this wavering indeterminacy of synchronisation, come some very tightly controlled parameters, the strictness and clarity of which give the work its distinctive character.
While the rhythms and consequently much of the vertical harmony is left to chance, the pitches themselves could not be more specific. It feels like each pitch is chosen specifically with a sense of the overall harmonic nature of the work in mind: The first time I listened to Feldman’s music I assumed it was serial music, or at least made use of some type of twelve-note system of organisation, I hadn’t at the time yet grasped the idea that after the developments of serialism, and in particular Webern’s cold and rational brand of serial invention, this style of harmony could be produced intuitively by the composer’s ear alone without need for a strict precomposed system. Feldman’s harmony is intervallically rich; if we view each instrument’s material as a sequence we immediately find a broad mixture of intervallic leaps between pitches but with a constant backdrop of chromaticism. Looking at just the first line of the alto flute shows us this: it opens with a minor-3rd A-sharp to C-sharp, followed by an A-natural up the octave, leaping up a minor-6th from the C-sharp and providing a sense of chromaticism from the opening A-sharp creating a major-7th. It then leaps down a minor 9th, another chromaticism from A-natural to a low G-sharp and then down a major 7th to the low A-natural right at the bottom of the alto flute’s register. The flute then leaps up by a minor 10th (or a compound minor 3rd) to C-natural followed by another minor-3rd to E-flat and then a minor-7th to a high C-sharp, again giving us a chromaticism separated by one pitch between the C-natural and C-sharp.
This style of harmony is found across the writing for all the instruments in the ensemble and is chiefly categorised by large intervallic leaps and an underlying sense of exploded (or compound) chromaticism, along with a general avoidance of repetition and the strong diatonic pitch relationships that suggest any kind of tonal centre. As a result, Feldman’s harmony seems to float in a kind of complex harmonic stasis; an omnipresent potential for any pitch to appear but in a manner completely at odds with a sense of tonal progression or functional intervallic movement, a wash of harmonic colour, so chromatic it almost doubles back into a kind of greyscale. It is a subtle harmonic language of disconnected points held in space, assisted by Feldman’s enduring persistence in exploring only soft sounds, removing any sense of dynamic tension that could have been possessed by the piece.
But for a language of disconnected points in space there are some smaller patterns and moments of repetition that really pull the ear’s focus while listening to Durations I. In the first system, for example, the alto flute plays three E-naturals back to back, with the second two pre-empted with a grace note on c-natural a major-3rd below. In the following system a similar event occurs, however this time a 10th below with three C-naturals played back to back with the latter two pre-empted with a grace note on the low A-natural.
On the second page on the first system the violin repeats a slow ostinato between a very high A-natural down a compound tritone to E-flat, repeating this three-and-a-half times before breaking the pattern and moving on to another briefly repeated cell of C-sharp to E-natural. The whole work is sparsely sprinkled with these unpredictable moments of repetition which, I feel, act like little anchors for the ear in an otherwise extremely foggy and ephemeral musical environment.
While the firm insistence on only soft dynamics, the consistent presence of chromaticism in the harmony, the primary focus on single pitches floating in time and space, and these isolated and unpredictable pockets of repetition do indeed provide the work with a strong aesthetic sense of character, there is a lot about Durations I that cannot be predicted. It’s length for one varies widely across performances, the three most well known recordings by The Turfan Ensemble, Ensemble Avant-Garde and The Barton Workshop all clock in at eight, ten and twelve minutes respectively, which is a huge differential for a short piece of five pages. Feldman has many early works which do not specify strict durations, many of them for solo piano which avoid the issue of desynchronisation due to being written for solo instrument. In these pieces the lack of explicit durations imbues the work with an extreme sense of rubato and an unpredictability as to when the next event will sound. In Durations however, things are more complicated: as all of the events are immediately desynchronised there are infinite possibilities for the alignment of the music. For example, taking the following passage from page two of the score, in one performance (red) these events might be aligned, in the next performance (blue) these ones might be aligned, and so on…
Feldman here has created a mobile form, of sorts, that displays self-similar material from different angles with no one single formation or alignment being able to be seen as optimal or ideal. I think the freedom inherent in Durations is an interesting one, but it is Feldman’s control and restraint with regard to the aesthetic and peripheral elements that make it such an intriguing, characterful and beautiful work.
- Jocelyn Campbell, 2025
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