The "departing landscape": Temporal and Timbral Elasticity in Morton Feldman's

i met heine on the rue fürstenberg ⁽¹⁾

Margaret Thomas

Thomas DeLio, Michael Hamman, and John P. Welsh focus on musical motion as created by timbral, intervallic, and registral processes.  ⁽²⁾ DeLio traces the predominance of particular interval classes in Last Pieces #3 (1959) as the work progresses through what he calls "regions." In so tracing these interval classes (formed both vertically and horizontally) DeLio infers an intervallic hierarchy that generates what we might hear as the work's structure, or "language," though he acknowledges that Feldman likely did not intend this structure. Instead, according to DeLio, Feldman "builds into the piece the possibility that the listener may perceive connections. In a sense, he builds in the possibility of order." ⁽³⁾ Hamman discusses a somewhat later work, Three Clarinets, 'Cello, and Piano (1971), likening its structure to an "evolution" formed by processes in the realms of pitch, texture, timbre, and register: the work's pitches are driven by the completion of chromatic sets; a textural process results from an interaction between two textures, one emphasizing vertical structures, and the other, horizontal structures; the timbral process features the interaction of two basic sound types, one characterized by a minimal attack and one by a maximal attack; and, finally, a registral structure emerges from the expansion and contraction of registral space. ⁽⁴⁾ Welsh also focuses on the idea of process, in his treatment of Projection 1 (1950), an early, graphically notated piece for solo 'cello with indeterminate elements. In the score Feldman specifies only articulation type (harmonic, pizzicato, arco), relative pitch (high, middle, low), and a basic duration/rhythmic scheme. Welsh graphs the deployment of these three musical characteristics through six sections in the piece, changes in which define the work's structure: "The first half of Projection 1 reveals a process whereby one timbre is transformed into another, while the second half synthesizes, intensifies, and reinforces this same process." ⁽⁵⁾

In these writings DeLio, Hamman, and Walsh flesh out directed readings of Feldman's works, focusing on motion and structure as created by musical processes. Steven Johnson takes a slightly different approach when he discusses Feldman's unusual evocation of two different kinds of musical time in Rothko Chapel, namely linear (processive) time and vertical (static) time, which are created in adjacent sections of the piece. Johnson relates their juxtaposition to the unusual circumstances surrounding the composition of that work, which was written for a specific architectural structure, a chapel designed to hold paintings by Mark Rothko. ⁽⁶⁾ In order to complement the presentation of paintings in the chapel Feldman felt that "the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections." ⁽⁷⁾ While this use of clear sections demarcated by differing styles is atypical for Feldman, particularly at this stage in his compositional development, Johnson's discussion of it does pave the way for my own attempt to reconcile the seeming presence of both stasis and motion in Feldman's music. Catherine Costello Hirata displays similar concerns when she fictionalizes a debate between a music analyst (read Hirata) attempting to impose a contextual, rhetorical reading on the first movement of Feldman's Last Pieces (1959) and a (wiser) fan of Feldman who insists on a focus driven by Feldman's emphasis on "the sounds themselves." ⁽⁸⁾ The reasoning behind incorporating indeterminacy in his early scores, as Feldman does in the score to Last Pieces, which has specific pitches but not durations, is that, in Feldman's words, "only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exists in themselves." ⁽⁹⁾ Hirata develops an analytical model that examines specific "sounds" (usually specific pitches) in a micro-context determined by the particular sonic qualities of a pitch's frequency, combined with its placement in the context of perhaps two to six adjacent sonorities. Jonathan W. Bernard adds to the debate by exploring the significant impact the visual artists of the "New York School" ⁽¹⁰⁾ had on Feldman's aesthetic and compositional approach. ⁽¹¹⁾ Of the many interesting points made by Bernard, one of the most pertinent to the present discussion is his assertion that, for Feldman, the "location of musical activity [is] somewhere between stasis and change" ⁽¹²⁾: Feldman often uses near, but not exact, repetition, the result being, in Feldman's words, that "there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion." ⁽¹³⁾

