Feldman's music used to drive me mad. After I graduated from the music conservatory in Chicago I decided to give him another 'go'. Nowadays, I am captivated by his music.
It’s so great to see that there are thousands of people out there who love contemporary and modern music that almost nobody else has ever heard, or heard of.
My friend, Jim, introduced me to your music...'Concerto 2018' which I enjoyed very much, so now I am listening to your critique of Feldman. Thank you for doing this sort of cultural education. Very happy to follow, and shall be most interested in your interviews with members of Magic Band, one of whom I know, and have had extensive conversations with. Thank You!
I often wondered how Feldman did his stuff. Thanks for this thorough analysis, as you said, about bloody time on UA-cam. Feldmans music har this strange, breathing quality - like people constantly listening carefully not to interrupt each other, bringing the music down in volume. Boulez wouldnt understand that. In most contemporary music everybody screams and nobody listens.
Thanks for the fascinating and easy to follow analysis. Your description of Feldman's music continually keeping you in the present articulated something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I'll check out your other videos and compositions for sure!
I just discovered your channel and I am delighted about someone finally talking about Feldman. I got started on Feldman with 'Coptic Light' years ago - I still consider it one of the greatest pieces of music ever written!
Grazie Samuel! I studied for years the works of John Cage and I've always thought that the trio Feldman/Wolff/Brown was a continuation of the road opened by Cage. Now I believe that Feldman has overcome the dichotomy between aleatory and serial aesthetics. Something that also happened with the Xenakis's music and philosophy
Hey Samuel, thank you so much for this analysis. Over the past three years I've began to really delve into Feldman's works and it's quite a shame that there are no analysis of his work here on youtube. This was extremely informative and helpful into getting a better understanding of not only this piece, but some of his techniques. I really hope you're able to do more analysis of Feldman in the near future, especially Palais De Mari. Thank you so much once again!
I just learned about this composer yesterday through The Classical Nerd. ua-cam.com/video/VpL80kd9qcY/v-deo.htmlsi=yz-DifKsc9GTYJSJ I must admit that I had previously known nothing about him. I sort of explored a bit of his music (no mean feat, since his pieces are all sooo long), and now you come up with this video. Perfect timing! Thank you so much. I love your channel.
Sam, I salute your efforts to educate your audience about the life and music of a strange and unusual man who wrote music in the 20th century. What you are attempting to do is come up with some understanding of Feldman's method as if it really mattered. I suggest that there are two problems that exist in the musical experience. The first is the battle the composer wages between the techniques he chooses to employ and the unconscious decisions he makes, often at critical moments in the piece. The second problem is that every listener has a different life experience and will come to the music from wherever they may be at that time and place. What happens to them while the music is being played will affect their brain and their heart, and for each of us that will be different experience. Your lesson is well prepared and very complete, but I wonder whether it, in any way, affects the listener's perception of Feldman's music. Very often there is a large gap between the composer's intentions and the listener's perception of those intentions. What you are doing here is a personal narrative of your theories about his music that may or may not line up with what he thought he was doing or with the ideas of other theorists. In the end we must ask the listener what the are thinking and what they are feeling as the music travels from the beginning to the end. At the base of my argument is the question, What is music and how does it relate to the human experience? The problems faced by the performers of his music is a tale for another day.
what I like the most Feldman faith ... is his enormous authenticity ... and his enormous sincerity ... even attacking himself ..... a man for the future of today
O yeah ?????? met him in 1960's Carnegie Hall NYC...He was unappreciate at having been recognized by an admiring music student, was rather off-putting and ill-temepered, one who appeared to be ungrateful and combative with his state of being. He might as well have burned his own scores and slinked off into the wilderness of forgotten composers, as far as I am concerned
The short melodic phrase 4. C#,D,B over Bb will sound like a Bb7b9 or Bb7 alterd dominant7 not major or minor it would in fact happily take your "octatonic" scale in a standard in Bill Evans or etc. In a chord progression it's 100% functional tonality. But yes creates expectation.
