“Morton Feldman will build a cool and transparent temple in the Tibet of your spirit. Your thoughts will be sorted out, one after the other, and your fears will stand translucent around your time on Earth”.
That is a Feldman-inspired excerpt from a letter I once wrote to a friend in anguish, and it rose out of extended experiences of Feldman’s late works, which spread out in complete ignorance or even consciousness of Time as a parameter, in a frame of mind where Time disappears in Timelessness, in a constant, vibrating Now, extending in all directions without end, which might comfort a person in trouble, putting himself and his life in perspective.

The works on this CD, number four in Mode’s Feldman Edition, stem from much earlier stages, but the seeds for the later grand pieces are readily noticeable already hear, meaning that Feldman fetched his strength of composition more from his own personality than from present circumstances.

Feldman said, about these early days:

So it was a liberation of sound that took place, in a way that had not happened before, and as electronic and concrete music also saw light of day those years (Stockhausen, Schaeffer), sound as “das Ding an sich”, with a value unto itself, arose out of the constraints of its formalized chains and broke free, to the bewilderment of many and the joy of a few, but from there on forever changing the way we perceive sound.

It was also under the influence of pictorial art by avant-garde painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and Philip Guston that Feldman composed “Projections” in the winter 1950 – 51. These compositions appear as the third set on the CD, with indexes 4 – 8. “Projections” are, however, the earliest music on this CD, which is why we consider it before the other pieces.
A very detailed essay on Feldman and his indeterminate music written by Sabine Feisst is found in the CD booklet.
These are freely notated scores on graph paper, with pitch indicated as high, middle or low, according to the vertical positioning of small squares and rectangles within larger boxes. In the piano part Arabic numerals indicate the number of pitches to be played simultaneously. Rhythm is also indicated in an unconventional way, through so-called time-boxes, which correspond, by Feldman’s design, to four icti (MM = roundabout 72). The length of a rectangle determines duration of sound, and placement within time-box indicates attack moment.
Quoting Feldman from Feisst’s essay, he says: “My desire here was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here.”
Referring to the influence of painting on Feldman’s music, the essayist points out that a pointillistic and static character is defined in the “Projections”.
Christian Wolff oftentimes saw Feldman at work, and testifies that Feldman put up sheets of graph paper on the wall and worked on them like paintings.
Sabine Feisst notes that the most important parameters in Feldman’s works at this point were instrumental color and tone color, various kinds of attack and decay, dynamics, timbre combinations and sonic density. She continues with the observation that Feldman explores different types of instrumentation and timbres in each of the “Projections”.

“Projection 1” staggers in on stilts, as the cello is plucked and soon stroked gently but erratically. The feeling is that of careful investigation of the space into which the sound is introduced. Nothing is hurried; there is no special place to go, no meeting to attend – just this place of stillness in the middle of Time…
“Projection 2” is equally still inside its on sphere of existence, but the instruments are five, and the muted trumpet leaves some gold dust on the surface of life. The piano adds clear, blue tones, in sparsely seasoned dispersement. Pauses of Eastern buoyancy – raked rock gardens of Japan! – leave room for the silence that nourishes sound, and appeasement is achieved in this music.
“Projection 3” for two pianos have timbres at times blur into each other, almost causing a Stockhausenesque “Mantra” effect, in beautiful, glasslike shrills out of the body of the instrument.
“Projection 4” for piano and violin give premonitions of later works of longer duration with the same instruments, like “For John Cage” (1982) or “Spring of Chosroes” (1977). The violin is either plucked or scratchy or really shrill, and the piano sometimes rumbles, sometimes plinks and plonks in erratic, but peculiarly rhythmic, progressions.
“Projection 5” utilizes the highest number of instruments, which renders it a tighter density, but make no mistake; the key word is transparency anyhow! The rendezvous of timbres and pitches in this piece is magic, sometimes bending the spoon out of your hand and having you hold on to the table as floor and ceiling change place!

“Two Pieces for Six Instruments” was composed in 1956, and this here recording is the very first one done of the piece. When composing these works Feldman adopted conventional notation again. Feldman has experimented here with techniques evoking piano resonance. The essayist Sabine Feisst further describes what she calls “interval fields”; a term borrowed from Martin Erdmann (“Zusammenhang und Losigkeit. Zu Morton Feldmans Kompositionen zwischen 1950 und 1956”). Feisst says: “Interval fields emerge through the frequent occurrence of certain intervals or interval groups in atonal music and lead to new types of structural coherence. In the case of ‘Two Pieces’, major seconds, perfect fourths, fifths and octaves are predominant and form various interval fields.”
These pieces are so minute that they pass like dew rising through morning sunlight across a meadow of medieval England… It’s but a truckle of absentminded time in an eternity of timelessness; a butterfly’s dream, the thoughts of trees… and the silvery bells of elves! Ah… fingertips softly tapping on your forehead…

“Durations” was composed in 1960 – 61. Feldman says about this work:

All the five pieces of “Durations” are clothed in very low dynamics, and it is indicated that the sounds should be played with a minimum of attack.
This all results in an airy flow of the ether, almost unimaginably thin, to the point of brittle flakes of ice held up towards the sun. Sounds progress in jingle jangle hingeries of heavenly doors, opening to inner states of bliss and transparent circumstances of the spirit. In this music the Self rids itself of Ego and hovers weightlessly above the surface of Lake Saimaa of Karelia, which is the Mirror of the Soul reflecting the bottomless void of Space. A composer able to project these gliding fields of vision is intuitive up to and beyond the limits of perception, and living in these sound worlds means living in visions projected on the inside of your eyelids…

The last work chronologically of the pieces herein presented – but the opening track of the CD – is “The Straits of Magellan” from 1961. Here Feldman resorts to graphic notation again, inserting time boxes, Arabic numerals indicating the amount of single notes, while roman numerals determine the number of simultaneous notes to be played within each time unit. Sabine Feisst notes, though, that a different concept rules in the piano part, where Arabic numerals decide the number of simultaneous sounds while encircled Arabic numerals denote the number of successively played single notes. The determination of pitches is looser than ever, only occasional arrows indicating a higher or lower register. The characteristics that indeed are strictly decided by Feldman in “Straits of Magellan” are textural density, the succession of silence, single notes, chords and clusters.
The demands on the performers are very high, which Feisst exemplifies with Feldman’s very distinct persistence of excellence when dealing with “the frequent density of sonic events, the amount of notes played within one time-box paired with meticulous timbre specifications such as the use of mutes, flutter and double tonguing in the wind instruments, eight different performance techniques in the contrabass, glissandi and harmonics in other instruments, the requirement of very low dynamics throughout and that sounds should be played with a minimum of attack.”
These high demands remind me a lot of Stockhausen’s very precise demands, which he too pairs with an amount of interpretational freedom, according to set systems of possible variations, which nonetheless are so diverse and incalculable that the music may head in very unexpected directions.

Myself, I am not overly interested in these technical methods of shaping art, though the knowledge of them may be of great value and interest to composers and scholars. I am obsessed with the feelings or experiences the sounding result may instigate in me, regardless of the methods. In these rather early Feldman works the dreamy, transparent glass notion is what I feel strongly. This music liberates stooping souls, have them straighten their backs and breathe, deeply. I don’t even think this at all was the intent of the composer, but it is the result. This music is a calm snowfall outside my window, and the music soothes almost as much as the humming computer…