'Entering a living world'
(work in progress)
[Notes for a colloquium]
This text copyright 1994 by James Pritchett. All rights reserved. Not to be copied or redistributed without permission.
. . . New ideas suggest themselves, need defining, exploring, need a mind that knows it is entering a living world, not a dead one. When you set out for a living world you don't know what to take with you because you don't know where you're going. You don't know if the temperature will be warm or cold; you have to buy your clothes when you get there.
-- Morton Feldman, 'Conversations without Stravinsky' (1967)
I
1
I never know what I'm doing now. When I mention a project, I always say 'I don't have any idea what I'll say, but I'll think of something.'
2
In my work, all my energies are directed towards keeping the experience of the music alive and somehow mysterious. How do I do it? I don't know; I don't think about where I'm going, I just go (Feldman again). Huang Po's advice: From morning till night, do not rely on any single thing.
3
I was asked what books had influenced me; like most questions from musicologists, it zoomed right past me. Cage first (a conversation); then nature writing--sitting and waiting, going to the same place every day. My method (if any): just go out there and hang out. Like reading the books John did. Live.
4
Poetry.
Read Frank O'Hara, Standing still and walking in New York, p. 112.
This goes very well with my line of thinking these days.
II-a
1
Wanting to write about Feldman, but baffled. Left with a peculiar look on my face, hands empty, the music long gone. Grasping at straws, I settled on a piano piece.
Play Piano piece (1964).
2
The feel of the piece under my fingers. The sounds just brush the silence, barely touching. This suggests an analogy with drawing, brush-and-ink, brushstrokes. I became fascinated with the different types of stroke he uses. Responding to the different kinds of line.
3
Look at the opening lines:
- Grace note going to a measured silence. Most of the piece is grace notes: lift, all up and no down.
- Open head versus closed head -- touch versus a dab? Difference between grace note before bar line and after (slight weight).
- Fermata? Breath.
- Metered bar: Not trailing, glancing, brushing, but put down and then lifted up, deliberately.
- Decays, trailing off, running out of ink.
- The 'thickened attack'.
4
Where is the tactile dimension? You can't point to it -- it's not a parameter (as it is in, say, Boulez). Holistic: can't just apply touch to the finished product. Unlike Boulez, Feldman's in there, doing it.
5
Touch: Mondrian story (spray-painted picture didn't even look like a Mondrian). 'For me, at least, this seems to be the answer, even if it is nothing more than the ephemeral feel of the pencil in my hand when I work. I'm sure if I dictated my music, even if I dictated it exactly, it would never be the same.' ('Anxiety of art', 1969)
II-b
1
Trying to get a handle on the pitch/harmonic element. Grays, non-pitched clusters. Began thinking in terms of graph piece notations.
2
History lesson: graph pieces. Feldman didn't turn back on them, but continued to write them until 1969.
3
Found the graph transcription wanting: had to make exceptions, alterations; couldn't get the rhythm notated; lost the touch. Lost shades of gray, places where pitchiness should intrude. Feldman's on-again, off-again use of graph notation for same reasons? Precise non-pitchiness: 'play three notes that I like.'
4
Play Piano piece (1964) again.
II-c
1
Once, after playing the piece, it made me think of For Frank O'Hara (1973).
Play For Frank O'Hara.
2
Nothing to add, really; it speaks for itself. A path I'll follow next.
James Pritchett
Princeton, 15 November 1994