Wow ! Your channel is just what I've needed and going back to school . Boulez definitely had technique , tools , mastery and systemics . Feldman is closer to abstract expressionists look at the tools i'm using . Medium , size , color , space , shadow , tonality etc . Boulez is actually more old-fashioned his pages point to abstract Ideas .I know sound was important to him and he probably felt the idea and sound were linked and that idea was needed to support sound . Messiaen , Boulez seem to relate to and against each other . Beethoven may be where this line of thought really cut into two wheras in Bach's day it was understood that everything pointed to divinity : nothing was only or only for itself . There is no answer to these dilemmas so we push into whichever idea we commit ourselves to.
Hello! I've become addicted to these videos recently. I have absolutely adored Feldman's music for decades (far more than Boulez's, lol), but this is the first analysis of a Feldman piece I've seen online. Feldman wasn't even mentioned in my undergrad or graduate theory, orchestration or composition courses at Indiana University (late 80's): I only found him years after graduating. I find it strange that his music is such a secret. I'm wondering if you might have plans to talk about music of Luciano Berio or Mauricio Kagel. I felt an instant affinity for the story of how you came to make writing music your life's work because it's very similar to mine. Keep up the great work and thank you!
Thank you David for this comment, it's great to hear from you. You asked about Berio and Kagel: I will certainly look at Berio's work at some point over the next year. I analyzed several of the sequenzas in my analysis class in Cambrai, France. As for Kagel, I'm not as familiar with him, unfortunately. But I'm sure that will change. Please stay in touch. Glad you're enjoying the channel.
Just so amazing to see someone analyze Feldman's work. Any chance you could analyze 'Patterns in a Chromatic Field? Thanks Samuel for all your wonderfully articulate and thorough commentaries.
Thank you for this enlightening analysis. If you happen to have some spare time, you might consider analysing a piece of Feldman's "middle period", like "The viola in my life", or "Piano". Those appear to be much less immediately accessible than his late work.
Rather than being a rare practical concession, perhaps the 10-4 bar is a pun on the radio code 10-4, meaning "understood". Appropriate bar for the musicians to rejoin with each other and start the next phrase! I'm not sure if I'm joking anymore, maybe that's a decent theory.
Not bad. I think he used it in other works as well. And wasn't he friends with the painter Cy Twombly, who was a codebreaker by the way( just speculating) ? ... And of course it fits the witty nature of Feldman I think.
With regards to some of his longer pieces, like the 5-6 hr 2nd String Quartet, why compose something practically nobody will ever listen to from start to end, or, for that matter, could possibly sustain the concentration necessary to full appreciate?
The long pieces require a different sort of listening. Apparently, Feldman didn't mind if listeners drifted in and out of concentration or even took breaks from listening to performances. Personally, I've enjoyed listening to some of the very late pieces in sections.
Thanks for replying. I guess my question arose from a internal conflict between feeling like I have to listen from start to end and the desire not to do so. Yeah, I recently got the Flux Quartet recording of the String Quartet No.2. I like how the tracks are titled by page numbers. Anyhow, something must be attracting me to his work. Like meditation, it requires of the listener a combination of focus and a letting go of anticipatory mental activity. La chose en soi. Pianist, Stephen Hough, commented somewhere, regarding abstraction expressionist painting, something to the effect, that sometimes a swath of orange on canvas is just that.
Great short article on Feldman's music if you have the time: www.cnvill.net/mfkgann.htm A quote about the length of late works: " The length of his late works, two to six hours nonstop, intended to entice you to live with the music the way you live with a painting on your wall, slowly acclimatizing yourself to its implied universe. "
Thanks -- I've seen that article. There is a clear parallel between the very long late works, and the huge canvases of abstract expressionist and color field painters of the 50s and 60s..
