![]() ![]() With his prose hallucinatory and vivid in the extreme, and his grammar being thoroughly unusual and often revelatory, it seemed to me that words occupied space first and foremost, since the sheer amount of information/ideas that could be gleaned from one page stayed in my head all day or longer, alien words vibrating like sympathetic strings. Through Burroughs’ radical restructuring of language, I saw the word as taking up space. I hadn’t yet read of Feldman’s views on space that he’d inherited from Varese, this idea of the sheer physicality of sound in its right context, but I felt it somewhere. It was simply a structuring of all three major art forms within the greater context of space. Burroughs, a long afternoon walk, and a listening session of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. I stumbled across something that helped me along quite by accident, in one of those happy alchemical formulations spurred on by the right mixture of stimuli in this case, the writings of Wittgenstein, Levi-Strauss, and W.S. ![]() ![]() I often find myself missing this element in many contemporary sounds, so it is a factor I’m trying to make an essential ingredient in my own music. The idea of analyzing and using concepts in different forms in order to try and attain some measure of objective truth is the mark of all art that considers itself ‘problematic’- a defining feature of all late modern-era work. The relationship of the arts to one another is something that has deteriorated since the dawn of postmodernism. Feldman, together with John Cage, Christian Wolff, and a handful of other New York-based composers, were somewhat outcast from the rest of the avant-garde crowd of the 50s, largely in part due to their absorption in the Cedar Tavern scene that was birthing the NY-school of large-scale abstract art. His fierce individualism was indeed just that- he was not interested in taking theoretical concerns to their limits, like his musical adversary Pierre Boulez. Morton Feldman, the more I dive into his life and work, seems increasingly like a quiet prophet that is still being digested by humanity. By Guston Attar Rauschenberg Black painting ![]()
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