Morton Feldman’s Music of Stillness

Feldman’s hundredth birthday was on January 12th. Little is being done on his behalf in New York City, where he was born and raised. But the University of Buffalo, where the composer taught for many years, mounted a two-day festival in his honor, and the Piano Spheres series, in Los Angeles, presented a pair of marathon concerts. I attended the latter, which culminated in the unveiling of a cake emblazoned with Philip Guston’s portrait of Feldman—a bulbous figure puffing on a cigarette and gazing into the distance. I happen to share a birthday with the man of the hour. It was as good a way as any to mark the creep of age.

The Piano Spheres events, which were divided between the Wende Museum, in Culver City, and the Brick, in Koreatown, concentrated on the music of Feldman’s final decade, when he largely gave up trying to produce works that could fit onto conventional programs. Thirteen of his scores from this period go on for more than an hour; two of them, “String Quartet II” and “For Philip Guston,” each outlast “Tristan und Isolde.” I sometimes suspect that Feldman seized on Wagnerian scale as a way of exacting revenge on Hitler’s favorite composer. But the vastness was really about fostering conditions in which his spectral harmonies could thrive. Rothko needed to fill a room with his canvases; Feldman needed to fill an evening with his music.

Anchoring the proceedings were two seventy-five-minute-long creations for solo piano. Amy Williams played “Triadic Memories,” from 1981, and Aron Kallay offered “For Bunita Marcus,” from 1985. Both renditions were superb, though small divergences between them showed that Feldman’s seemingly monolithic style leaves room for individual approaches. In his later years, he fashioned his music to suit his favorite interpreters—“like a tailor,” he said. Writing for piano, he often had in mind the lustrous touch of Aki Takahashi, who, thirty years ago, gave a hypnotic, séance-like reading of “Triadic Memories” at the Lincoln Center Festival.

Williams grew up with Feldman in her ears. Her father, the percussionist Jan Williams, taught alongside the composer at Buffalo and participated in the premières of “Guston” and other major works. The younger Williams is giving a number of Feldman performances this year, including one at Columbia’s Miller Theatre, in March. “Triadic Memories” is a stark construction, even by Feldman’s standards. For long stretches, the pianist picks out single notes rather than chords, although the pedal allows ghost harmonies to accumulate. The score is thick with repetition: figures are heard six, eight, ten times in succession. Williams knows how to humanize this bare-bones vocabulary, minutely adjusting the voicing of a chord or caressing the last of a set of recurring motifs with a regretful ritardando. Lightly syncopated patterns dance in place like Messiaen’s birds. Feldman has seldom sounded so companionable.

Kallay, a professor at the Claremont Colleges, had never before essayed Feldman in public, although you wouldn’t have known it from the phenomenal focus and finesse he applied to “For Bunita Marcus.” This score, too, is remarkably threadbare. The first page has thirty-four notes in twenty-four bars. Kallay, like Williams, has a gift for infinitesimal variation: solitary high C’s glitter like crystals being struck by shifting light. When, in a harmonic field that verges on the key of C-sharp minor, an E-sharp brings a major-ish gleam, Kallay underlined the shift just enough to make it feel like an epiphany. Yet his playing had an otherworldly serenity that contrasted with Williams’s gentle purposefulness. His luminous tone filled the Brick, a recently converted gallery space with fine acoustics. Heightening the atmosphere was the presence of Kara Walker’s sculpture “Unmanned Drone,” a creative deconstruction of a statue of Stonewall Jackson that once stood in Charlottesville.