Morton Feldman's Bass Clarinet and Percussion: Analysis 

The analysis appears absolutely correct, and I began to enjoy Feldman's aesthetic within 10 seconds of hearing his work.

This is my new favorite youtube channel. You're teaching me a lot and exposing me to a ton of stuff. thanks man

Feldman's music used to drive me mad. After I graduated from the music conservatory in Chicago I decided to give him another 'go'. Nowadays, I am captivated by his music.

i've looked for analysis of Feldman's work on here and am VERY glad to have found this! fantastic for us Feldman fans :-) thank you!

In listening to the first few bars of "Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello" (1987), one can almost feel the eerie friction of the musical textures as if they were tangible.

It’s so great to see that there are thousands of people out there who love contemporary and modern music that almost nobody else has ever heard, or heard of.

So good to have this and so easily accessible in understanding !

oh man this is great, i recently read a compilation of his essays and writings and the man had a fascinating view on music and art.

Thanks for the fascinating and easy to follow analysis. Your description of Feldman's music continually keeping you in the present articulated something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I'll check out your other videos and compositions for sure!

Thank you very much!

I often wondered how Feldman did his stuff. Thanks for this thorough analysis, as you said, about bloody time on RU-vid. Feldmans music har this strange, breathing quality - like people constantly listening carefully not to interrupt each other, bringing the music down in volume. Boulez wouldnt understand that. In most contemporary music everybody screams and nobody listens.

your channel is such a learning experience....new composers, new pieces...or just insight that makes listening more interesting...

Well done. Many of Feldman's works are freely available on RU-vid but there's almost no content that unpacks his dauntingly long works. Thanks. :)

thanks! great material.

Great work!

My friend, Jim, introduced me to your music...'Concerto 2018' which I enjoyed very much, so now I am listening to your critique of Feldman. Thank you for doing this sort of cultural education. Very happy to follow, and shall be most interested in your interviews with members of Magic Band, one of whom I know, and have had extensive conversations with. Thank You!

Thanks for this. So much fun.

I just discovered your channel and I am delighted about someone finally talking about Feldman. I got started on Feldman with 'Coptic Light' years ago - I still consider it one of the greatest pieces of music ever written!

Hey Samuel, thank you so much for this analysis. Over the past three years I've began to really delve into Feldman's works and it's quite a shame that there are no analysis of his work here on youtube. This was extremely informative and helpful into getting a better understanding of not only this piece, but some of his techniques. I really hope you're able to do more analysis of Feldman in the near future, especially Palais De Mari. Thank you so much once again!

Thanks for doing this, Samuel.

Awesome!

amazing analysis.

Grazie Samuel! I studied for years the works of John Cage and I've always thought that the trio Feldman/Wolff/Brown was a continuation of the road opened by Cage. Now I believe that Feldman has overcome the dichotomy between aleatory and serial aesthetics. Something that also happened with the Xenakis's music and philosophy

Genius,triadic memories……my fav.

Thank you very much from a Feldman's music addict.

Just so amazing to see someone analyze Feldman's work. Any chance you could analyze 'Patterns in a Chromatic Field? Thanks Samuel for all your wonderfully articulate and thorough commentaries.

Great. His friend Cage gets more work analyzed on RU-vid. Great work my friend.

Hello! I've become addicted to these videos recently. I have absolutely adored Feldman's music for decades (far more than Boulez's, lol), but this is the first analysis of a Feldman piece I've seen online. Feldman wasn't even mentioned in my undergrad or graduate theory, orchestration or composition courses at Indiana University (late 80's): I only found him years after graduating. I find it strange that his music is such a secret. I'm wondering if you might have plans to talk about music of Luciano Berio or Mauricio Kagel. I felt an instant affinity for the story of how you came to make writing music your life's work because it's very similar to mine. Keep up the great work and thank you!

I love Morton Feldman's work

Looks amazing, I will definitely come back for more! Can you recommend other resources about 20th century classical music?

