Imperfection and colour

Musical Times, Autumn 2006 by Fox, Christopher

Imperfection and colour Morion Feldman says Edited by Chris Villars Hyphen Press (London 2006); 302pp; £25, $50 PBK. ISBN 0907259 31 6.

MORTON FELDMAN APPRECIATED FINE THINGS - great paintings, good food, attractive companions - and I suspect he would have enjoyed this latest addition to the Feldman fan's library as much for the tactile and visual pleasure it gives as for its record of his verbal gifts. Since 1997 Chris Villars has edited the Morton Feldman web-page (www.cnvill.demon.co.uk/mfliome.htm) but useful as that is as a source of Feldmania there is something so much more satisfying about having material from the site in book form. Hyphen Press approached Villars with the idea of such a book and the result is a celebration of the subtle arts of book construction. 240 pages of essays, interviews and lectures, interspersed with photographs, are printed on white paper; then there are 12 pages of score extracts from across Feldman's output, one piece to a page, followed by a chronology of the composer's life, a bibliography, notes on the contributors and a good index, all printed on grey paper. The book is paper-backed and beautifully bound, with a colour photograph of Feldman, intently examining an antique relief, on the front of the book jacket.

Does this matter? For a book about Feldman I think it does. He was after all a composer who said 'I'd stop writing music unless I had a beautiful piano' and elsewhere that 'pitch is a gorgeous thing. If you have a feeling, a tactile feeling for the instrument'. Of course all the information in Morton Feldman says can be got from a computer screen but how much more appropriate to its subject that it should be elegantly presented on paper in a book that has a good weight in the hand. The page layout is also easy on the eye, again something Feldman would have appreciated. He describes learning from Cage how to set out his music in score: 'It was through John Cage that I learned about a great German pen, the Rapidograph... my early graph music, three graphic pieces, he copied it... He spent the whole week copying things, showing me how to set up a page.'

There have been two previous collections of Feldman's words, Give my regards to Eighth Street, edited by BH Friedman and first published by the American imprint Exact Change in 2000, and Morton Feldman: essays, edited by the German composer Walter Zimmermann and published by his Beginner Press in 1985, and there is some overlap, both between the material presented in Morton Feldman says and the Zimmermann volume, and between the Friedman and Zimmermann. Zimmermann's book is long out of print but anyone who has both Give my regards and Morton Feldman says will have an almost comprehensive Feldman archive, since the earlier book consists of Feldman's writings while Villars has concentrated on Feldman talking. As the bibliography in the new book shows, there are still some Feldman lectures to be transcribed and published in English, particularly the lectures he gave as part of the composition course in Middleburg in the Netherlands near the end of his life, but a reading of Give my regards and Morton Feldman says will give a very good sense of Feldman's artistic preoccupations.

What mere text cannot provide, of course, is a sense of Feldman's extraordinary physical presence or the sound of the grating New York twang in which his pronouncements were delivered. The photographs in the book are an objective depiction of the man - jutting jaw, protruding lower lip, heavyframed glasses, slicked-back hair - but they suggest a persona rather more benign than the street-wise, razor-sharp character Feldman chose to present in public. Morton Feldman says does however include the lecture he gave during the 1984 Darmstadt courses and there is a hint here of the hard-boiled Feldman. I was in that swelteringly hot classroom as Feldman paced the floor, firing off a stream of unforgettably perceptive remarks on music, art, time and creativity, and I can still recall the moment when the British composer James Erber innocently asked whether Feldman was going to say anything about the second String Quartet which we had heard the Kronos Quartet play the night before. 'You're not nice... I wouldn't answer anything you asked me. You're horrible! You're hostile!', replied Feldman. When Erber responded, Oh come, buy me a drink and then you'll get to know me better', Feldman retorted, ? don't want to get to know you at all!'. Morton Feldman says records the words and square brackets record that there was [laughter] but this does not capture the palpable menace in Feldman's tone and manner.

Nor is Morton Feldman says able to add much more to the vexed debate over performance practice in Feldman's music. Feldman's late scores make extensive use of double sharps and double flats; in a lecture in Toronto he described them as 'adding a little turpentine to the chromatic field' and in Darmstadt he told us variously that these spellings were 'microtonaP but that he didn't 'use it conceptually', that 'people think they're leading tones' but that we could 'think what you want'. What does this all mean? For Paul Zukofsky in his recording of the 75-minute-long violin and piano piece For John Cage (1982) it means thoroughly microtonal playing, double sharps three-quarter tones sharp; for Josje ter Haar in her recording of the same music it means the subtlest of inflection. I find the former excruciatingly ugly and the latter entrancingly beautiful but I know other listeners whose response is quite different. Perhaps Feldman savoured this ambiguity? My own view is that Feldman the pragmatist chose to tolerate some questionable performances from people he felt were worth cultivating but that Feldman the musical philosopher imagined a more or less conventionally beautiful sound for his music. He loved the sophistication of modern western instruments and generally wrote for them in their most secure registers; when he departs from this world, either for more remote registers or through chromatic respelling, it is 'in search of an orchestration', to quote the title of his 1967 orchestral score, or, as he said in Toronto, 'just an orchestration of a chromatic tone'.