Marilyn Nonken. Photo: Sharka Bosakova.
UPDATE: Come for the concert, stay for the talk: the next day, Sunday 5 June, Marilyn joins long-time Feldman associate Bunita Marcus, the Flux Quartet‘s Tom Chiu and critic Kyle Gann for Finding Feldman, a three-part symposium on Feldman’s music, at Nexus, 1400 N. American Street, in Philadelphia. At 1.00pm, Marcus will present a multimedia overview of the composer’s creative life; at 3.00pm, Marilyn and Chiu discuss the challenges and pleasures of playing Feldman’s long-duration late works; and at 4.30pm Gann makes the case for Feldman as one of America’s most important composers. Tickets are free, but reservations should be made here.
Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it.
–Morton Feldman
“The Anxiety of Art” (1965), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street
Opening the Bowerbird American Sublime: The Late Works of Morton Feldman festival, Marilyn Nonken will perform Feldman’s 1981 masterpiece for solo piano, Triadic Memories, at the Congregation Rodeph Shalom, 615 North Broad Street in Philadelphia, at 8.00pm this coming Saturday 4 June. Tickets are available online here. (There’s also a Facebook page for the event here, where you can let Bowerbird know you’re coming.)
The work was premiered on 4 October 1981 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, performed by Roger Woodward (to whom, along with Aki Takahashi, Triadic Memories was dedicated). In the 6 October 1981 issue of The Daily Telegraph, Robert Henderson described and reviewed the new work:
[It] consists of no more than 25 pages of spare, conventionally notated patterns of sound, yet lasts for an hour and a half and never rises above a gentle pianissimo … The pulse rate, or rather the rate of change, is extremely low, the music mainly unfolding through hushed, obsessive, minutely calculated repetitions of brief chordal segments or simple decorative figures. Almost as exhausting as Wagner’s Rheingold, but for very different reasons, such microscopic music, music which depends on the almost infinitesimal fluctuations of response, frequently hovering within the dynamic range of triple to quintuple piano, and in which any hint of expression is accidental, demands unusual concentration, not only on the part of the performer but also on that of the audience, very few of whom failed to stay the course. Described by the composer as probably the largest butterfly in captivity concerned with the shape of a leaf and not the tree, each tiny segment taken in isolation possesses its own peculiar beauty, their cumulative effect as they dissolve slowly into one another, one of a near trance-like stillness and immobility.
The day before, Hugo Cole perceptively described the piece in The Guardian:
The psychological effect is often like that of an elasticated Webern work … In spite of earlier disclaimers, Feldman shows much ingenuity in dislocating his slow basic rhythm, throwing parts out of synchronisation or building in faint hesitations by ingenious notational means. To get the most out of this music, one should not be a critic with a deadline to meet and probably would do better without a score — the mysteries of chords 11 times repeated are revealed before their time if you are following the music. … [To] play for 90 minutes pianissimo and almost senza espressione must be the hardest thing in the world; while Feldman’s ability to spread music so very, very thin without losing his thread or his audience, is also not to be underestimated. … As a reaction against the busy-ness and absurd over-concentrations of meaning in most intellectual Western music, Triadic Memories makes its point clearly.[]
I am ambivalent about Cole’s Cagean approach to Triadic Memories even as I admit its validity: “We become acutely aware of the distant gurgling of an ICA cistern, of the air-conditioning, of every breath drawn by our neighbours,” he writes — which may be true, but which seem to me irrelevant, even a distraction, from the music itself, an implicit test of our own perceptual discipline (a discipline shared, as listeners, with the performer). The sublimity of Triadic Memories resides in our recollection of the harmonies and sound world created by every pianistic attack and their inevitable and consequent decay; to listen to the drip of the condensation of the air conditioner may constitute our own failure to pay heed to the attention Feldman draws to this waning. The true communion in Triadic Memories occurs among music, listener and performer, not between HVAC unit and distracted auditor. The term “communion” is carefully chosen; while the private communion between performer and auditor is mediated by electronic recording while listening to the CD, it is that much more intense and personal in a spiritual sanctuary (where indeed the Philadelphia performance will take place — indeed, for me, the ideal venue for Triadic Memories may be Houston’s Rothko Chapel, a venue to which Feldman dedicated a 1971 work). Marilyn told me in 2006:
Performing in real time, there is always a thrill that comes from knowing that everything matters that much more. I can’t help but be more self-aware. But playing Feldman’s music, I also find myself that much more aware of my listeners. When I play Triadic Memories for Feldman fans, the intensity of our shared focus is just wild. I sense us all united within the space, to the point we’re almost breathing at the same rate. Other times, when I perform Triadic Memories for audiences less comfortable with Feldman’s music, I can sense their dissatisfaction and anxiety. Whatever the reaction, this music creates such a delicate atmosphere, and the energy from the audience feeds into it as well. In the sense of John Cage, the drama with this piece is not just what’s going on onstage. It’s what going on in the hall.
Marilyn recorded the work for Mode Records in 2004; Kyle Gann wrote that it was “a dynamite performance captured on a spectacularly pristine recording,” and other reviews can be found at the Mode Records Web page for the recording, an excerpt of which can be found below. Marilyn’s further comments on Triadic Memories can be found in my 2006 interview with her here.
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Footnotes