Saw the second string quartet in Philadelphia a few years ago and it was great! Laid down on the carpet in a cathedral and listened while looking at the ceiling, let me my mind wander between focus and daydreaming. The anxiety before it began was intense "wow, this is 6 hours, this is my entire saturday afternoon" but the music pulled me in and by the end I was in a headspace I've never been in before or since, time moved differently, the world sounded different, and i felt genuinely euphoric for the next 12 hours. Would I do it every weekend? Haha nope, but I'm very very happy he wrote it and that their are players dedicated to performing it, made for a memorable and moving experience.
Perhaps he was just avoiding the inevitable influence of the work's title on the perception of the piece rather than any preoccupation with the instrument/instrumentation, which points to a inclination towards the importance of the music in itself?
O yeah ?????? met him in 1960's Carnegie Hall NYC...He was unappreciate at having been recognized by an admiring music student, was rather off-putting and ill-temepered, one who appeared to be ungrateful and combative with his state of being. He might as well have burned his own scores and slinked off into the wilderness of forgotten composers, as far as I am concerned
Thanks for your work on this channel. Will you please explain what you mean by octave identities? Are you just describing octave displacement, or is there a distinction?
xnophloglas I no longer recall the exact quote (this video is now almost a year old) -- but in this music, the octave placement of a given pitch is important, and when the same pitch class appears in different octaves, they are not functionally equivalent, as they might be in other styles. Hope this helps.0
is it mechanically / physically possible to play the notes in the high register again (the 4th cycle of the bass clarinet line) without the harmonics? if so, i doubt it's a mistake omitting the harmonics, given Feldman was keen to utilise subtle variations of colour (the whole 'dyed rugs thing ...') & this would have been a way to achieve that effect ... same notes, different M.O. ...
I may be off the boil here, but i'd like to throw this at you by way of a kind of request ... I understand Stephan Wolpe was a formative / direct influence on Feldman's compositional style? A few years back i read a translation of Wolpe's 'on proportions' to try & gain some insight into this influence & possibly some kind of procedural basis, but to be frank, i understood very little of the paper. Is this something you have any knowledge of & would you be in a position to illuminate this in a video at all? My vague understanding (based on an even vaguer recollection ...) is that it's to do with partitioning the tessitura / registral areas in some way ... have watched a few of your videos now & found them very interesting, including on music that has otherwise been of no particular interest to me (Beefheart etc ...)
Hi Tim, I am familiar with Stefan Wolpe's music and like it, but I don't know the article you mentioned. Having read several accounts of Feldman's lessons with Wolpe, I doubt if the latter's ideas would have left much of a mark on Feldman's style. My sense is that he was more influenced by Varèse, Stravinsky and the composers in his immediate circle. Thanks for writing.
Brown's Music for Cello and piano is a great piece! Don't know how I didn't see it going through your videos! Thanks for sharing, queued up too watch. Really enjoying your videos, I just discovered them this week. I thought maybe I would finally be able to enjoy Ferneyhough, but to no avail not yet haha. I give his music a good try for a week about once a year (i find the scores to be beautiful, motivatingly so) but just can't get into his music. Your video does give me some new angles to listen with, so maybe soon it'll click!
haha 45 bar phrases be like, "10/4, over." serious question: did he make any kind of specifications as to what kind cymbals and gongs the performers should use? i ask this because i heard somewhat distinct and very relevant pitch class information in the rolls in the beginning. perhaps create this potential illusion in the listener's mind is another way of "liberation?" pretty cool stuff.
I don't care for the presenter's intro stating his opinion that Feldman, is "one of the great composers of the 20th century". It kind of bias's one's thoughts about what will be said here. Better to leave comments like that for the end - after the analysis may or may not support such a claim. Just an opinion...
