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By JamesP, 17 May 2012 5:40 am

Twice a week I do some very simple strength training at home (just lifting some free weights), and lately I’ve taken to listening to piano music while doing this. It gives me ideas of things I’d like to play, reminds me of repertoire I haven’t heard in awhile, etc. I’ve been working on those Rachmaninoff Preludes, so the other day I poked through Rhapsody to see if I could find some recordings that I could listen to for reference and for ideas. I found a recording of Sviatoslav Richter playing some, including the D major one that I’ve played.

I love Richter’s playing, and I was looking forward to the climax of the Prelude. I thought there would be a big sound and a sense of power to this “Rachmaninoff moment”, and there was, but what impressed me more was the ease with which he played it.  This sense of ease seemed foreign to my playing, which sounded forced and strident in my mind as I listened to Richter.  Where does that come from?  Technical mastery is part of it, for sure, but that’s not the whole story.

I’ve since gone back and listened to the two performances again.  Mine’s not as tense as I imagined it in my mind, and the sound isn’t as harsh as I was thinking it was.  It’s partially a trick of memory, but also a reflection of the state of mind I often have when playing:  leaning forward into the next thing, worrying about getting the notes right in that tricky bit, building up the story of the piece rather than allowing its unfolding.  Listening to Richter, I see some technical things he’s doing differently:  a faster tempo, less rubato, letting the lower and middle registers purl along more in the background.  But I keep coming back to the attitude in the mind, this ease, this relaxed awareness.

There are times when it just happens of its own accord. I think that’s what’s behind that occasional experience of playing especially well after having not practiced at all for some days. I came back from vacation and the first time I sat down to play through things again, they all sounded so much better than usual. I’ve had that experience before. It’s counter-intuitive, this facility that arises when by all rights your fingers should be rusty and recalcitrant. But while the fingers may need some exercise, the mind is ready and not yet startled by the task in front of you.

I’ve thought of this in relation to meditation practice, in which the same problem occurs: how to cultivate ease of mind?  There is no formula: you just learn to dwell there by practicing it. Christina Feldman teaches that we are always cultivating something, either consciously or unconsciously. Consciously we can choose to cultivate qualities such as calm and kindness, or we can unconsciously cultivate our habitual responses. The same may be true for ease in playing: I may just need to consciously cultivate ease by turning to it often.

And so lately I have been figuring out how to practice ease in my playing.  It’s partly a matter of relaxing tempos (although I play the Rachmaninoff slower than Richter), but even more it’s relaxing my inner sense of tempo, especially at climaxes. I have always had a tendency to rush when I play, especially nearing difficult or stressful passages, and even more especially when playing in public. There’s a feeling in the mind of wanting to nail this passage, to be sure to get it right, to put across the big moment. Now I am recognizing that inner sense of desire, of anxiety, as the difficult passage approaches, as the climax starts to build.  It is relaxing in the face of this that is required, and this is a skill that needs to be practiced as much as the finger work.

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By JamesP, 9 May 2012 5:20 am

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus, very busy with other things, including writing two articles on Cage. One is a short piece for the Portuguese-English journal Cine qua non.  The title is “Five statements on silence by John Cage:  Questions, hypotheses, second thoughts”. It deals with Silent prayer, the string quartet, the experience in the anechoic chamber, 4′ 33″, and 0′ 00″.  The other article is a longer essay about Cage’s spiritual journey, titled “John Cage’s journey into silence”.  This will be published by Ashgate Publishing as part of the collection Contemporary music and spirituality.  I’ve been travelling, too:  my annual two-week retreat and a vacation in Italy.

