Quick Analysis No.5
Morton Feldman - Durations I
After my last quick analysis of Morton Feldman’s Durations I I found myself with a few stray thoughts about the change of approach to indeterminacy in his later works which didn’t find a home in that first article. This won’t be so much an analysis of a single piece as a quick comparative glance across the approaches to indeterminacy across his oeuvre. It goes without saying that reading the aforementioned Quick Analysis No.5 is probably necessary context for the following:So, if Durations was an early experiment into what happens when pitches are controlled but durations are left to the discretion of each performer, then Feldman’s graph pieces of a similar time are essentially the exact opposite. Feldman composed many graph pieces in the 1950s and 60s, several for solo piano in which the performer is given a long forty-three by three grid of squares, some of which are outlined and contain numbers. The numbers contained within the squares of the grid correspond to the number of different pitches to be played by the performer in that part of the instrument's register: high, middle or low signified by the top, middle or bottom squares vertically. Each square horizontally represents one metronomic unit of rhythm, in the case of Intersection 2 pictured below, that being equivalent to 158 beats per minute.
1969’s In Search of an Orchestration presents Feldman’s graph principles for a whole orchestra in which rhythms and durations are precisely controlled as well as instrumental playing techniques, however all pitches are at the discretion of each performer. This not only produces a radically different looking score from how we conventionally expect notated music to appear (to me it looks quite like a game of minesweeper or an excel spreadsheet) but also a radically different sounding piece for every performance where only the order and synchronicity of which instruments are playing is consistent across interpretations.
There are a few other notable approaches to indeterminacy in this early period of Feldman’s work; such as works similar to the Durations cycle like Four Instruments or the Vertical Thoughts series in which durations are (mostly) free but synchronisation between the instruments of the ensemble is maintained throughout. This approach exercised much more compositional control over the resources in play and really only leaves the lengths of sounds up to the performers and keeps not only the work’s pitch content but its order and synchronisation under the strict control of the composer.
Intermission 6 for one or two pianos is also worth glancing at too for its uniqueness. A single page of disembodied notes or chords to be played in any order, one after the other, until no more remain, either by one or two pianos. This piece functions like a mobile made from simple fragments that will never quite align in a formation previously witnessed. The indeterminacy of the instrumentation is also an interesting wrinkle as to whether a performance will have two versions of itself unfolding simultaneously or just one.
Feldman’s experiments with indeterminacy in the 50s and 60s were prolific. Many of his works explored something in the vein of what’s been briefly discussed (there are many variants of his durational works as well as his graph pieces, such as Atlantis; an orchestral graph piece that uses only the instruments’ high registers and uses numbers to signify how many successive pitches should be played within a duration, creating a shimmering and highly active musical surface). He did also compose many works using conventional notation during this period, but I think it would be fair to say that compositional indeterminacy was a consistent and high-priority concern during these years. Then, in the 1970s, his music began to change in favour of conventional notation, largely leaving behind the indeterministic experimental works of the 50s and 60s, and beginning slowly to morph into the monolithic works exploring longer and longer durations that culminated in his final works of the 1980s. I can’t resist briefly touching on what is perhaps the transitional piece between styles, 1972’s Five Pianos. If Feldman’s preoccupations in the 1970s were becoming more to do with duration and fractured repetition and less to do with compositional indeterminacy then this is the piece that passes the baton and has one foot firmly planted in each style. Five Pianos is a completely desynchronised work for five pianists in which the preliminary notes expressly state that no attempt to synchronise the parts is to be made whatsoever. The score does indicate the order that the pianos are to begin playing, and then from there it’s a long, slow wash of self similar material overlapping with absolutely no sense of regularity or pulse. To me this work seems like a magnification of the principles of the Durations series, writ large on a more vast and expansive temporal scale, giving up all moment to moment synchronicity in favour of an endless cascade of soft piano sounds and one insistent rising motif shared across all parts. One particularly interesting point is that individual tempi are given for the rising pattern of semibreves that becomes the central motif of the work; so that at times the listener will hear the same material being played at different speeds across two or more different pianos.
After Five Pianos Feldman’s works become almost entirely conventionally notated, using specific rhythms and pitches in the confines of bars and time signatures (notated at an obsessively consistent crochet = 63-66). Perhaps Feldman felt that relinquishing control of his pitches or durations was no longer in the interests of his compositional aims, but there was still one interesting form of semi-indeterminacy that he would come to explore several times in his later career.
For Philip Guston (1984) at a glance looks like it opens with a conventional passage of music. The tempo is marked at the predictable Feldmanian crochet = 63-66, the three instruments that form the ensemble all begin simultaneously on a high C-natural, and the first system is divided evenly into 9 bars. But look for a little longer and we immediately see that each instrument starts in their own unique time signature, with their opening four-note motifs, while appearing in sync on the page, actually deviate in their note lengths. Look a little closer still and we can see exactly what is happening: each note in the motif is the length of a full bar, each bar is a different length and each instrument has the same bar lengths in a different order but have the notes in the same order. This means that each instrument’s overall phrases are the same length but the duration of each note is different and, after beginning simultaneously, they immediately go out of sync until they all catch up to one another in 3/2 bar of silence following the four note motif. Below we can see the four bar sequence of 3/8, 3/32, 3/16, 1/4 in the flute goes against 3/16, 1/4, 3/32, 3/8 in the vibraphone and 1/4, 3/8, 3/16, 3/32 in the piano, all barlines localised to their own stave only until they resynchronise and Feldman gives universal bar lines for the 3/2 bar of silence.
