Contemporary Music Review

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Between categories

Morton Feldman

To cite this article: Morton Feldman (1988) Between categories, Contemporary Music Review, 2:2, 1-5, DOI: 10.1080/07494468808567063

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494468808567063

Published online: 10 Oct 2011.

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Download by: [Royal Conservatoire of Scotland], [Maria Donohue] Date: 26 September 2016, At: 05:04 Contemporary Music Review, © 1988 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH 1988, Vol. 2 pp. 1-5. Printed in the-United Kingdom Photocopying permitted by license only

Between categories Morton Feldman

This article was originally published in the mimeographed periodical The Composer (Vol. 1, no. 2, 1969, pp. 73-77). Almost immediately it was translated into Swedish ("Mellan kategoriema," Nutida Musik, vol. 12, no. 4, 1968-69, pp. 25-27) and French ("Entre des categories," Musique en Jeu, No. 1, 1970, pp. 22-26). More recently it has appeared in a German re-translation from the Swedish and French versions in the collection of Feldman's writings edited by Walter Zimmermann ("Zwischen den Kategorien," in Morton Feldman: Essays. Kerpen, Beginner Press, 1985, pp. 82-84).

This is the first time Feldman's original text, which is rather hard to find, has been reprinted. KEY WORDS music, painting, construction, surface. Space, Time. Oscar Wilde tells us that a painting can be interpreted in two ways, by its subject or by its surface. He goes on to warn us, however, that if we pursue the painting's meaning in its subject, we do so at our peril. Conversely, if we seek the meaning of the painting in its surface — we do this also at our peril. I will not be as ominous as Oscar Wilde, though this problem does exist when we separate one integral part of any work of art from another. Music, as well as painting, has its subject as well as its surface. It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies or 12 tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed. Rhythms do not appear from nowhere. They must be constructed. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition. But if we want to describe the surface of a musical composition we run into some difficulty. This is where analogies from painting might help us. Two painters from the past come to mind — Piero della Francesca and Cezanne. What I would like to do is juxtapose these two men — to describe (at my peril) both their construction and surface, returning for a brief discussion of the surface, or aural plane, in music. Piero della Francesca is compounded with mysteries. Like Bach, his 2 Morton Feldman

construction is his genius. We are looking into a world whose spatial relationships have adopted the newly discovered principles of Perspec- tive. But Perspective was an instrument of measurement. Piero ignores this, and gives us eternity. His paintings indeed seem to recede into eternity, into some kind of Jungian collective memory of the beginning of the Christian ethos. The surface seems to be just a door we enter to experience the painting as a whole. One might also say, despite all the facts against it, that there is no surface. Perhaps it is because Perspective itself is an illusionistic device, which separates the painter's objects in order to accomplish the synthesis that brings them into relationship with each other. Because this synthesis is illusionistic, we are able to contain both this separation and unity as a simultaneous image. The result is a form of hallucination, which della Francesa is. All attempts at utilizing an organizational principle, either in painting or music, has an aspect of hallucination. Cezanne, on the other hand, does not recede into an arcane time world. The construction of the painting, which might begin as a pictorial idea, disappears, leaving little trace of a unifying organizatio- nal principle. Rather than taking us into a world of memory, we are pushed into something more immediate in its insistence on the picture plane. The search for the surface has become the obsessive theme of the painting. The Abstract Expressionist painters carried Cezanne's surging sur- face another step forward into what Philip Pavia characterized as "raw space." Rothko discovered further that the surface did not have to be activated by the rhythmic vitality of a Pollock to be kept alive ... that it could exist as a strange, vast, monolithic sundial, so to speak, with the exterior world reflecting upon it still another meaning — another breathing. I'm afraid that the time has now come when I will have to tackle the problem of just what is the surface aural plane of music. Is it the contour of intervals which we follow when listening? Can it be the vertical or harmonic proliferation of sound that casts a sheen in our ears? Does some music have it, and other music not? Is it possible to achieve surface in music altogether — or is it a phenomenon related to another medium, painting? While thinking about all this, I went to the telephone and called my friend Brian O'Doherty. "Brian," I asked, "what is the surface of music I'm always talking to you about? How would you define or describe it?" Naturally, O'Doherty began apologetically. Not being a composer, not knowing that much about music, he was hesitant to answer. After a little coaxing he came up with the following thought: The composer's surface is an illusion into which he puts something real — sound. The painter's surface is something real from which he then creates an illusion. With such excellent results, I had to continue. "Brian, would you now please differentiate," I said, "between a music that has a surface and a Betxveen categories 3

music that doesn't." A music that has a surface constructs with time. A music that doesn't have a surface submits to time and becomes a rhythmic progression. "Brian," I continued, "does Beethoven have a surface?" "No," he answered emphatically. "Does any music you know of in Western civilization have a surface?" "Except for your music, I can't think of any." Now you know why I call Brian O'Doherty. When O'Doherty says that the surface exists when one constructs with Time, he is very close to my meaning, though I feel that the idea is more to let Time be, than to treat it as a compositional element. No — even to construct with Time would not do. Time simply must be left alone. Music and painting as far as construction is concerned, parallel each other until the early years of the 20th century. Thus, Byzantine art, at least in its uncluttered flatness, was not unlike the Gregorian Chant or the Plain Song. The beginning of a more complex and rhythmic organization of material in the early 15th century with the music of Machaut was akin to Giotto. .Music also introduced "illusionistic" elements during the early Renaissance by way of inaugurating passages of both soft and loud sounds. The miraculous blending or fusing of the registers into a homogeneous entity, as in the choral music

