How do you focus your ear?

Morton Feldman. First thoughts. How often a volume, a piece of music, an exhibition comes at the right time. Sense of uncanny synchronicity. Or is it simply changes within your own living, breathing, thinking which allow a greater receptivity? Above all to be responsible (Robert Duncan) – ie able to respond.

Feldman’s music intrigues me. It comes at the right time given my current reading & preoccupations. (Although during the MOMA Guston exhibition in Oxford circa 1987-8 wouldn’t have been a bad time, would it?). Still, we orbit.

How do you focus your ear? That seems to be a major issue with Feldman’s music. Cage, of course, wished his readers ‘Happy New Ears’. And it is not once every 365 days but here, now, this very second.

Which leads to a consideration of time. Feldman cites Varese & the “time sound needs in order to speak”. What is sound? What is a note in fact?

Feldman’s music demands a re-thinking of the material nature of sound. The note is struck – a physical action involving musician plus instrument (eg. piano = hammer plus strings) – which sets the air molecules “wiggling” (Zappa). The note is – as such – an after-image, a shadow. Feldman’s compositions are thus “thin air”. An “airy nothingness” suggestive of metaphysical poetry. Shakespeare’s Ariel. John Donne.

Yet – to my mind & way of hearing – the excitement of Feldman’s music is in its simultaneous claim for & denial of sonic ‘purity’. As Beckett shows (& Feldman obviously absorbs Beckett’s lessons/lessens) paring down creates richness. Feldman’s single notes become voluptuous to the ear greedy for more. The attack, the duration, the fade. However, Cage also is instructive in the movement towards nothing – especially his ideas of continuity & no continuity, composition & acceptance - & implicitly denies minimalist preciosity.

Do ‘ideal’ conditions for Feldman’s music exist? Was he joking when he suggested a dead audience? As Cage frequently reminded us, you cannot attain silence. In the concert hall: the bronchitic in the third row, the air conditioning system, the hum of city traffic. In the domestic environment: your kids shouting downstairs, the CD player’s whirr. Even the iPod – does anyone load up Feldman CDs to go jogging? – is prone to distortion through mp3 compression, the rubbing & rustling of ear buds…

To say it again: you cannot speak of silence. No note is ‘pure’. I am reminded of Benedick in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’:

Now, divine air! now is his soul ravished! Is it
not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out
of men's bodies? (II. iii)

For me, Feldman’s music is predicated upon Cage’s “acceptance”. Continuity and no continuity. This applies ‘within’ the composition – although the spatial metaphor is rendered questionable by definition – as well as the context in which the composition is written, performed, heard. Background is foreground. Beginning, middle & end co-exist. Ventilated music such as Feldman’s cannot but embrace all sound. In this it is similar to a Calder mobile. Exquisitely balanced on its own terms yet also ‘accepting ‘ of the particular givens of ceiling to door jamb alignment, the faint breeze from the window, the startling snow-capped mountains (eg Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny).

Zappa spoke of his Project/Object whereby everything becomes part of the Work in Progress. A lyric, a chord, the cover art, a remark in an interview are all material for the Composition. A fabulous and liberating aesthetic of Life is Art (check out Out to Lunch, Poodle Play, and the Militant Esthetic site www.militantesthetix.co.uk) .

Feldman achieves it by different means. Precisely by paring music down to such minimal elements – seemingly purifying music of the contingency & noise of the everyday - Life rushes in through the holes. More than a glib play on words: the hole is the whole. What is ‘empty’? The oxymoronic ‘full emptiness’ makes sense.

For all their high art, minimalist chic packaging, Feldman’s CDs are not-things. What do we ‘buy’ when we purchase Early Piano Works? “It’s just a load of notes” is both a lazy opinion and penetrating analysis. (What, after all, is a de Kooning but “paint”?). We buy a duration – 78 minutes let us say – and a record of an interpretation. However, even the seemingly permanent status of the recording will - in its very playing and unfolding in time – be invaded by unforeseen circumstances, unheard of possibilities. I decide to listen to a Feldman piece, the CD starts, a fly enters the room – buzz, buzz, buzz – how irritating until you accept (that word again) the conditions of Feldman’s work.

“Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music, and Feldman’s eminently, is a celebration that we own nothing.” (Cage ‘Lecture on Something’).

Or, as Cage puts it later on in the same text:

“Let us say in life:/No earthquakes/are permissible”.

I listen to Feldman & hear what is there (& simultaneously not there) all the time. The whole in the holes. His divine holiness…