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Feldman\u2019s 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\u2019s portrait of Feldman\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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, \u201cString Quartet II\u201d and \u201cFor Philip Guston,\u201d each outlast \u201cTristan und Isolde.\u201d I sometimes suspect that Feldman seized on Wagnerian scale as a way of exacting revenge on Hitler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Anchoring the proceedings were two seventy-five-minute-long creations for solo piano. Amy Williams played \u201cTriadic Memories,\u201d from 1981, and Aron Kallay offered \u201cFor Bunita Marcus,\u201d from 1985. Both renditions were superb, though small divergences between them showed that Feldman\u2019s seemingly monolithic style leaves room for individual approaches. In his later years, he fashioned his music to suit his favorite interpreters\u2014\u201clike a tailor,\u201d he said. Writing for piano, he often had in mind the lustrous touch of Aki Takahashi, who, thirty years ago, gave a hypnotic, s\u00e9ance-like reading of \u201cTriadic Memories\u201d at the Lincoln Center Festival.<\/p>\n
Williams grew up with Feldman in her ears. Her father, the percussionist Jan Williams, taught alongside the composer at Buffalo and participated in the premi\u00e8res of \u201cGuston\u201d and other major works. The younger Williams is giving a number of Feldman performances this year, including one at Columbia\u2019s Miller Theatre, in March. \u201cTriadic Memories\u201d is a stark construction, even by Feldman\u2019s 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\u2019s birds. Feldman has seldom sounded so companionable.<\/p>\n
Kallay, a professor at the Claremont Colleges, had never before essayed Feldman in public, although you wouldn\u2019t have known it from the phenomenal focus and finesse he applied to \u201cFor Bunita Marcus.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s sculpture \u201cUnmanned Drone,\u201d a creative deconstruction of a statue of Stonewall Jackson that once stood in Charlottesville.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Feldman\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2346112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21941,22008,365925,343871],"class_list":["post-2346111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-audio","tag-magazine","tag-musical-events","tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Morton-Feldmans-Music-of-Stillness.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2346113,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346111\/revisions\/2346113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2346112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}