Wow ! Your channel is just what I've needed and going back to school . Boulez definitely had technique , tools , mastery and systemics . Feldman is closer to abstract expressionists look at the tools i'm using . Medium , size , color , space , shadow , tonality etc . Boulez is actually more old-fashioned his pages point to abstract Ideas .I know sound was important to him and he probably felt the idea and sound were linked and that idea was needed to support sound . Messiaen , Boulez seem to relate to and against each other . Beethoven may be where this line of thought really cut into two wheras in Bach's day it was understood that everything pointed to divinity : nothing was only or only for itself . There is no answer to these dilemmas so we push into whichever idea we commit ourselves to.

Sam, I salute your efforts to educate your audience about the life and music of a strange and unusual man who wrote music in the 20th century. What you are attempting to do is come up with some understanding of Feldman's method as if it really mattered. I suggest that there are two problems that exist in the musical experience. The first is the battle the composer wages between the techniques he chooses to employ and the unconscious decisions he makes, often at critical moments in the piece. The second problem is that every listener has a different life experience and will come to the music from wherever they may be at that time and place. What happens to them while the music is being played will affect their brain and their heart, and for each of us that will be different experience. Your lesson is well prepared and very complete, but I wonder whether it, in any way, affects the listener's perception of Feldman's music. Very often there is a large gap between the composer's intentions and the listener's perception of those intentions. What you are doing here is a personal narrative of your theories about his music that may or may not line up with what he thought he was doing or with the ideas of other theorists. In the end we must ask the listener what the are thinking and what they are feeling as the music travels from the beginning to the end. At the base of my argument is the question, What is music and how does it relate to the human experience? The problems faced by the performers of his music is a tale for another day.

Had an opportunity to collaborate with him shortly before his death in 1987, for a dance and music collaboration, but missed it!

Morton Feldman was quite interested in resonance as is evident in a few of his compositions. This was very different from the rapid, thickly textured and usually loud music of many serialist composers like Boulez that barely seem to give time for a single sound to have a moment to "sit in a given space and time and resonate".

The short melodic phrase 4. C#,D,B over Bb will sound like a Bb7b9 or Bb7 alterd dominant7 not major or minor it would in fact happily take your "octatonic" scale in a standard in Bill Evans or etc. In a chord progression it's 100% functional tonality. But yes creates expectation.

You could also possibly theorise that the 'altered cluster', is a Ab minor cluster (with a 2nd & major 7th), over a Dm cluster of the same quality

Glad that Feldman has taught you duration.

I just learned about this composer yesterday through The Classical Nerd. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VpL80kd9qcY.htmlsi=yz-DifKsc9GTYJSJ I must admit that I had previously known nothing about him. I sort of explored a bit of his music (no mean feat, since his pieces are all sooo long), and now you come up with this video. Perfect timing! Thank you so much. I love your channel.

Thank you for this enlightening analysis. If you happen to have some spare time, you might consider analysing a piece of Feldman's "middle period", like "The viola in my life", or "Piano". Those appear to be much less immediately accessible than his late work.

Thanks for your work on this channel. Will you please explain what you mean by octave identities? Are you just describing octave displacement, or is there a distinction?

what I like the most Feldman faith ... is his enormous authenticity ... and his enormous sincerity ... even attacking himself ..... a man for the future of today

Perhaps, some time in the future, you could do an analysis of a Cornelius Cardew composition, such as his most famous piece called "Treatise". It uses graphic notation.

Great channel. Will you ever make an analysis of Rothko Chapel?

Perhaps some time in the future you could analyse a composition by John Cage.

cool

Feldman is hands down the greatest American composer...

I wonder if some performers, before playing this piece, "cheat" and rearrange the score so the bars are aligned and the pulse is "countable".

Feldman is a space explorer!

Rather than being a rare practical concession, perhaps the 10-4 bar is a pun on the radio code 10-4, meaning "understood". Appropriate bar for the musicians to rejoin with each other and start the next phrase! I'm not sure if I'm joking anymore, maybe that's a decent theory.

Feldman wanted his music to have sounds that did not represent a metaphor, but to just be themselves.