He really is a radical American in that he deals with materials first ; not like Boulez or other Europeans of the postWWII era ; being metaphorical ,allusive and "pointing to the non-musical . Like Abstract expressionism and later Bartok did this too (Materials and how they function !).The transcripts of his masterclasses are hilarious and one wonders what advanced students took away from him . Bunita Marcus probably didn't need him . She is wonderful composer on her own ! Must find his essays ! One has to do some serious evaluation with his scores-it is not a matter of reading notes -the conceptual and no pulse and the packets of his measure make no sense till oe gathers all the information and deductions inherent in his scores . Great abstractionist like the painters of his generation wee akin to his idea of large canvases of color ;directionality, anti-programmatic, thematic digression withut development . Did Feldman in the wild heady 1970's think concerts would turn into sound fests ?
"Coptic Light" is also a late piece of Feldman's (I believe) and of modest length (~25 mins or so), orchestral, less austere. Hearing it is for me an experience similar to lying in the sand on a beach and hearing the recurring sound of the surf, almost always the same and yet never quite the same, highly regular and yet not quite. I've no competence in music theory, but I'd be quite interested to have your take on this work - one of my favorite in "contemporary classical"... along with Dutilleux's "Ainsi la nuit" (dans un genre complètement différent - et qu'il vaudrait aussi la peine de commenter ?).
WHY DO YOU CALL AN AUXILIARY DIMINISHED SCALE OCTATONIC? Gees in jazz that's just one of the scales you use to negotiate an altered dominant chord. Very comon usage Charlie Parker etc.
Morten Feldman -- the explanation regardless of there were synchrony cmes dow to much ado about noting. Who would be the first to say "the emperor has no clothes" without taking away the possibility that beauty can arise in the beholder as I think for me it does. I'm not sure that Feldman would appreciate someone trying to eplain him. In fact I don't think he would. He and you are trying to create legitimacy for something thaat is neither legitame nor illegitimate. Good try. Looking forward to some of your other anaysis of othermore analyzable composers.
This is my new favorite youtube channel. You're teaching me a lot and exposing me to a ton of stuff. thanks man
Juan Olivo Hi Juan, I'm thrilled to hear that. Welcome!
The analysis appears absolutely correct, and I began to enjoy Feldman's aesthetic within 10 seconds of hearing his work.
Feldman's music used to drive me mad. After I graduated from the music conservatory in Chicago I decided to give him another 'go'. Nowadays, I am captivated by his music.
i've looked for analysis of Feldman's work on here and am VERY glad to have found this! fantastic for us Feldman fans :-) thank you!
It’s so great to see that there are thousands of people out there who love contemporary and modern music that almost nobody else has ever heard, or heard of.
Try millions.
your channel is such a learning experience....new composers, new pieces...or just insight that makes listening more interesting...
My friend, Jim, introduced me to your music...'Concerto 2018' which I enjoyed very much, so now I am listening to your critique of Feldman. Thank you for doing this sort of cultural education. Very happy to follow, and shall be most interested in your interviews with members of Magic Band, one of whom I know, and have had extensive conversations with. Thank You!
Thanks very much for this thoughtful discussion of a such a beautiful work.
Thank you very much!
I often wondered how Feldman did his stuff. Thanks for this thorough analysis, as you said, about bloody time on UA-cam. Feldmans music har this strange, breathing quality - like people constantly listening carefully not to interrupt each other, bringing the music down in volume. Boulez wouldnt understand that. In most contemporary music everybody screams and nobody listens.
Thanks for the fascinating and easy to follow analysis. Your description of Feldman's music continually keeping you in the present articulated something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I'll check out your other videos and compositions for sure!
Thanks for doing this, Samuel.
Thanks for listening, Gary! Great to hear from you.
I second. I really appreciate the channel a lot :)
I just discovered your channel and I am delighted about someone finally talking about Feldman. I got started on Feldman with 'Coptic Light' years ago - I still consider it one of the greatest pieces of music ever written!
start listening to some great music throughout the ages to clear your mind.