And, of course, I’ve been playing the piano. I’m still playing For Bunita Marcus, and will blog again about that soon.  I’ve been trying to keep up some of the repertoire I’ve learned lately by playing everything  every few weeks, although some things fall out of the rotation and get rusty. And, without necessarily intending to, I’ve picked up some new pieces.  Sometimes it was just things that were lying around, or things that I heard and got the urge to play myself.  These include:

• A couple of Poulenc pieces:  the first Nocturne (C major) and the third Novelette (e minor).  Years ago, when I was planning my undergraduate senior recital, I contemplated doing a set of Poulenc pieces to open the show.  I listened to a bunch of works and settled on three or four that I thought made a nice grouping.  That memory came to mind a few months ago and I sought out Poulenc piano music again.  The Nocturne and Novelette were in that grouping, and I remembered them as my favorites in the bunch. I got the scores and have been playing them a lot lately.  One thing I was a bit surprised by is how unidiomatic the piano writing is.  So many things are awkward and do not fall easily under the hand.  But they are beautiful, especially the dark and dramatic Novelette.
• A couple more of the Rachmaninoff Preludes.  I learned the Op. 23, No. 4 (D major) some time back, did a video of it, and blogged about it here.  I got curious about other preludes in the set and listened to them again one evening while I was cooking dinner.  This led me to two other pieces in the Op. 23:  No. 10 (G-flat major) and, just recently, No. 6 (E-flat major). And just the other day I tried playing through the “alla marcia” No. 5 (g minor), which I played as a teenager. I think that I’ll revive that one, too.

With the coming of spring, I’m going to try to get back to more focused practicing and with that more blogging about it.  I need to finish my series on Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus, for one thing.  But as I am playing more of this other literature, I find myself wanting to blog more about that, especially as I think about the intersection of my inner life and piano playing. With the page-by-page descriptions of For Bunita Marcus, it’s gotten very technical in here, and I feel the need to ease up on that a bit.  As different as they are from the Feldman, those Rachmaninoff preludes have been making me think about “the piano in my life”; expect an appearance from them here shortly.

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By JamesP, 12 December 2011 6:30 am

After attaining a state of deep concentration in pages 20-22, For Bunita Marcus breaks off and scatters a bit over the next few pages.  This is another section where Feldman rearranges earlier music, disorienting our memories.

Page 23 is mostly a reordering of page 19.  For the most part, page 19 is chopped up at the level of the individual measure and the measures rearranged.  The first two and a half systems of music on page 23 move roughly backwards through page 19, although not in a strict manner (at least as far as I can tell). The second half of the page is punctuated by the “fanfare” motive from the end of page 19, but transposed down a step. In between these are other individual measures from page 19.

When we turn the page, the music shifts focus again. The first four systems return to the pairs of two-note phrases, separated by silence, that were the object of attention on page 22. This is not a literal repetition of what happened on page 22, but rather a continuation of the pattern. But after a short while, this breaks off into the rising pattern that ended page 22.

The last system of page 24 through page 25 is a revisiting of the very first page of the piece, transformed using a different approach. The five systems of music from page 1 are presented in order, but with time and octave changes. The last system of page 24 is exactly the same as the opening of the piece, just up an octave. Following this, Feldman takes the music of the second system of page 1, moves it up an octave, and changes the rhythms to draw out the durations, writing the entire section in 2/2 meter. Here’s the original from page 1:

And here’s the prolonged version on page 25:

Feldman makes a couple of small changes, making a couple of single tones into chords, but it is clearly drawn from page 1.  This is then followed by a pair of phrases that are new:

I find these to have a particularly striking character.  They seem like omens to me, sentries pointing to a door somewhere. In performance I try to set these off via touch (and maybe a little extra pause before and after).

The rest of page 25 follows similar patterns as the above.  Here’s the whole sequence, starting from the bottom of page 24:

• Page 1, system 1, up an octave
• Page 1, system 2 (edited), up and octave and prolonged
• “The sentries”
• Page 1, system 3, down an octave
• Page 1, system 4 (edited), with various octave displacements and prolonged
• “The sentries”
• Page 1, system 5, transposed down a minor ninth (i.e., down a semitone and an octave)

I try in performance to really put across this shifting in pace as the music drops out of “real time” into a kind of suspended slow motion. This is mostly a matter of body language, moving hands slowly and evenly from note to note, as if I, myself, have been yanked into slow motion. It sounds hokey, and it probably is, but it keeps me engaged with the material and I think that it would be effective with an audience, too.