Clearly, this recent scholarship reveals a widespread and intense interest in the presence (or absence) of linearity and goal direction in Feldman's music. The present paper is no exception: taking these other writings as a starting point, I focus on Feldman's 1971 piece i met heine on the rue fürstenberg, conflating the contradictory views of his music as either processive or static by developing a model of temporal and timbral motion that is elastic rather than directed. My aim is to avoid interpreting the interconnection of events that plays a large role in this work as forming a directed process because I do not believe the piece operates under such a linear scheme. My approach to the concept of elasticity in i met heine ... is inspired by Feldman's discussion of the issue of attack in an article contemporary to the piece. Feldman says,

Naturally, if the instrumental attack in music always creates the same aural plane, something must be done to activate, to vary it. It must be propped up to make it more interesting. . . . Since music is increasingly obsessed with this one idea - variation - one must always be looking back at one's material for implications to go on. Change is the only solution to an unchanging aural plane created by the constant element of projection, of attack.

This is perhaps why in my own music I am so involved with the decay of each sound, and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing - leaving us rather than coming toward us. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Beyond the obvious connection striving to make attacks "sourceless" has with Feldman's characteristically soft dynamics and sustained sonorities, Feldman's notion of the "departing landscape" suggests that we would do well to approach his pieces with a reflective mode of listening rather than either a directed linear mode or timeless mode, to borrow phrases from Jonathan Kramer. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Kramer defines linearity as "the determination of some characteristic(s) of music in accordance with implications that arise from earlier events of the piece. Thus linearity is processive." ⁽¹⁶⁾ But to depart is to move away from, not toward, and to emphasize the importance of the decay of sounds is to suggest the existence of a retrospective, relational structure. A given event in a piece may not have implications for what will follow, but, rather, may relate to an event that has already occurred.

This distinction is crucial to the special effect of a work like i met heine ..... It can perhaps be demonstrated most clearly by invoking the concept of the Markov chain, as does Kramer, in which the Markov order parallels the degree of linearity of a passage or work. When a given event is suggested by the event immediately preceding it a first-order Markov chain results; dependence on more than one previous event increases the Markov order, and independence from preceding events results in a zeroth-order Markov chain. At stake is the probability of events, or the linearity of a passage. The more linear a passage, the more it recalls conventional goal-directed temporality. At the opposite end of the spectrum is timeless, or vertical, music, which, as Kramer describes it, "tries to create an eternal now by blurring the distinction between past, present, and future, and by avoiding gestures that invoke memory or activate expectation." ⁽¹⁷⁾ Despite Kramer's assertion that "the composer who perhaps best epitomizes vertical time was Morton Feldman," who "simply put down one beautiful sound after another," ⁽¹⁸⁾ I maintain that Feldman's music, like most music, fits somewhere in between these two extremes.

Analytical Obervations

i met heine .... (like many Feldman works) comprises a limited set of gesture, or sound, types, but incorporates virtually no exact repetition or durational periodicity. Constant meter changes, along with rhythms that do not project the notated meters, play an important role in this lack of periodicity. The work is scored for flute, clarinet, percussion instruments, ⁽¹⁹⁾ piano, untexted voice, violin, and 'cello. Many events consist of a single articulation, or perhaps two or three successive notes; only a few events have a somewhat more "melodic" effect. These facts enable a viewing of the work through relational webs based on the similarity among events of timbre, instrumentation, duration, pitch, or some combination of these. The webs display an aspect of elasticity in the form of parametric expansions and contractions, and in the connections formed by subtle variations in instrumental combinations, pitch content, dynamic shading, articulation, meters, and metric placement, but they do not represent uni-directional processes.

Once a set of identities is established a relational web can be created. The opening eight measures of i met heine... will provide a model. We begin with what I call a first-level web, which addresses a single musical feature. Subsequent levels of interpretation address new sets of similarities. Page 1 of the score is given in Example 1.