This is interesting because while it seems like the three instrumental parts are desynchronised, somewhat like in the earlier Durations series, actually, if played accurately at the same common tempo, all three will sound the same way relative to each other. In fact, if the placement of notes and rhythms is all we care about, then we could notate this opening passage as I’ve laid out below and do away with any need for individual time signatures.
So, this does somewhat beg the question, why notate the material in this way and what does Feldman’s approach here achieve? Well, I think there is a strong argument for sometimes notating material in the manner it is conceived and not always adapting it to fit the conventions of standard notational practice. The idea of Feldman, given how he notated the music in the first place, is obviously concerned with the de-and-re-synchronisation of simple musical events, and that fundamental concern is not captured in the same way by the alternative notation. The second way of notating this passage also doesn't immediately communicate the idea that it is the same cell of material unfolding in a different configuration of the same rhythms. In a context where there is no need for a conductor or for the musicians to rigidly keep to a common pulse relative to one another at all times, then such a device as Feldman employs here can necessarily imbue the music with a sense of rubato for each performer without going all the way as to eliminate the idea of fixed or composed durations in the music. In other words, this device allows for each performer, during the localised period of the desynchronisation of time signatures, to feel their own pulse and count to their own beat, which will inevitably result in micro-desynchronisations until the silence pulls the performers back together and they can begin simultaneously again on the next entry. It’s also worth noting that as soon as things get even a little bit more complicated with bracketed tuplet rhythms occurring at different moments in different time signatures across desynchronised instruments then the attempts to homogenise the notation by scoring it in a common time for all instruments begins to look much more cumbersome and unwieldy than the alternative.1
For Philip Guston’s monolithic four-and-a-half hour run time is filled with constant use and variation of this device: To look at just a few examples, the first two systems of page fourteen show passages of differing lengths being subject to this treatment. Firstly is an entire nine-bar system of 7/4, 6/4 and 5/4 bars desynchronising for each performer. Then in the following system we can see a three-bar phrase followed by a six-bar phrase.
By contrast the middle two systems of page nineteen demonstrate more of a balance between the synchronised and desynchronised time signatures: In the first system we see three bars of material synchronised across all three instruments that is followed by a repeated cell of three bars which is desynchronised, which then resynchronises for the final three bars of the system. The following system then repeats the same structural layout but with different material and bar lengths but the overall same principle.
Nearly the entire piece is founded on this central conceit; the score presents a seemingly endless fluctuation of synchronised and desynchronised passages which appear to explore the minutia of performative rubato across an ongoing tapestry of cellular material. That is until page eighty-eight when all the parts’ time signatures resynchronise never again to deviate. Perhaps Feldman has exhausted this particular invention in the context of the work, and the final twenty-four pages represent a return to a more conventional form of compositional control.
I would be remiss to not mention two other late works which have perhaps a more extreme conception of asynchronous instrumental parts: 1981’s Bass Clarinet and Percussion and 1983’s Crippled Symmetry. The former of which contains a very enigmatic little NB at the bottom of its first page stating that every five systems is equal to 135 crotchets for both the bass clarinet and percussion. Other than this the parts are completely desynchronised with the percussion beginning in 3/4 and never once changing time signature for the whole piece, and the bass clarinet beginning with a more typical system of Feldman’s obsessive shifting of meter, starting with a bar of 3/8 then 3/4, 7/8, 2/4, 3/8 etc. It’s hard to know to what degree Feldman anticipated the parts desynchronising when the periods of independence for each instrument are so vast, one would think that he expected each rendition to contain some quite sizeable fluctuations in time and synchronicity, but clearly Feldman felt something about this style was worth pursuing because in 1983 he composed a work for three instruments which is entirely desynchronised from start to finish with seemingly no anchor points whatsoever for its entire hour-and-a-half long run time. Andrew Clements in a Guardian review of the Feldman Soloists’ CD recording of Crippled Symmetry described its approach to time and synchronisation thusly:
‘The three players each have their own fully notated parts, but those contain no indications of how and where they should synchronise over the 85-minute span. The keening phrases of the flute, the arpeggios of the piano and the shimmer of the glockenspiel and vibraphone forge a wonderfully supple yet organic unity. The lack of precise coordination creates the sense of every sound constantly being reassessed and placed in a slightly different context.’
It feels to me that in the later stages of his career Feldman was at times still intrigued enough in the process of writing asynchronous or subtly indeterministic music, however, he was unwilling to wholesale give up the specificity of his notation in areas such as metered rhythm (and certainly not pitch by this point). Feldman’s late approach to indeterminacy is really one of asynchronous conception rather than wholly indeterministic parameters, these deviating individual time signatures provide a means for exploring the concurrent temporal flux of individual rubatos while maintaining the exacting approach to rhythm and pitch that had become a true cornerstone of his style across those late pieces.
1. Footnote: Feldman scored a number of desynchronised passages like this in the orchestral parts for his 1977 ‘opera’ Neither one of which featured the triple wind section forming into three identical groups of flute, clarinet and oboe and each group playing one strand of desynchronised material across an ever shifting backdrop of changing time signatures and bracketed tuplets. This passage was re-scored in a common time for the new edition due to performative impracticalities of the work requiring a conductor and the distribution of parts being near impossible to synchronise accurately across the required instruments.]
- Jocelyn Campbell, 2025
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