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By JamesP, 18 November 2011 5:50 pm

As I noted at the end of the last installment of my trek through For Bunita Marcus, the end of page 19 signals something altogether different:

I think of this almost like a fanfare (although scaled within a Feldman context!), an announcement of someone new coming through the doorway. What happens over the next three pages is an expansion of time and a sharpening of concentration in the piece. It is as if the appearance of a new imagery settles the heart of the music.  It becomes intensely focused on simple things, where even tiny changes seem momentous.

The initial musical image here is a static sonority that is activated from within by the placement of attacks.  The sonority shown in the example above—the four tones in those specific registers—is sustained over the next system or so of music, but with the order and rhythm of the four attacks shifting:

Once the image is sustained, Feldman shifts it slightly, first by dropping the F-sharp:

And then by bringing the E down to a D-sharp and moving the D up to an E, plus adding a grace-note F-natural:

He then sustains this new sonority for another page’s worth of music.  The rhythms of the patterns have slowed down, and this, combined with the subtle variations, makes the whole thing float:  we can’t latch onto any obvious rhythmic pattern, and so we really keep track of exactly what’s happening. Sonically the music is static, like the passage on pages 8-10, but rhythmically it’s much more spacious, so the feeling is different. This is another case of Feldman’s reflections, as I have called them: neither repetition nor development, but a way of dwelling upon an image that has energy and change but not necessarily direction.

Midway through page 21, Feldman takes us out of this space and the opening “fanfare” returns for a few repetitions. The music then settles again into a new reflection on a new image: from the patterns we’ve been hearing, Feldman draws out a simple two-note phrase.  The next page and a half (through the end of page 22) is devoted to these, generally presented in pairs with a measure’s rest between them and repeated:

At this point the music has settled and become very quiet (energetically, not just in terms of volume). The long pauses between the two-note phrases slows the pace and sets off each phrase so that we can hear them very clearly. Our attention is focused more and more closely on each of these as they occur; our awareness is narrowed more and more to the present moment. At the end of the page, the music almost literally floats away:

The first time I started playing this section, I found the whole thing exhilarating, and on days when my energy and attention are strong, I still get into a kind of “zone” in these pages. It very much feels like a turning point in the piece, like something has been discovered. It also makes you wonder when it will end, and where the music will go next.

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By JamesP, 26 October 2011 8:21 pm

Here in the blog, I’ve been describing my progress through Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus one section at a time. I’ve gotten through page 19, which is about halfway through the piece.  In reality, I’ve been much further ahead of the blog. A couple of weeks ago, I finally reached the end.

My way of learning the piece has been to identify a coherent chunk of music and work on learning the notes of just that section. When I’m comfortable with that chunk, I identify the next one and continue the process. When I started this, I would practice by beginning at page 1 and play through however much I had learned so far, then spend time on the details of the latest section to get it in my fingers. But the piece is so long that, after a while it took too much time to start at the beginning and playing through to my stopping point. I have to squeeze my practice in among various other work and home activities, so I couldn’t spend all my time just playing through parts of For Bunita Marcus that I had already learned. So I started the practice of dropping a section from the beginning of my practice once I had blogged about it. I’d do some analysis and write about that chunk, and then the next time I practiced I’d start from the next chunk and play through. This means that my practice sessions were a moving window into the piece. Since I’ve blogged about everything in pages 1-19, I now start my practice with page 20 and go forward from there.

But I’m slow blogging, and besides, I find it better to write about the music after I’ve been playing it awhile in the context of the music around it, so in my practice I’ve always been ahead of what I’ve written about. When I got to the latter part of the piece, its beauty was so seductive that I kept moving forward and as a result reached the ending sooner than I’d expected. I’ll blog about it eventually, but wanted to put this quick post out to signal the milestone.