Well done. Many of Feldman's works are freely available on UA-cam but there's almost no content that unpacks his dauntingly long works. Thanks. :)
Grazie Samuel! I studied for years the works of John Cage and I've always thought that the trio Feldman/Wolff/Brown was a continuation of the road opened by Cage. Now I believe that Feldman has overcome the dichotomy between aleatory and serial aesthetics. Something that also happened with the Xenakis's music and philosophy
Hey Samuel, thank you so much for this analysis. Over the past three years I've began to really delve into Feldman's works and it's quite a shame that there are no analysis of his work here on youtube. This was extremely informative and helpful into getting a better understanding of not only this piece, but some of his techniques. I really hope you're able to do more analysis of Feldman in the near future, especially Palais De Mari. Thank you so much once again!
Hayden Ryan I'm so glad you found it helpful. I may indeed return to his work on this channel at some point. Best regards.
Awesome!
So good to have this and so easily accessible in understanding !
Great work!
oh man this is great, i recently read a compilation of his essays and writings and the man had a fascinating view on music and art.
I just learned about this composer yesterday through The Classical Nerd. ua-cam.com/video/VpL80kd9qcY/v-deo.htmlsi=yz-DifKsc9GTYJSJ
I must admit that I had previously known nothing about him. I sort of explored a bit of his music (no mean feat, since his pieces are all sooo long), and now you come up with this video. Perfect timing! Thank you so much. I love your channel.
Sam, I salute your efforts to educate your audience about the life and music of a strange and unusual man who wrote music in the 20th century. What you are attempting to do is come up with some understanding of Feldman's method as if it really mattered. I suggest that there are two problems that exist in the musical experience. The first is the battle the composer wages between the techniques he chooses to employ and the unconscious decisions he makes, often at critical moments in the piece. The second problem is that every listener has a different life experience and will come to the music from wherever they may be at that time and place. What happens to them while the music is being played will affect their brain and their heart, and for each of us that will be different experience.
Your lesson is well prepared and very complete, but I wonder whether it, in any way, affects the listener's perception of Feldman's music. Very often there is a large gap between the composer's intentions and the listener's perception of those intentions. What you are doing here is a personal narrative of your theories about his music that may or may not line up with what he thought he was doing or with the ideas of other theorists. In the end we must ask the listener what the are thinking and what they are feeling as the music travels from the beginning to the end. At the base of my argument is the question, What is music and how does it relate to the human experience? The problems faced by the performers of his music is a tale for another day.
Thanks for this. So much fun.
Matt LeGroulx Hey Matt. Glad you enjoyed it.
thanks! great material.
Thank you very much from a Feldman's music addict.
Bruno Friolo You're very welcome.
what I like the most Feldman faith ... is his enormous authenticity ... and his enormous sincerity ... even attacking himself ..... a man for the future of today
O yeah ?????? met him in 1960's Carnegie Hall NYC...He was unappreciate at having been recognized by an admiring music student, was rather off-putting and ill-temepered, one who appeared to be ungrateful and combative with his state of being. He might as well have burned his own scores and slinked off into the wilderness of forgotten composers, as far as I am concerned
The short melodic phrase 4. C#,D,B over Bb will sound like a Bb7b9 or Bb7 alterd dominant7 not major or minor it would in fact happily take your "octatonic" scale in a standard in Bill Evans or etc. In a chord progression it's 100% functional tonality. But yes creates expectation.
amazing analysis.
Genius,triadic memories……my fav.
Looks amazing, I will definitely come back for more! Can you recommend other resources about 20th century classical music?
There doesn't seem to be a lot on UA-cam, so I'm working hard to remedy that! Many more videos coming soon. Thanks for watching!
