metaphysical place

Like Cage’s, Feldman’s music shows a tendency to move in a kind of “metaphysical place”, in Frank O’Hara’s words. The transcendence is to be found in the perception’s intensification of the here and now in the acoustical phenomenon. In order to liberate the sounds from the composer’s authoritarian control, both Feldman and Cage came to wonder about their compositional methods: Cage by consulting the I-Ching, and Feldman, first, through graphic notation, where the performer is requested to play sounds in a non-virtuoso way, having silence as a starting point. There is no question here of any improvisation catharsis, but of a special space suggested by the notation, in which the performer can let the sounds occur in all their autonomy. Between 1952 and 1958 Feldman abandons graphic notation and comes back to the use of traditional notation, which could nevertheless maintain the abstraction and absence of control of indeterminate music. He is not interested in a system, but in a work method. Some of the features of it are, for example; writing in ink, as a possibility of observing his own attention while working, writing all his ideas in the score, mixing the sounds directly on the canvas - in order to be able afterwards to dislocate the material in any direction; silence as a substitution for counterpoint - “I’m interested in counterpoint [...] in the way that Mozart was, that is, as orchestration” -; use of patterns, discontinuous and modular disposition of the material.

Chico Mello, Precision and Anarchy in Feldman’s Work, 1995