of Josquin, could also be said of the painting of that era. What characterized the Baroque was the interdependence of all the parts and its subsequent organization by means of a varied and subtle harmonic palette. With the 19th century, Philosophy took over — or to be more precise — the spectre of Hegel's dialectic took over. The "unification of opposites" not only explains Karl Marx, but equally explains the long era that includes both Beethoven and Manet. In the early years of the 20th century, we have (thank Heaven!) the last significant organizational idea in both painting and music — Picasso's analytical cubism, and a decade later, Schoenberg's principle of composing with the 12 tones. (Webern is even more related to Cubism in its formal fragmentation.) But just as Picasso in Cubism was a summing up, an analysis of the history of formal ideas in painting that extended his own future, this tendency also characterized the great names of music at that time. Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, are more the history of music than an extension of musical history. Picasso, who found Cubism in Cezanne, developed from this a system. He.failed to see Cezanne's more far reaching contribution. This, was not how to make an object, not how this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but how this object exists «s Time. Time regained, as Proust referred to his work. Time as an Image, as Aristotle suggested. This is the area which the visual arts later began to explore. This is the area which music, deluded that it was counting out the seconds, has neglected. I once had a conversation with Karlheinz Stockhausen, where he said 4 Morton Feldman to me, "You know Morty, we don't live in Heaven but down here on Earth." He began beating on the table and said: "A sound exists either here, or here, or here." He was convinced that he was demonstrating reality to me. That the beat, and the possible placement of sounds in relation to it, was the only thing the composer could realistically hold on to. The fact that he had introduced it to so much a square foot made him think Time was something he could handle and even parcel out, pretty much as he pleased. Frankly, this approach to Time bores me. I am not a clockmaker. I am interested in getting Time in its unstructured existence. That is, I am interested in how this wild beast lives in the jungle, not in the zoo. I am interested in how Time exists before we put our paws on it, our minds, our imaginations, into it. One would think that music more than any other art would be exploratory about Time. But is it? Timing, not Time, has been passed off as the real thing in music. Beethoven, in such works as the Hammerkla- vier illustrates this perfectly. All the mosaics, all the patch quilt juxtaposition of ideas happen at the right time. One feels one is being continually saved. But from what? Boredom perhaps. My guess is that he is saving both himself and ourselves from anxiety. What if Beethoven went on and on without any element of differentiation? We would then have Time Undisturbed. "Time has turned into Space and there will be no more Time," intones Samuel

Beckett. An awesome state that would induce anxiety in any of us. In fact, we cannot even imagine this kind of a Beethoven. But what does Cezanne do as he finds his way toward the surface of his canvas? In Cezanne's modulations, intelligence and touch have become a physical thing, a thing that can be seen. In the modulations of Beethoven we do not have his touch, only his logic. It is not enough for us that he wrote the music. We need him to sit down at the piano and play it for us. With Cezanne there is nothing more to ask. His hand is on the canvas. Only Beethoven's mind is in his music. Time, apparently, can only be seen, not heard. This is why traditionally, we think of surface in terms of painting and not music. My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In that sense, my compositions are really not "compositions" at all. One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music. I have learned that the more one composes or constructs, the more one prevents Time Undisturbed from becoming the controlling metaphor of the music. Both these terms, Space, Time have come to be used in music and the visual arts as well as in mathematics, literature, philosophy and science. But, though music and the visual arts may be dependent on these other fields for their terminology, the research and results involved are very different. For example, when I first invented a music that allowed various choices to the performer, those who were knowledgeable in mathematical theory decried the term "indetermin- ate" or "random" in relation to these musical ideas. Composers, on the Belxveen categories 5 other hand, insisted that what I was doing had nothing to do with music. What then was it? What is it still? I prefer to think of my work as: betioecn categories. Between Time and Space. Between painting and music. Between the music's construction, and its surface. Einstein said somewhere that the more facts he uncovered about the Universe, the more incomprehensible and alien it seemed to become. The medium, whether it be the sounds of a John Cage or the clay of a Giacometti, can be equally incomprehensible. Technique can only structure it. This is the mistake we make. It is this structure, and only this structure, that becomes comprehensible to us. By putting the "wild beast" in a cage, all we preserve is a specimen whose life we can now completely control. So much of what we call art is made in the same way — as one would collect exotic animals for a zoo. What do we see when looking at Cezanne? Well, we see how Art has survived, we also see how the artist has survived. If our interest lies in discovering how Art has survived, we are on safe ground. If our interest lies in how Cezanne, the artist, survived, then we're in trouble — which is where we should be. I have a theory. The artist reveals himself in his surface. His escape into History is his construction. Cezanne wanted it both ways. If we ask him, "Are you Cezanne or are you History?" his answer is, "Choose either one at your peril." His ambivalence between being Cezanne and being History has become a symbol of our own dilemma.