The events during measures 1-8 are labeled sequentially A through J in the score. We can represent them as an uninterpreted succession simply as a string of letters, as in Figure 1(a), but it provides no other information than order. Each event is different, although there are a variety of shared characteristics that connect them. The first set of identities that might be imposed on the events is instrumentation, shown in Figure 1(b). Events (BCFGH) do not presage their subsequent combination to form J, but J clearly relates back to those earlier events in terms at least of instrumentation: it is a reflective event whose appearance connects (BCFGH), bringing together the flute, clarinet, vibraphone, voice, violin, and 'cello. You will notice the exclusion of the piano events (ADI) from the larger structure, and the obvious independent strand they form based on instrumentation. More fully connected structures emerge when additional identities are incorporated.

                                        b)
                                            ```

Figure 1a: Uninterpreted succession of events in mm. 1 - 8 Figure 1b: First-level web based on instrumentation

Consider the impact of pitch and pitch class, which draw the self-similar piano events into the overall structure. These sustained chords preceded by grace notes, which occur intermittently throughout the piece, are often followed by events in other instruments that repeat pitches from the chords. Figure 1(c) shows the impact of these connections on the passage. The D4 of chord A reappears directly as the voice note for event B, for example, and pitch class C# from A reappears in the clarinet in event B. Similarly, the G#5 of event D reappears as the violin harmonic event G, and the F5 and D#5 of I as the flute and voice parts of J. While the path of these pitches is audible, it is only in retrospect that we hear the connections; the subsequent reappearance in another instrument of a pitch initially sounded in a piano chord is never suggested in the music, nor is it inevitable, nor is the specific pitch to be repeated predictable.

Although the webs illustrated in Figure 1 may appear to be linear in that event J seems to act as the culmination of preceding events, it is important to note that in context it, in fact, has little concluding impact. My cutoff for the example at m. 8 is arbitrary; there is nothing in the surface texture of the piece to mark this point as a conclusion or divider. Events continue to occur at the near-regular spacing of approximately every three to four quarter notes, and they resemble earlier events in articulation type and in their general

intervallic and pitch-class content. While several previously heard instruments do indeed combine to form J, and two pitches from I recur directly in J, two pitches from J then recur in the clarinet and flute parts of the subsequent measures. These pitch links are one of the key elements in the perceived elasticity of the work: they act as threads that connect events to one another, yet they have no implications for forward or developmental motion.

In fact, the temporal/formal structure of i met heine ... is largely undifferentiated. It is marked for a time by the periodic occurrences of the piano chords, which are recognizably similar to one another, but rarely exactly the same. ⁽²⁰⁾ But they have neither the concluding nor initiating functions that would create a sense of phrase structure in the work; they merely act as one of the most clearly defined elements around which the work seems to cycle. Indeed, it is the absence of these chords for a time that forms one of the subtle shifts that shape the piece: following the initial piano chord (event A in Example 1) the chords gradually appear with less frequency, until m. 82, after which we do not hear a related piano event until m. 128. ⁽²¹⁾ The piano chord of m. 128 is followed by five more piano articulations before the end of the piece in m. 150, interspersed with material in the other parts. Does this behavior in the piano - that of a gradual disappearance of the chords and then reappearance near the end of the piece - constitute a linear process? I would argue that it does not, because it exhibits no sense of probability. This is not to say that the piano chords are unrelated, however. They are illustrated in Example 2, annotated to show set-class content.

Note a similarity of interval, articulation, and, occasionally, pitch. Trichords containing at least one instance of interval class 1 are frequently formed by the individual hands, especially (012), (013), and (014), and they often contain a pitch interval of a diminished third or augmented sixth. Perhaps one could pose a directed process overseeing the chords, but I do not believe it would do service to these lovely chords, whose general emphasis on interval class 2 as the upper dyad of many of the sonorities is more circular than directed. Is ic2 a familiar sound in the piece? Yes, and it occurs in other instruments as well, as we shall see. But is there convincing progress toward the final three chords, with their top dyad formed by F#5 and A5 a goal of that motion? No, they do not complete a transpositional or other process. Imposing other types of linear schemes on the piano chords is similarly problematic.

