Explore Our Unconditional Love For The Colour of Music

For the .Cent print magazine spring 2006 issue titled Memories, the guest editor, Jules Wright from The Wappung Project, explored the poetic connection between two artists who greatly influenced her: the abstract painter Mark Rothko and Morton Feldman, a leading figure in classical music. Thus offering an insight into an unusual creative blend. = A Dialogue Between Abstract Expressionism and Music in Explore Our Unconditional Love For The Colour of Music

Algonquin Hotel

Jules Wright: In 1987, I made my first trip to New York. Being of a pretentious turn of mind with a sense of my own imminent importance in the artistic life of Britain, I stayed at the Algonquin. Unfortunately, I was a little late. The place was seedy, dirty, the shower didn’t work, and the literary establishment of New York was definitely not there. Across the road, the Royalton was opening, and through my dirty window, I saw limos pulling up and doormen bowing and scraping as all of New York made their way in. I was so not at the heart of the city. I was often lost and afraid to be lost. Sophisticated, I was not. Museums and galleries, I decided, were good and safe places to hang out, which brings me to Rothko.

The Algonquin Hotel, New-York

Mark Rothko

Jules Wright: He took me unaware. Rothko took my breath away and made me stifle tears, perhaps for my lack of sophistication, for my ordinariness, for my lack of talent.

MOMA New York

I walked in on Rothko. Along a corridor in MOMA, the stairwell on my left and a blank wall on my right, I turned a corner and there were twenty Rothko’s, mostly black on black and black on red, a body of work with such collective power and such a strong personal narrative that you knew that someone was telling you who they were, what they felt, how they lived and how they would die, with no holds barred. In art, truth and the aspiration to tell it or show it are the only absolutely vital ingredients. Rothko’s work, at MOMA, not at the Tate, is me trying on New York for size. It is Manhattan. It is properly understanding, for the first time, how serious an undertaking it was to make art.

Rothko Painting

Morton Feldman

Steven Johnson: Why, in an article devoted to Mark Rothko, would we stop to talk about the composer Morton Feldman? If he were still with us, Feldman, who died of cancer in 1987, might answer that it was not this or that musician but rather the painter Rothko, along with some other painters, who helped him to discover his compositional aesthetic.

New York Composers

Feldman was one of a group of New York-based composers, including John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, who in the 1950s and 1960s pursued a level of sonic abstraction never heard before. Feldman was particularly famous during this time for his pieces in graphic notation.

Morton Feldman, Abstraction

In such works, he dispensed with most of the specifics that composers traditionally use to make their music, pitches, rhythms, and metres, and introduced instead a sequence of time boxes in which performers insert their own pitches and durations. Feldman typically might specify only which instrument is to make a sound, how many notes are to occur at one time, and if the sounds are to be low, medium, or high. The result, as you might expect, is a music of sounds that float disconnected from one another, free of motivic rhetoric, free of the rational left-to-right grammar that marks most musical (and, for that matter, literary) processes. Even when Feldman reverted to ‘normal’ notation during these years, he specified the pitches but left their entrances and durations up to the performer.

Abstract Expressionist

Such methods represented a radical departure from traditional composition, and Feldman mainly credited the Abstract Expressionist painters for triggering it. He and they shared ‘a powerful, mysterious aesthetic,’ he once claimed; it was they who showed him a

‘sound world more direct, immediate, more physical, than anything that had existed before.’

Morton Feldman

DeKooning, Kline, and Pollock: Their Influence

Feldman felt the debt so deeply, in fact, that he often titled his pieces after the painters (for example, his DeKooning or his For Franz Kline). Feldman may have admired the energetic pulsations of Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock, but the quiet and nearly static nature of his music belongs rather to the contemplative world of Rothko and Philip Guston. Feldman was, in fact, closest to Guston, but considered Rothko a friend, too. He visited the painter’s studio from time to time, and sometimes the two spent time together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Rothko vs Feldman Comparison

So how does one go about explaining the relationship between Feldman’s music and Rothko’s painting?

Comparisons of this sort are difficult, maybe even impossible, since the media are so vastly different. But since Feldman himself made so much of the connections, insistently and at length, in article after article and interview after interview, it seems that we at least have his blessing to investigate the issue.

Piece For Four Pianos 1957

For my money, the most Rothko-like music Feldman ever wrote is his Piece for Four Pianos, written in 1957 at the peak of his immersion in the Abstract Expressionist movement. The score, complete on one page, consists of atonal pitches and chords, all played quietly as a series of single, disconnected events. All four pianists play from the same score: they start at the same time, following the same general tempo, but each chooses on their own when to advance from one sonority to another. Ultimately, the piece presents four parallel planes of time. The composer himself described the piece as a series of reverberations from the same sound source. The existence of distinct inter-penetrating layers, each floating alongside the others, seems to me like some sonic version of those classic Rothkos, where cumulus rectangular planes of colour hover in vertical stacks.

Rothko Chapel, Morton Feldman

Rothko Chapel Morton Feldman

Sometimes in Rothko, you’re not sure if a field sits in front of or behind the ones next to it; planes often inter-penetrate ambiguously. Feldman’s four planes of sound, too, never dominate one another; each fades in and out of prominence as the music takes its course. The best evidence of a direct link between the two is Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971), one of the most successful – and stirring memorials created in the Twentieth Century.

Steven Johnson

Rothko Chapel, Morton Feldman

From Jules Wright’s encounter with these artists emerges a powerful connection, one whose delicate, floating music echoes the other’s vast fields of colour. Together, their work becomes a tender dialogue about the beauty of creation.

To find out more about the RothkoChapel.org Steven Johnson, Brigham Young University The music of Morton Feldman is published by Peters Edition. Order scores online editionpeters.com

If you enjoyed reading Explore Our Unconditional Love For The Colour of Music, then why not read Artistic Alchemy here

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