Contemporary Music Review ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 120 View related articles Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gcmr20 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.