Memories and Imitations
I spent a recent Saturday morning chatting with Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust, a conversation now available online in the latest episode of her program “All Things Cage” for WGXC.
Morton Feldman
Writings about the music of American composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Notes on For Bunita Marcus
I’ve just posted the essay I wrote to accompany Aki Takahashi’s beautiful recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus.
Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus
Notes for the Mode Records release of Morton Feldman’s “For Bunita Marcus”, performed by Aki Takahashi
Triadic memory 4: Rhythms and structures
Triadic memories, like all late Feldman, is a series of repeated patterns, musical images that are extended in time by repetition. In some pieces these repetitions are of larger chunks of music, with a system, set of systems, or even pages of music reappearing, often with permutations. I’ve always thought of these larger-scale repetitions in terms of the whole pattern: pitch and rhythm together. Playing through Triadic memories, I’ve become aware of them rhythmically, repeating even as the pitches are moved around.
Triadic memories
An ongoing, sporadic series examining aspects of Morton Feldman’s Triadic memories for piano. The series has no overarching structure, but instead takes up individual moments, images, and questions about the piece and follows them where they lead. Triadic memory #1: Hand-made music Triadic memory #2: A question about rhythm Triadic memory #3: A figure in memory
Triadic memory #3: A figure in memory
There is a figure that appears about a third of the way into Triadic memories. It catches my attention, wakes me up: it is a signal that something is changing. Where are we going now? And haven’t I heard this before somewhere?
On the Cage/Feldman “Radio Happenings”
On the Cage/Feldman Radio Happenings This is a series of posts about the Radio Happenings shows of 1966–1967, over four hours of conversations between John Cage and Morton Feldman broadcast on WBAI in New York. It covers the history of these shows, including the story of how I rediscovered them twenty years after their initial broadcast. 1. The Happenings …
How I happened upon the Happenings
For me, there is a more personal history of the Radio Happenings: the story of how they came to light and were preserved. It all happened because of procrastination and the pre-Internet digital social world of Bulletin Board Services in New York City. It was a rare musicological adventure.
What happened at the Happenings
In this installment of my series on the Cage-Feldman “Radio happenings”, I describe where Cage and Feldman were in their lives at the time of the recordings, and present highlights of their conversations.
How the Happenings happened
The history of how the Cage/Feldman “Radio Happenings” came to be recorded at WBAI, under the direction of Ann McMillan