In 1978 Morton Feldman composed 'Why Patterns?', a first of three pieces for flute, piano and glockenspiel. In this rare instrumental combination, each instrument has a very defined sound identity and physical playing style. Feldman responds to this by assigning characteristic motifs to each of the musicians. Paradoxically enough, we hear these totally emancipated patterns merge into a harmonious sounding, psychedelic sound universe. The way in which Feldman deals with time also contributes to this alienating atmosphere. Even though the individual voices are rhythmically very accurately notated, they are uncoordinated, except in the final phase of the work. In this free temporal space, the voices only meet by chance.
Het Collectief asked two composers, who both have a strong affinity with Feldman's oeuvre, to write new works for the same unique line-up.
David Fennessy (IRL - °1976) about his music: “I’m not sure if there is a consistent line of inquiry running through my work. Each piece is its own little universe with its own technique, language, rules, problems and solutions.” One of his more recent works: 'Panopticon' (2019) for cymbalom and strings, struck a chord with Het Collectief because of its great sound sensitivity and a free and very original approach to the physical characteristics of the instruments.
We already know more about the new work of Jean-Luc Fafchamps (B – °1960): the piece actually premiered last season in Tilburg (NL). Both the audience and we ourselves greatly appreciated For Morton Feldman. Fafchamps manages to transform the simple Webernian patterns that form the basis of Feldman’s music into building blocks for a wide range of styles and forms that, despite their apparent incompatibility, come together in a coherent and utterly original whole. In a way, Fafchamps reinvents music by manipulating existing styles.
For the visuals we approached Klaas Verpoest (B - °1975), who was already responsible for beautiful projections at our previous Feldman concerts.
Jean-Luc Fafchamps
FOR MORTON FELDMAN (VAV)
for piano, flute(s) and percussion (vibraphone, glockenspiel and tam-tam)
I have often played Morton Feldman’s music at the piano, and each time I found myself enveloped in a profound, meditative delight. Yet again and again, I felt that his singular style admitted no true continuation. His late works are utterly without precedent: their vast duration, their whispering softness, their quiet relentlessness, the play of resonances, the uncompromising abstraction — all combine to form something that resists any sequel. To extend them seems destined to slip into imitation or pastiche, and that is the last thing such music calls for. Still, like Feldman himself, I am not immune to reversal.
A reversal… The story is well known. In 1970, Philip Guston (1913–1980), once a towering figure of New York abstraction, turned back to figurative painting. Feldman, his friend and a passionate devotee of abstraction, felt betrayed and severed ties for good. Yet a decade later, upon Guston’s death, Feldman came to understand the reasons for this act of defiance. He offered his apology — posthumously — by writing a monumental work, more than four hours long: For Philip Guston (1984), for piano (with celesta), flute(s) and percussion (vibraphone, tubular bells, glockenspiel, marimba). A late homage, a musical gesture of reconciliation across death.
And yet… however extraordinary in scale and intensity, this work remains firmly within the abstract canons of Feldman’s own style. And there I sensed a fissure, a breach, an opening. An invitation to respond. To respond to Feldman by applying to his writing that figurative, narrative, committed awakening which Guston had dared in painting in 1970.
Imagine this: material that Feldman himself might not have disowned — major sevenths and minor ninths, borrowed from Webern, placed with meticulous care, pianissimo, a basic figure bathed in resonance, its appearances broken by pauses of varying length.
But what if those six tones were not treated as the endless pattern of a carpet — endlessly repeated with only artisanal deformations — but allowed instead to wander, to be disrupted, to be reshaped by foreign forces, as though carrying a story within? What if accidents are permitted, subtler shadings dispersed across the texture, changes of tempo, chromatic mutations of the motif, ambiguous drifts between dissonance and near-consonance? What then remains of Feldman’s meditations on time, on form (for him always a juxtaposition of surfaces), on metaphysics itself? What happens if into his stillness one pours a trace of immersion?
For Morton Feldman is such a mirror within a mirror: a reply to an old friend, refracted through Guston, with an ensemble reminiscent of that which bound them together in memory. As for duration, I have kept it to twenty-five minutes — though nothing prevents me from one day returning to more panoramic expanses. Is this iconoclasm, or rapture? What does it matter. I open doors to styles yet to come. Love drives me forward; no reverence restrains me.