Another practice that I’ve started relatively recently has been to try to play through from page 1 through my ending point once a week, usually Saturday or Sunday. After reaching the ending, it meant that my weekend summary was a true end-to-end performance. I timed it and it clocked in at 1 hour, 19 minutes. My next steps are to firm up my command of the final pages, blog about the second half of the piece, and play through the whole thing more frequently (where will I find the time?) so that I learn how concentration and energy are managed over that span of time. I hope to wind up the descriptive blog entries before the end of the year.

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By JamesP, 30 September 2011 6:05 am

In a recent lecture on Feldman’s music, Bunita Marcus said that Feldman was ”playing with memory and the evolution of memory.”  I’ve noted on many occasions (including occasionally in this blog) that the continuity of Feldman’s music is like the continuity of thought, so the connection to memory seems very powerful to me.

The next part of For Bunita Marcus (pages 16-19) is devoted to this “playing with memory”. These four pages are filled with music we’ve already heard before, but reconfigured in ways that affect our connection of the current events to the past ones. Actually, I first noted this on pages 5-6. Here Feldman repeats the seven phrases of the opening page of the piece, but in a different order (4, 3, 6, 2, 1, 7), and with very slight modifications: a missing note here, a register change there. It actually sounds like Feldman was playing these phrases from memory here, and the anomalies are places he didn’t quite remember it correctly. I have no idea whether this is what happened; that’s just the way it sounds.

It’s worth noting that, in general, this music encourages tricks of memory. The chromatic noodling of these first seven pages is very labyrinthine: it’s disorienting if you’re trying to keep track of what’s happened before. Had I not been reading this from the score and playing it over and over, I might not have noticed the repetitions on pages 5-6 at all, although the repeat of the opening phrase is noticeable, since we tend to remember beginnings well. I hear the overall progression of adding more tones to the mix, but that’s really all: a vague notion that we’re moving somewhere, but no clear point-to-point motion, no obvious reference points. When we hit those repeated phrases on page 5, we might ask ourselves, have we been here before? Or we might just have an unrecognized sense of familiar terrain.

All four of the pages 16-19 are devoted to this kind of deliberate reconfiguration of memory. Each separate page takes as its source an earlier page and applies a different method to transform that source page. Some of these are done quite systematically, some are not. Here are the geeky details:

• Page 16. The music on this page is identical to that on page 11, but reordered by system. The five systems of page 11 are presented in almost-reverse order:  5-4-3-1-2. And the nine measures within each system appear in reverse order. The music within each measure is unchanged.
• Page 17. The music here comes from page 7. That page consists of a number of phrases set off from each other with silent measures. On page 17, Feldman for the most part presents the same phrases in a different order. One phrase (the sixth one on page 7) is missing, and another (the eighth) is repeated in its place. And the final phrase (which appears at the end of both pages) is varied slightly on page 17.
• Page 18. The music here is derived from page 13. The connections are much looser, although almost every measure on page 18 can be identified in page 13. In this case, rather than rearrange the systems, the individual measures of page 13 are reordered. There is a rough overall movement backwards through the music of page 13, although this is not followed systematically. Most of the measures are exactly the same, although some modify the original slightly through octave displacements and the chromatic inflection of a note here or there. Four measures are similar to music found on page 13 but do not actually appear there.
• Page 19. This follows a similar process as page 18—reordering the individual measures of a page—but using the music of page 18 itself as the source, so that we are now hearing a twice-shuffled version of page 13. In addition, all measures are transposed up a semitone. For the most part only measures from the first three systems of page 18 are used—the interlocking figures, not the chromatic lines of the last two systems. There are a handful of measures with new music as well, but mostly it is just page 18 cut up and transposed.