Wow ! Your channel is just what I've needed and going back to school . Boulez definitely had technique , tools , mastery and systemics . Feldman is closer to abstract expressionists look at the tools i'm using . Medium , size , color , space , shadow , tonality etc . Boulez is actually more old-fashioned his pages point to abstract Ideas .I know sound was important to him and he probably felt the idea and sound were linked and that idea was needed to support sound . Messiaen , Boulez seem to relate to and against each other . Beethoven may be where this line of thought really cut into two wheras in Bach's day it was understood that everything pointed to divinity : nothing was only or only for itself . There is no answer to these dilemmas so we push into whichever idea we commit ourselves to.
rambling of little sense
Hello! I've become addicted to these videos recently. I have absolutely adored Feldman's music for decades (far more than Boulez's, lol), but this is the first analysis of a Feldman piece I've seen online. Feldman wasn't even mentioned in my undergrad or graduate theory, orchestration or composition courses at Indiana University (late 80's): I only found him years after graduating. I find it strange that his music is such a secret.
I'm wondering if you might have plans to talk about music of Luciano Berio or Mauricio Kagel.
I felt an instant affinity for the story of how you came to make writing music your life's work because it's very similar to mine.
Keep up the great work and thank you!
Thank you David for this comment, it's great to hear from you. You asked about Berio and Kagel: I will certainly look at Berio's work at some point over the next year. I analyzed several of the sequenzas in my analysis class in Cambrai, France. As for Kagel, I'm not as familiar with him, unfortunately. But I'm sure that will change. Please stay in touch. Glad you're enjoying the channel.
UA-cam has lead me to understand just how many talented composers were never mentioned in music education. What I do not know is encyclopedic.
Just so amazing to see someone analyze Feldman's work. Any chance you could analyze 'Patterns in a Chromatic Field? Thanks Samuel for all your wonderfully articulate and thorough commentaries.
Thank you, I think Patterns.. is one of Feldman's finest pieces
You could also possibly theorise that the 'altered cluster', is a Ab minor cluster (with a 2nd & major 7th), over a Dm cluster of the same quality
I love Morton Feldman's work
Great. His friend Cage gets more work analyzed on UA-cam. Great work my friend.
Great channel. Will you ever make an analysis of Rothko Chapel?
Thank you. I'm not planning to do analyze Rothko Chapel any time soon, but stay tuned!
@@samuel_andreyev I second this :)
Thank you for this enlightening analysis. If you happen to have some spare time, you might consider analysing a piece of Feldman's "middle period", like "The viola in my life", or "Piano". Those appear to be much less immediately accessible than his late work.
Joachim Pense I love those pieces but sadly I am very short on spare time.. hopefully some day.
@@samuel_andreyev I can believe this
Had an opportunity to collaborate with him shortly before his death in 1987, for a dance and music collaboration, but missed it!
Glad that Feldman has taught you duration.
Rather than being a rare practical concession, perhaps the 10-4 bar is a pun on the radio code 10-4, meaning "understood". Appropriate bar for the musicians to rejoin with each other and start the next phrase! I'm not sure if I'm joking anymore, maybe that's a decent theory.
Not bad. I think he used it in other works as well. And wasn't he friends with the painter Cy Twombly, who was a codebreaker by the way( just speculating) ? ... And of course it fits the witty nature of Feldman I think.
With regards to some of his longer pieces, like the 5-6 hr 2nd String Quartet, why compose something practically nobody will ever listen to from start to end, or, for that matter, could possibly sustain the concentration necessary to full appreciate?
The long pieces require a different sort of listening. Apparently, Feldman didn't mind if listeners drifted in and out of concentration or even took breaks from listening to performances. Personally, I've enjoyed listening to some of the very late pieces in sections.
Thanks for replying. I guess my question arose from a internal conflict between feeling like I have to listen from start to end and the desire not to do so.
Yeah, I recently got the Flux Quartet recording of the String Quartet No.2. I like how the tracks are titled by page numbers. Anyhow, something must be attracting me to his work. Like meditation, it requires of the listener a combination of focus and a letting go of anticipatory mental activity. La chose en soi. Pianist, Stephen Hough, commented somewhere, regarding abstraction expressionist painting, something to the effect, that sometimes a swath of orange on canvas is just that.
