Morton Feldman: Reading

The fact that the writer attributes his free-thinking of music to one his own teachers being liberal rather than disciplinarian hits home with me simply because I had a similar experience in my life when I started taking my first piano lessons. The fact that Morton spent five years talking about painting rather than music makes me wonder if he was serious about music at all. I think relating visual things and what we sort of, try to do while were scoring films is kind of, not very far from how he visualizes photography and its relation with music. His talk about indeterminacy in pitch while writing music is something I took note of. Perhaps, the form of graph notation he talks about was indeed liberating the performer but at the same time, I also feel like there would also be limitations just like any other technique. Perhaps, not knowing for sure whether you are right or wrong makes it sort of, like an oxymoron for the performer Morton seems to overtly experimental with his approaches in Durations. I think to a certain extent, that kind of experimentation is always good when you dont really have a perfect fifth or a third or something more perfect and I feel that it makes music seem more human. Structures of orchestra reminds me of the I am sitting in a room series that you recently shared in video game class. Sometimes, all these compositions seem to be more of experiments than actual music. I feel like even if they might not always have been music, they do somehow shape how its made. Its an interesting perspective to think two oscillators are played with an amplified guitar and xylophone. That seems like a fairly odd combination. False relationships and an extended ending seems to be fairly more intuitive than other works in terms of music playing technique and instrumentation from what I read. He mentions that the space of the chapel influenced his choice of instrumentation. Whats interesting is I read something similar while I

was reading a book called How Music Works by David Bryne last year and in one of the first chapters, he talks about how something like orchestral music adapted the way it did was because it used to be played in large halls and how something in contrast like, say african music is more close-spaced with a drum circle. It seems fairly logical that what surroundings we are in ended up shaping the kind of music we make. The fact that he forgot some of the references makes me wonder if art or music creation is really pointless.

20/02/15 11:05 AM

20/02/15 11:05 AM