The last few bars of page 19 introduces an entirely new image that clearly heralds a change:

So in these four pages, Feldman has taken music from various earlier points in the piece and rearranged it at the measure-to-measure level, while keeping the content of the measures themselves relatively constant. The shape of the phrases and figures are unchanged and hence recognized as related to our past experience, but the configurations are new, which challenges our memories. The pages all feature similar music—mostly the interlocking motives that first appeared at page 11—which makes this section seem even more labyrinthine. Of course those interlocking motives all have similar profiles in the first place, but there are some specific, recognizable moments that tickle our memory when they appear again here. And appearing as they do in similar, but altered surroundings gives us the feeling of déjà vu: we know that we’ve been here before, but we are uncertain exactly how it happened the first time. And it’s not just the ordering of these things in time that has been played with. Page 19′s transposition up a semitone gives the music of page 18 a different color altogether, even as the rhythms, intervals, and registers remain the same.

I was well aware of this kind of memory effect in Feldman’s music, but I had never realized how systematic the approach was until I started working through this score.  One way to look at this is that Feldman is deliberately confusing and disorienting the listener.  We’ve entered a part of the piece where he wants to have us revisit music that we’ve encountered before, but he wants to change our felt sense of this music by changing the context in these methodical ways. It’s not just a matter of “developing themes” as it is producing a particular effect of memory, a pattern of simultaneous recognition and uncertainty.

Another way of looking at this is that what we are witnessing here is Feldman’s own thought itself. Perhaps not confusion or uncertainty, but exploration and play. Feldman is at a point where he wants to revisit music that’s occurred before, but to see what other possibilities for combinations and sequences there are. The various ways of rearranging measures of music that we find in pages 16-19 are means, systematic to varying degrees, of rediscovering the material. Viewed this way, Feldman’s motivation is strikingly similar to Cage’s in his adoption of chance operations in the 1950s. I have always felt that Feldman was the man behind Cage’s taking the leap into chance, and so this connection intrigues me.

Finally, yet another way to look at it, if you want to further the analogy of continuity of thought, is to view this passage as being like the experience one has of this music when one is away from it, the different images and figures tumbling around in one’s mind. Different flashes of beauty stand out for us, and every time we let these measures sift through our memory, we pick out different ones as our favorites—or at least the ones that stick in our minds today.

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By JamesP, 21 September 2011 8:36 pm

Looking at the somewhat sparse blog postings lately, it looks like I’m just plowing through For Bunita Marcus and not much else. Not true! Let me take a moment to touch on a few other things that I’m playing and thinking about:

Debussy and racism

I found my copy of Debussy’s Children’s corner, purchased in 1970, with its bright yellow cover (above). That cover always disturbed me with its grotesque, disembodied grinning black face. At the time I learned Snow is dancing and none of the other pieces. Lately I’ve been enjoying playing through all of them, especially the poignant Little shepherd, the Satie-like Jimbos lullabye, and, of course, Golliwog’s cakewalk. Frances & I got into a discussion about what a Golliwog is, and I turned to the Internet, where I found an extensive entry from The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. I had no idea that this was behind the piece, although that grinning face on the cover should have tipped me off. What to do? The racist origin of the thing taints my experience of it now, but I have other associations with it that transcend that. Does that redeem it, purify it in some way? I have no answers, but there could be a much longer post in all of this.

Learning to be Gershwin

George Gershwin made solo piano arrangements of a number of his favorite songs. I love the Gershwin songbook, and so I bought the score and have started learning some. They are a challenge, which is something I was looking for. It’s clear to me that these are snapshots of Gershwin himself just sitting down to the piano and riffing on his own tunes. The style and some of the mechanics of the playing are quite different from what I’m used to, which makes them more difficult to learn. It’s not just learning the notes, it’s learning the whole style, learning new mechanical and musical habits; learning, in a way, to be Gershwin. My favorites so far? The luxurious “Do it again” and the “Who cares?” (one of my all-time favorite Gershwin songs), with its quirky rhythmic accompaniment.

Flute music

I’ve always loved the Poulenc flute sonata. As an undergraduate I actively sought out a flutist with whom to play it (not the usual path for an “accompanying” gig). Now that I have a piano again, I’ve done it again. Our good friend Elizabeth Brown loaned me her score and we played through the sonata the last time she came over for a visit. I held my own on the first two movements but massacred the third. But it was fun, and it was great to having a sonic companion for the piano in the house. Elizabeth brought over a bunch of other scores for us to consider. I haven’t started playing through these yet, but there are pieces by Bartok and Schumann that have attracted my attention.