Great short article on Feldman's music if you have the time: www.cnvill.net/mfkgann.htm A quote about the length of late works: " The length of his late works, two to six hours nonstop, intended to entice you to live with the music the way you live with a painting on your wall, slowly acclimatizing yourself to its implied universe. "
Thanks -- I've seen that article. There is a clear parallel between the very long late works, and the huge canvases of abstract expressionist and color field painters of the 50s and 60s..
Saw the second string quartet in Philadelphia a few years ago and it was great! Laid down on the carpet in a cathedral and listened while looking at the ceiling, let me my mind wander between focus and daydreaming. The anxiety before it began was intense "wow, this is 6 hours, this is my entire saturday afternoon" but the music pulled me in and by the end I was in a headspace I've never been in before or since, time moved differently, the world sounded different, and i felt genuinely euphoric for the next 12 hours. Would I do it every weekend? Haha nope, but I'm very very happy he wrote it and that their are players dedicated to performing it, made for a memorable and moving experience.
I wonder if some performers, before playing this piece, "cheat" and rearrange the score so the bars are aligned and the pulse is "countable".
Feldman is a space explorer!
Perhaps he was just avoiding the inevitable influence of the work's title on the perception of the piece rather than any preoccupation with the instrument/instrumentation, which points to a inclination towards the importance of the music in itself?
Feldman is hands down the greatest American composer...
O yeah ?????? met him in 1960's Carnegie Hall NYC...He was unappreciate at having been recognized by an admiring music student, was rather off-putting and ill-temepered, one who appeared to be ungrateful and combative with his state of being. He might as well have burned his own scores and slinked off into the wilderness of forgotten composers, as far as I am concerned
Thanks for your work on this channel. Will you please explain what you mean by octave identities? Are you just describing octave displacement, or is there a distinction?
xnophloglas I no longer recall the exact quote (this video is now almost a year old) -- but in this music, the octave placement of a given pitch is important, and when the same pitch class appears in different octaves, they are not functionally equivalent, as they might be in other styles. Hope this helps.0
cool
is it mechanically / physically possible to play the notes in the high register again (the 4th cycle of the bass clarinet line) without the harmonics?
if so, i doubt it's a mistake omitting the harmonics, given Feldman was keen to utilise subtle variations of colour (the whole 'dyed rugs thing ...') & this would have been a way to achieve that effect ... same notes, different M.O. ...
Tim Mortimer good question--have to ask a clarinetist!
I may be off the boil here, but i'd like to throw this at you by way of a kind of request ...
I understand Stephan Wolpe was a formative / direct influence on Feldman's compositional style? A few years back i read a translation of Wolpe's 'on proportions' to try & gain some insight into this influence & possibly some kind of procedural basis, but to be frank, i understood very little of the paper.
Is this something you have any knowledge of & would you be in a position to illuminate this in a video at all? My vague understanding (based on an even vaguer recollection ...) is that it's to do with partitioning the tessitura / registral areas in some way ...
have watched a few of your videos now & found them very interesting, including on music that has otherwise been of no particular interest to me (Beefheart etc ...)
Hi Tim, I am familiar with Stefan Wolpe's music and like it, but I don't know the article you mentioned. Having read several accounts of Feldman's lessons with Wolpe, I doubt if the latter's ideas would have left much of a mark on Feldman's style. My sense is that he was more influenced by Varèse, Stravinsky and the composers in his immediate circle. Thanks for writing.
Interested to hear your thought's on Christian Wolff... and Earle Brown for that matter.