Perhaps he was just avoiding the inevitable influence of the work's title on the perception of the piece rather than any preoccupation with the instrument/instrumentation, which points to a inclination towards the importance of the music in itself?

With regards to some of his longer pieces, like the 5-6 hr 2nd String Quartet, why compose something practically nobody will ever listen to from start to end, or, for that matter, could possibly sustain the concentration necessary to full appreciate?

is it mechanically / physically possible to play the notes in the high register again (the 4th cycle of the bass clarinet line) without the harmonics? if so, i doubt it's a mistake omitting the harmonics, given Feldman was keen to utilise subtle variations of colour (the whole 'dyed rugs thing ...') & this would have been a way to achieve that effect ... same notes, different M.O. ...

Interested to hear your thought's on Christian Wolff... and Earle Brown for that matter.

haha 45 bar phrases be like, "10/4, over." serious question: did he make any kind of specifications as to what kind cymbals and gongs the performers should use? i ask this because i heard somewhat distinct and very relevant pitch class information in the rolls in the beginning. perhaps create this potential illusion in the listener's mind is another way of "liberation?" pretty cool stuff.

"Coptic Light" is also a late piece of Feldman's (I believe) and of modest length (~25 mins or so), orchestral, less austere. Hearing it is for me an experience similar to lying in the sand on a beach and hearing the recurring sound of the surf, almost always the same and yet never quite the same, highly regular and yet not quite. I've no competence in music theory, but I'd be quite interested to have your take on this work - one of my favorite in "contemporary classical"... along with Dutilleux's "Ainsi la nuit" (dans un genre complètement différent - et qu'il vaudrait aussi la peine de commenter ?).

He really is a radical American in that he deals with materials first ; not like Boulez or other Europeans of the postWWII era ; being metaphorical ,allusive and "pointing to the non-musical . Like Abstract expressionism and later Bartok did this too (Materials and how they function !).The transcripts of his masterclasses are hilarious and one wonders what advanced students took away from him . Bunita Marcus probably didn't need him . She is wonderful composer on her own ! Must find his essays ! One has to do some serious evaluation with his scores-it is not a matter of reading notes -the conceptual and no pulse and the packets of his measure make no sense till oe gathers all the information and deductions inherent in his scores . Great abstractionist like the painters of his generation wee akin to his idea of large canvases of color ;directionality, anti-programmatic, thematic digression withut development . Did Feldman in the wild heady 1970's think concerts would turn into sound fests ?

thanks, so cool ! I see many goods tools that Boulez's arrogance could not comprehend.

I don't care for the presenter's intro stating his opinion that Feldman, is "one of the great composers of the 20th century". It kind of bias's one's thoughts about what will be said here. Better to leave comments like that for the end - after the analysis may or may not support such a claim. Just an opinion...

The thing to understand is that Feldman did not believe oh Hegel.

WHY DO YOU CALL AN AUXILIARY DIMINISHED SCALE OCTATONIC? Gees in jazz that's just one of the scales you use to negotiate an altered dominant chord. Very comon usage Charlie Parker etc.

there is only Feldman

Feldman was a magician. I don't think his music is about 'analysis '

Completely apropos that this video is an hour.

17:55 “so let’s get started”. this intro is longer than Pink Floyd...

Riveting.

I think it would be correct to label him as a Jewish composer in any "general intro". It's what he would want.

Morten Feldman -- the explanation regardless of there were synchrony cmes dow to much ado about noting. Who would be the first to say "the emperor has no clothes" without taking away the possibility that beauty can arise in the beholder as I think for me it does. I'm not sure that Feldman would appreciate someone trying to eplain him. In fact I don't think he would. He and you are trying to create legitimacy for something thaat is neither legitame nor illegitimate. Good try. Looking forward to some of your other anaysis of othermore analyzable composers.

This sucks as analysis. You spend half the video on background, and then you don't even provide any audio examples, that I could find.

A discussion &/ or analysis without Any sound is... next to worthless.

mumble mumble mumble

Feldman's music is total junk