There are two basic shifts, however, that help to shape the piece. The first is the unique appearance of new material once the piece is well under way - the 32nd-note arpeggiations in the flute that begin in m. 56 - varied repetitions of which occur occasionally through the remainder of the work. A sampling of these arpeggiations is given in Example 3. Notice that they are sometimes shared by other instruments, particularly the clarinet and 'cello. This material has a markedly different effect from that of the otherwise slow and gentle gestures of the work. While the introduction of the arpeggiations seems to signal a new stage in the piece, it is important to note that the material with which the arpeggiations are interspersed is a continuation of the gesture types established early on. As a result there is no clear sectional division here.

           

The second shift of the work is the gradual move toward longer melodic lines as the end of the piece nears, particularly in the voice part, which emerges in the melodic role, occasionally doubled by the winds or 'cello. The question of whether the lengthening of the melodic lines represents linear, processive motion is a complicated one. While it is true that the final statement in the voice, in the closing measures, is the longest continuous melodic line of the piece, the approach to it is not systematic, nor is its length (of nine adjacent notes in contrast to the prior maximum of five adjacent notes) predictable. This final melodic statement by the voice, just six measures before the end of the piece, is provided in Example 4(a). It does build on the voice's preceding statements, in that it references certain familiar intervallic patterns (especially ic2, as <+2>, <+10>, or <+14>, along with <+7>), but it cannot be said to act either as a conclusion or a reprise. It is, however, a self-quotation (with minor rhythmic discrepancies) of the principal melody in Feldman's The Viola in My Life (2), which occurs three times, each time slightly altered, in the final third of that piece. The first version of that melody is given in Example 4(b). The Viola in My Life (2) is similar in many respects to i met heine ... : it is approximately the same length (about 12 minutes), is contemporary to it (written just a year earlier, in 1970), and is scored similarly, for solo viola, flute, clarinet, violin, 'cello, piano, and percussion. The appearance of its main melody in i met heine ... speaks to a larger durational/temporal interpenetration of Feldman's compositions that is suggestive of a kind of macro-composition formed by the two works, and characterized by an expanded form of the interconnectivity demonstrated by i met heine ....

                          

Example 4b: FeldmanThe Viola in My Life mm. 121- 126

Another argument for a closure to our hypothetical goal-directed structure is the unusual use (for this work) of literal repetition in the work's closing measures. Precisely the same piano chord occurs three times in the last eleven measures (in mm. 140, 144, and 149), each time coinciding with a B5 to C#6 dyad in the violin. Since these chords and dyads surround the final melodic statements of the voice their reiteration could suggest melodic and harmonic arrival.

Conclusions

But how, then, might we reconcile Feldman's concept of the "departing landscape" with this view of the work? Let's begin by considering the ways in which the piece presents a static sense of musical time. One of the most basic, but vital, features in this regard is the limited set of gesture types contained in i met heine ..., and their frequent, though not ordered, recurrences, which create a cyclic effect. This corresponds nicely to the non-linear, non-developmental idea of stasis, and allows for forming a web of connections one can follow both forward and backward. For example, when the piano chords reappear near the end of the work, following an extended absence, we are reminded of the chords that occur during the first part of the work. There is a similarity of spacing and intervallic emphasis, as discussed earlier. None of the chords is exactly the same as one found previously in the work, however, so the effect of reprise is denied. To return implies to have gotten somewhere, but to revisit, or recall just a portion of the entire gestural complex without precise replication evokes the processes of fluctuation and deterioration that are fundamental to the concept of the departing landscape.

Another element commonly associated with stasis is the absence of progression or change. And, in fact, a sense of immobility is very strong at times in this work, created by frequent and repetitive appearances of pitches and intervallic patterns. Although these appearances do not constitute literal repetition, because the instrumentation, durations, or metric placement tends to vary, the overall effect of a surface restricted in content is acute. Consider mm. 103-114. An annotated score to these measures is given in Example 5.

The metaphorical concept of elasticity provides a useful way to view this interesting blending of linearity and stasis. It reflects both the undivided formal structure of the work, that is, the unbroken strand forged by the continuity of gesture types, and the changing degree of linearity ranging from brief quasi-developmental passages to passages fixed on repetitive presentations of a limited number of sounds. When the material is limited in this way the effect is a stretching of the elastic connections running through the piece. The resulting image is a reorientation of the connective temporal strand at these points to a nearly vertical position. Note that the connection is never broken, though, just as in an elastic band, and, moreover, that it is not directed only along a forward trajectory. It runs both forward and backward, since there is nothing like a finish line placed at the end of the piece. In fact, we can envision it looping back, or reflecting back, toward the beginning of the work.

