JamesP

How do you listen to a six-hour string quartet?

Morton Feldman

Last year I spent a good deal of time listening to Morton Feldman’s music, trying to get a picture of his entire body of work. I started with the works of the early 1950s and marched forward through the 1960s and 1970s. When I got to 1983, I faced the need to listen to Feldman’s String quartet No. 2, his famous six-hour string quartet, the longest work of a composer who wrote many long works. How do you listen to a six-hour string quartet?

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4 — Law and freedom

John Cage

In his writings “Defense of Satie” and “Forerunners of modern music”, Cage attempted to build a framework for music that could integrate what he needed in his life from both traditional and avant-garde music. In the process his work and thought began moving in the direction of “self-knowledge through self-denial”.

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An ancient Indian relief of Durga combined with a painting by Russolo

3 — Integrating opposites

John Cage

In 1948, Cage was completely in alignment with Ananda Coomaraswamy’s severe criticisms of Western art. At the same time, it directly contradicts Cage’s own career, built by playing the role of the brash individualist, modeling himself on artists such as the “Art of Noises” Futurist Luigi Russolo. This conflict is a key factor in the history of Cage’s path in the late 1940s.

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2 — The purpose of music

John Cage

“To what end does one write music?” For a composer like John Cage, this was not just a question about the meaning of his work, it was a question about the meaning of his life. It is not surprising, then, that Cage would turn to sources that combined the artistic and the religious to seek out answers.

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