Schumann (& Feldman?)

And speaking of Schumann, one of my goals for the year was to learn more of his music. I have my heart set on learning Carnaval, but that will take lots of time and attention, and I’m using that on Feldman at the moment. So to tide me over until then, I’ve been learning the Blumenstück, Op. 19. Maybe it’s just me and the musical place I’m in these days, but the piece keeps reminding me of Feldman. It has an open-ended, repetitive structure built of low-contrast materials. The effect is disorienting: you can’t remember where you’ve been before and how you got here. Everything seems somehow related, but you can’t quite place it, at least not consciously. For example, when I started working on the score, I was surprised to find that the opening section is never repeated; I somehow assumed that it was the thing that came back over and over, but in fact it’s the second thing that does that (Schumann loves to bring back the second thing, as in the Davidsbündler or Dichterliebe). In any event, a nice complement to the Feldman.

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By JamesP, 26 August 2011 6:42 pm

In my last post, I noted the way that these first pages of For Bunita Marcus contain such a diversity of music. With page 14, Feldman begins recycling patterns and music from earlier in the piece. I’ll talk about the first chunk of this briefly here, and then in my next post I’ll cover the more extended and involved memories that fill pages 16-19.

Pages 14 and 15 are devoted to a reappearance of the image last seen on pages 8-10: the two oscillations of G-flat/E-flat and C/D. As in the earlier appearance, these two pairs of notes go through subtly shifting rhythmic patterns, moving quite independently of the alternating 3/8 and 5/16 meters.

So for the first four systems, the music is really a continuation of the earlier pages. But the pattern slows down and spreads out in the last of these four systems, and in the last system of the page the image is transformed:

The left hand part of the pattern has morphed into a single chord, while the right hand’s E-flat/G-flat motion continues. This sonority continues unchanged for the entirety of the following page. At the top of the page, Feldman slows down the rhythm dramatically:

This, combined with the stopping of motion in the left hand, makes this passage feel as if we are in some kind of suspended animation. The music floats for a few minutes in this one harmonic space, the only change being the shifting of the rhythms in the right hand and the unpredictable tolling of the chord in the left hand.  It is as if Feldman’s mind settled on this sonority and sank into a deep reverie on it, losing all forward momentum of thought, at least for a few minutes.  But the turn of the page breaks the spell, as we shall see.

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By JamesP, 28 July 2011 6:14 am

The figure above, repeated four times with pauses between, signals the end of the extended sonority of pages 8-10 and the start of something different in the piece. For the next several pages the music is more unsettled, moving forward and backward in time and changing imagery and focus more frequently. I’ll start with a description of the next three pages, which feel like a unit to me.

The first three minutes (pages 11-12) sustain a new image, interlocking eight-notes within a tight chromatic range, with octave displacements:

The pitches here follow the same general course of development as the opening of the piece, starting in the range C-sharp to E-natural, then gradually opening up wider. But the handling of the imagery is quite different; we might say that Feldman’s brushwork is changed. In the opening, he used very taut, extended lines. Here the interlocking figures are floated in silences, some longer, some shorter.  This is the notion of “reflection” that I described in an earlier post on Palais de mari: a kind of repetition that gives the music space to penetrate deeper into us. In this case, the figures are presented either singly or strung together into short phrases. They move around different registers in the piano, and a particularly low appearance in the middle of page 12 signals another transition.

What follows is a brief return to the imagery of the opening of the piece:  lines of single tones in the limited C-sharp to E-flat range. There’s a feeling of return here, but also a change in focus, from the more spacious to the more single-pointed. This return to the opening lasts for just a minute, but it’s one long, continuous phrase.

Following this is a different kind of interlocking image, similarly chromatic with displacements, but on a different set of pitches:

What really sets this pattern apart from the earlier one is the change in the rhythmic flow. This has less of the quality of reflection and is more continuous, in a way synthesizing the two passages just heard, although not in any obvious or overt way. This runs to the end of page 13 (less than a minute), and then things change more substantially (the subject for a future post).