The notion of reflection and temporal interpenetration permeates Feldman's essay that shares the work's title, published in 1973. ⁽²²⁾ In it he reminisces about various friendships, with such figures as Lukas Foss, Wallingford Riegger, Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Christian Wolff, and Jackson Pollock. He concludes thus:

        Radical composer, they say. But you see I've always had this big sense of history, the feeling of tradition, continuity.

With Mm. Press at twelve, I was in touch with Scriabin, and thus with Chopin. With Busoni, and thus with Liszt. With Varese, and thus with Debussy, and Ives and Cowell, and Schoenberg. They are not dead.

One early morning in Paris I was walking along the small street on the Left Bank where Delacroix's studio is, just as it was more than a century ago. I'd read his journals, where he tells of Chopin, going for a drive, the poet Heine dropping in, a refugee from Germany.

Nothing had changed in the street. And I saw Heine up at the corner, walking toward me. He almost reached me. I had this intense feeling for him, you know, the Jewish exile. I saw him. Then I went back to my place and wrote my work, I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg. They are not dead. They are with me.

What I feel the most is not in respect to the public, or even to myself. I have the feeling that I cannot betray this continuity, this thing I carry with me. The burden of history. ⁽²³⁾

Feldman's statement provides us a key to reconciling the linear and static views of i met heine ..., in his evocation of historical continuity. It allows for linear connections, certainly, but the emphasis is on backward relations rather than a forward trajectory, on the departing, but not departed, landscape of musical predecessors, and thus on the reflective interaction of events across the piece.

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory, Philadelphia, November, 2001.

2. Their analyses appear in Thomas DeLio, ed., The Music of Morton Feldman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996): Thomas DeLio, "Last Piece #3 (1959)," 39-70; Michael Hamman, "Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (1971)," 71-98; and John P. Welsh, "Projection I (1950)," 21-38.

3. DeLio, 67.

4. Hamman, 71.

5. Welsh, 35.

6. Steven Johnson, "Rothko Chapel and Rothko's Chapel," Perspectives of New Music 32/2 (Summer 1994), 6-53.

7. Morton Feldman, "Rothko Chapel," liner notes, Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel/For Frank O'Hara Columbia Records/Odyssey Y34138 (1976), reprinted in B. H. Friedman, ed., Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), 125.

8. Catherine Costello Hirata, "The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman," Perspectives of New Music 34/1 (Winter 1996), 6-27.

9. Feldman, "Predeterminate/Indeterminate," Composer 19 (Spring 1966), 3-4, reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 35.

10. The "New York School" painters included Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Philip Guston.

11. Jonathan W. Bernard, "Feldman's Painters," in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, Steven Johnson, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 173-215.

12. Bernard, 181.

13. Morton Feldman, "Crippled Symmetry," Res 2 (Autumn 1981), 91-103, reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 134-149, and quoted in Bernard, 180.

14. Morton Feldman, "The Anxiety of Art," Art in America 61/5 (Sept./Oct. 1973), 90, reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 24-25. Jonathan Bernard, too, discusses the importance of decay in Feldman's aesthetic, suggesting that it can be likened to the "lack of sharply defined edges in much abstract expressionist work" (Bernard,182).

15. Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988).

16. Kramer, 20.

17. Kramer, 376.

18. Kramer, 386.

19. The percussion instruments are vibraphone, tenor drum, chimes, temple block, glockenspiel, timpani, wood block, and triangle.

20. Exact repetition occurs only in mm. 62 and 69 (allowing for registral shifts), 128 and 132, and in the final three chords, whose special purpose will be discussed below.

21. The piano articulation that appears during the intervening measures, in m. 98, contains only two pitch classes, and is thus sufficiently different from the other piano articulations of the work so as not to be considered a representative of that gesture.

22. Feldman, "I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg," Buffalo Evening News (April 21, 1973), reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 112-121.

23. Ibid., 120-121.