I did a video about Christian Wolff. Have a look: ua-cam.com/video/H2GRhS7WCr4/v-deo.html
Brown's Music for Cello and piano is a great piece! Don't know how I didn't see it going through your videos! Thanks for sharing, queued up too watch. Really enjoying your videos, I just discovered them this week. I thought maybe I would finally be able to enjoy Ferneyhough, but to no avail not yet haha. I give his music a good try for a week about once a year (i find the scores to be beautiful, motivatingly so) but just can't get into his music. Your video does give me some new angles to listen with, so maybe soon it'll click!
haha 45 bar phrases be like, "10/4, over." serious question: did he make any kind of specifications as to what kind cymbals and gongs the performers should use? i ask this because i heard somewhat distinct and very relevant pitch class information in the rolls in the beginning. perhaps create this potential illusion in the listener's mind is another way of "liberation?" pretty cool stuff.
I don't care for the presenter's intro stating his opinion that Feldman, is "one of the great composers of the 20th century". It kind of bias's one's thoughts about what will be said here. Better to leave comments like that for the end - after the analysis may or may not support such a claim. Just an opinion...
He really is a radical American in that he deals with materials first ; not like Boulez or other Europeans of the postWWII era ; being metaphorical ,allusive and "pointing to the non-musical . Like Abstract expressionism and later Bartok did this too (Materials and how they function !).The transcripts of his masterclasses are hilarious and one wonders what advanced students took away from him . Bunita Marcus probably didn't need him . She is wonderful composer on her own ! Must find his essays ! One has to do some serious evaluation with his scores-it is not a matter of reading notes -the conceptual and no pulse and the packets of his measure make no sense till oe gathers all the information and deductions inherent in his scores . Great abstractionist like the painters of his generation wee akin to his idea of large canvases of color ;directionality, anti-programmatic, thematic digression withut development . Did Feldman in the wild heady 1970's think concerts would turn into sound fests ?
"Coptic Light" is also a late piece of Feldman's (I believe) and of modest length (~25 mins or so), orchestral, less austere. Hearing it is for me an experience similar to lying in the sand on a beach and hearing the recurring sound of the surf, almost always the same and yet never quite the same, highly regular and yet not quite. I've no competence in music theory, but I'd be quite interested to have your take on this work - one of my favorite in "contemporary classical"... along with Dutilleux's "Ainsi la nuit" (dans un genre complètement différent - et qu'il vaudrait aussi la peine de commenter ?).
The thing to understand is that Feldman did not believe oh Hegel.
thanks, so cool !
I see many goods tools that Boulez's arrogance could not comprehend.
there is only Feldman
There is also Copland.
there is also BACH
WHY DO YOU CALL AN AUXILIARY DIMINISHED SCALE OCTATONIC? Gees in jazz that's just one of the scales you use to negotiate an altered dominant chord. Very comon usage Charlie Parker etc.
And george RUSSELL has different ideas
Completely apropos that this video is an hour.
Feldman was a magician. I don't think his music is about 'analysis '
Riveting.
17:55 “so let’s get started”. this intro is longer than Pink Floyd...
Morten Feldman -- the explanation regardless of there were synchrony cmes dow to much ado about noting. Who would be the first to say "the emperor has no clothes" without taking away the possibility that beauty can arise in the beholder as I think for me it does. I'm not sure that Feldman would appreciate someone trying to eplain him. In fact I don't think he would. He and you are trying to create legitimacy for something thaat is neither legitame nor illegitimate. Good try. Looking forward to some of your other anaysis of othermore analyzable composers.
I think it would be correct to label him as a Jewish composer in any "general intro". It's what he would want.
A discussion &/ or analysis without Any sound is... next to worthless.
This sucks as analysis. You spend half the video on background, and then you don't even provide any audio examples, that I could find.
You might find my more recent analysis videos preferable, in that case.
mumble mumble mumble
Feldman's music is total junk
Your comment, on the other hand, is solid gold!
@@samuel_andreyev zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
What have you ever done?
@@philipconnelly1505 How old are you? Eight? What a moronic statement.
@@anonymoussource701Definitely older than you based on your comments here.