----------Artist
In order to further complete (y)our Feldman collection here at KiC, here's a little something that might, at the very least, grab your attention. Also, I'd like to share some thoughts with you regarding this album, maybe as a review, maybe just as a general "whatever" kind of text. Please take it with a grain of salt.
The first piece, just titled "Piano and Orchestra", constantly shifts in form and color like one of those abstract expressionist paintings he admired so much; while this is a bit far from action painting, it certainly resembles the process behind it. If one is to trace the origins of the "method", one could go back to Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and his New York workshop at the end of the thirties, a location that attracted more than one future American star such as Jackson Pollock. This place of experiments in material aspects of the two-dimensional art brought forward an enormous force to the theoretical background of Pollock et al. As a 'venting' grounds for Siqueiros' heavily contrasting ideas about art in general (as much as a result of the "good neighbor" policy with Mexico), it's no wonder that a whole generation of painters and the musicians later associated with them share little bits of thought from the angry, outspoken, deeply militant Siqueiros. I'd like to argument that one of these ideas was that of a 'new classicism'. Siqueiros, like most good avant-gardists, wanted to eradicate the formal pressure of history upon art, but unlike most of those same good avant-gardists, he also wanted to create a 'new classicism'. He wasn't referring to pretty old neoclassicism as we know it, but a simpler, perhaps more utopian endeavor: the replacement of a tradition of repetition with a tradition of the now (almost of improvisation), self-renewing and self-rupturing.
Since this is intended to just be a brief text about the album, I'll stop there for you to interpret and research as you will, considering that yes, the idea is quite paradoxical, maybe philosophically vacuous, and has been a subject of a myriad discussions regarding the historical vanguard in general too. So, soldiering on with the argument and ignoring all sorts of holes, there is a Feldman quote within the liner notes in this album, in relation to "Rothko Chapel", that brought me to it all: "While it was possible with the paintings to reiterate color and scale and still retain dramatic interest, I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples." Of course, it seems like an easy shot, but considering that the chapel itself is a kind of neo-spiritual monument informed by paintings that tried to lure the spectator into a 'fourth dimension' (deeper into space, deeper into time), the whole work seems imbibed with this idea of a new classic. Rothko and Feldman had found it: the spiritual experience absolutely never gets old, and proof abounds everywhere you look in human culture. By entering the fourth dimension, each prayer, each meditation, would be constantly renewed in states of mind unshackled from Enlightenment and furiously grasped upon perception, the mindlessly empiric, the perpetually changing. And yet, it would all be framed by monumentality, by death and the immobility of a classical frieze. The tradition of the now would be practically complete, with its minimal, almost silent, horizontal micro-revolutions represented both in painting and music. Action painting be damned, this would be truly transcendental for both the individual and the collective ("highly contrasted merging sections"). Like the ending of the piece, it would be utterly sublime.
"Durations II" is the other side of the coin: with only the pitches specified, the performer is practically required to do 'action playing' and keep the listener on the edge of his or her seat. Each recording, then, would be like each painting hung on the wall, a different experience out of the same work, a frame that is always self-renewing; not a 'style', but a sort of new form of tradition.
Here's the album for you to enjoy. I hope I piqued some of your interest; I did not intend to make a solid essay or review, and instead went along with my intuition to bring a flawed idea about a possible interpretation for you to consider when listening to these pieces. As for the recording itself, I think it's good enough. There's other versions out there that are more powerful and/or severe in their treatment of the music, but this one is fine and compiles three of Feldman's most evocative pieces. In any case, there you go:
The first piece, just titled "Piano and Orchestra", constantly shifts in form and color like one of those abstract expressionist paintings he admired so much; while this is a bit far from action painting, it certainly resembles the process behind it. If one is to trace the origins of the "method", one could go back to Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and his New York workshop at the end of the thirties, a location that attracted more than one future American star such as Jackson Pollock. This place of experiments in material aspects of the two-dimensional art brought forward an enormous force to the theoretical background of Pollock et al. As a 'venting' grounds for Siqueiros' heavily contrasting ideas about art in general (as much as a result of the "good neighbor" policy with Mexico), it's no wonder that a whole generation of painters and the musicians later associated with them share little bits of thought from the angry, outspoken, deeply militant Siqueiros. I'd like to argument that one of these ideas was that of a 'new classicism'. Siqueiros, like most good avant-gardists, wanted to eradicate the formal pressure of history upon art, but unlike most of those same good avant-gardists, he also wanted to create a 'new classicism'. He wasn't referring to pretty old neoclassicism as we know it, but a simpler, perhaps more utopian endeavor: the replacement of a tradition of repetition with a tradition of the now (almost of improvisation), self-renewing and self-rupturing.
Since this is intended to just be a brief text about the album, I'll stop there for you to interpret and research as you will, considering that yes, the idea is quite paradoxical, maybe philosophically vacuous, and has been a subject of a myriad discussions regarding the historical vanguard in general too. So, soldiering on with the argument and ignoring all sorts of holes, there is a Feldman quote within the liner notes in this album, in relation to "Rothko Chapel", that brought me to it all: "While it was possible with the paintings to reiterate color and scale and still retain dramatic interest, I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples." Of course, it seems like an easy shot, but considering that the chapel itself is a kind of neo-spiritual monument informed by paintings that tried to lure the spectator into a 'fourth dimension' (deeper into space, deeper into time), the whole work seems imbibed with this idea of a new classic. Rothko and Feldman had found it: the spiritual experience absolutely never gets old, and proof abounds everywhere you look in human culture. By entering the fourth dimension, each prayer, each meditation, would be constantly renewed in states of mind unshackled from Enlightenment and furiously grasped upon perception, the mindlessly empiric, the perpetually changing. And yet, it would all be framed by monumentality, by death and the immobility of a classical frieze. The tradition of the now would be practically complete, with its minimal, almost silent, horizontal micro-revolutions represented both in painting and music. Action painting be damned, this would be truly transcendental for both the individual and the collective ("highly contrasted merging sections"). Like the ending of the piece, it would be utterly sublime.
"Durations II" is the other side of the coin: with only the pitches specified, the performer is practically required to do 'action playing' and keep the listener on the edge of his or her seat. Each recording, then, would be like each painting hung on the wall, a different experience out of the same work, a frame that is always self-renewing; not a 'style', but a sort of new form of tradition.
Here's the album for you to enjoy. I hope I piqued some of your interest; I did not intend to make a solid essay or review, and instead went along with my intuition to bring a flawed idea about a possible interpretation for you to consider when listening to these pieces. As for the recording itself, I think it's good enough. There's other versions out there that are more powerful and/or severe in their treatment of the music, but this one is fine and compiles three of Feldman's most evocative pieces. In any case, there you go:
4 comments:
Awesome.
Going to post in a sec, too.
this served as a friendly reminder for me to listen to rothko chapel more often
Excellent post I must say.. Simple but yet interesting and engaging.. Keep up the awesome work!
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