At this point in the piece, about a third of the way through (at least by page count), I’m struck by the diversity of music we’ve had so far. In Palais de mari I had the feeling of settling down on a specific image and dwelling there for extended periods. In For Bunita Marcus there is much more of a forward drive, an edginess, and, especially in this section and the ones to follow, a searching quality.   The opening pages are intense and laser-sharp, and even the very static second section is propelled by the constantly-shifting sixteenth-note rhythmic patterns.  And now these next few pages contain a mixture of both, with no sense of settling down at all. I keep wanting to put these passages together into some grand scheme, but it is clear that this isn’t happening yet. Perhaps this is the difference between a longer work like this and a shorter one like Palais de Mari: the energy of this active mind is needed to propel the piece over the longer haul. Or perhaps this is just Feldman’s mind in a more exploratory, less settled state. Whatever it is, I am finding myself quite anxious to turn the page to move forward in the journey.

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By JamesP, 7 July 2011 5:39 am

After I learned the first seven pages of For Bunita Marcus, I allowed myself to continue to the next chunk of music. Pages 8-10 are almost completely taken up with the same image made up of two oscillations: an E-flat and G-flat in the right hand, and a C and D in the left:

Feldman plays with this pattern for the next four minutes of the score; I’ll go ahead and do the play-by-play here. He opens with the eighth-note pattern above, and over the next ten bars or so he moves the patterns around rhythmically so that the left hand notes move out of phase with the right hand, and the overall length of the pattern expands and contracts subtly. Following this, the left-hand/right-hand pattern changes: the two notes in the right hand settle into a slower, straight quarter-note rhythm, while the notes in the left hand continue as before. This causes a fundamental change in the image, from a three-note phrase to a series of two note phrases:

The quarter-note pulse disappears, but the two-note phrases continue, spreading out and becoming more sparse. At the top of page 9, the three-note arrangement returns, but with a change in direction in the right hand:

The sextuplet over 5/16 boggles the mind, but I approach this as a written-out tempo change and just play the 5/16 bars “a little too fast.” Page 9 then rings more changes on the patterns of page 8, again slowing down and spreading out by the end of the page. The top of page 10 announces a different formulation of the same basic sonority, changing the C to a C-sharp and combining the notes in the right hand:

The shifting rhythmic patterns return after this, but with the notes in the right hand moving chromatically within the range of C to E-flat before settling on C-sharp and D.  Finally, at the end of page 10, Feldman puts this image aside.

First, let me say that this section is a nightmare to count. With the exception of the top of page 10, all of this music uses alternating bars of 3/8 and 5/16, but the patterns themselves have no alignment with the barlines. This, plus the irregularity of Feldman’s manuscript, make the score almost impossible to read. I’ve made up counts of two to four eighth notes and marked them in the score throughout so that I can count and keep track of where I am, and where the notes come relative to an eighth-note pulse. Here’s a before-and-after of the score to give you an idea of how I’m doing it:

Preparing the score in this manner feels a little bit like doing math homework, but it’s helped me bring this section under control. The main difficulty now is keeping it even and calm, even while I count furiously under my breath. It should float for four minutes and not sound mechanical.

In an earlier posting, I made the case that what Feldman does with his images isn’t just repetition and that it doesn’t really belong stylistically with classic minimalism. But the lack of pauses here, the basic eighth-note pulse, and the shifting, almost hocketing patterns of pages 8-10 make me see how you could make that argument. But there’s nothing motoric about the patterns here: they have too many gaps and irregularities in them, they clump together and thin out. And ultimately we don’t really get anywhere, although the meandering chromatic line in the left hand at the end suggests some kind of discovery. It feels a bit like a cop-out to say that this is just four minutes of a particular color wash, but perhaps that is indeed what’s going on here. I keep having to remind myself that we’re only about a third of the way through and there’s no telling what will come next.

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