Being Time

Case Studies in Musical Temporality

Richard Glover, Bryn Harrison, Jennie Gottschalk

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781623564940
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628927016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Being Time invites a deep consideration of the personal experience of temporality in music, focusing on the perceptual role of the listener. Through individual case studies, this book centers on musical works that deal with time in radical ways. These include pieces by Morton Feldman, James Saunders, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Ryoji Ikeda, Toshiya Tsunoda, Laurie Spiegel and André O. Möller. Multiple perspectives are explored through a series of encounters, initially between an individual and a work, and subsequently with each author's varying experiences of temporality. The authors compare their responses to features such as repetition, speed, duration and scale from a perceptual standpoint, drawing in reflections on aspects such as musical memory and anticipation. The observations made in this book are accessible and relevant to readers who are interested in exploring issues of temporality from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.

CHAPTER ONE

Foreshadowing and Recollection:

Listening Through Morton Feldman’s Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello

Bryn Harrison

Thirty years after its completion, Morton Feldman’s last work Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987) still seems radical in its approach to form and its handling of musical time. While there has been much experimental work created over the past three decades that deals directly with a reduction in materials and extended musical durations, there are few such works, to my mind, that are able to deal with notions of time so eloquently or as poetically. In this chapter I will discuss the ways in which the work confronts me with the limitations of my understanding and, ultimately, with my own sense of being.

The italicized sections below are transcriptions of notes taken during the hours spent listening to the piece. My notes are interleaved among more general reflections on the ways in which time can be seen to operate in this work. This interleaving occurred in a manner that happened to resemble the piece as I found myself moving between direct contemplation and broader musical issues. Where appropriate, quotations have been included from other authors as a means of expanding upon my own direct experiences as a listener.

***

The dense, closely voiced chords that open the work alternate between piano and strings, with both voices sharing harmonic material of similar pitch content and duration. However, I find the function of each voice is entirely different: the piano’s attacks, with their transient qualities, are noticeably stronger than the strings, making marks in time, while the sustained qualities of the violin, viola, and cello appear to play through time, etching lines in space. Feldman is acutely aware of these timbral distinctions, and highlights their intrinsic differences. Meanwhile, the similarities in pitch content, rhythm, and register between the piano and strings result in an interleaving effect, like plates of glass placed on top of one another. Periodically, the order of the piano and string utterances is reversed, or reiterated with slight alterations. Any suggestion of a logical pattern is made redundant by the constant rearrangement of the same materials, which themselves have sometimes been varied.

This interplay of the near and exact repetition of single or two bar units promotes both familiarity and confusion, and I quickly become aware of my lack of ability, as a listener, to make sense of the experience. At first, I was on top of it; I could hear those slight variations, that moment of repose, the reintroduction of the same material, but now, less than three minutes into the piece, I am less sure. I am faced with a perplexing question, which manifests itself in constantly changing ways: How does what I am listening to now relate to what went before? What I am experiencing is utter confusion of the senses, which leaves me wondering where I am.

***

These opening remarks have come from a set of preliminary observations I made after one of a series of seminars on aspects of temporality in experimental music that I gave to students at the Escola Superior de Musica Catalunya (ESMuC) in Barcelona between October and December 2015. As a visiting professor, I had the privilege of teaching three-hour classes on two consecutive days each week. Wishing to take advantage of these longer sessions, I used the time available to play the class recordings of pieces of extended duration in their entirety. All of these seminars focused on music of the last forty years and, on more than one occasion, included pieces from Feldman’s late period that last over an hour.

Following a session in which we listened to the Ives Ensemble’s recording of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello¹ from beginning to end, much of the discussion with the group focused upon the very nature of the experience of listening attentively to the 76-minute work, with many students purporting to share my own sense of disorientation. Although I could have asked the students to listen to the piece prior to the class, what proved to be enormously rewarding was the experience of listening together as a group, of collectively witnessing time passing. I chose works with which few students were familiar, and encouraged them to make observations of the music after listening to the pieces without following or analyzing the scores. When we did analyze pieces using the score, this was done retrospectively, with the intention of relating what could be gained theoretically to the experience of prior listening. The students responded positively to these sessions, and I went on to prepare further seminars that dealt directly with the phenomenological experience of listening to this music: we talked about listening through rather than listening to these pieces. We also considered issues of recontextualization and how, for example, repetition might be used to provide different points of orientation and disorientation for the listener.

In this chapter, I will explore these aspects further and consider how a listener’s apprehension of time passing in Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello is formed in response to what Feldman describes as his “conscious attempt at formalizing a disorientation of memory.”² As my understanding and appreciation of Feldman’s late works has come primarily from the experience of listening to these pieces rather than through undertaking detailed analysis of the scores, I will draw on my own perceptual, subjective responses to listening to this piece and talk at length about the resultant sense of “memory disorientation.” I have chosen to present my experiences as a series of personal encounters with the music to capture the experience of time passing, moment to moment. I have reflected on the difficulties inherent to the act of describing that experience and, at times, have found myself restating comments made previously. Since I aim to provide an honest account of the experience of listening through the work, I have resisted removing these duplications from the text. Indeed, one of the perplexing aspects of listening to this piece is that it relies largely on the interplay of that which is the same and that which is different. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that I should keep returning to the same thoughts, albeit in relation to a different moment in the piece. With hindsight, it seems appropriate that, as I have chosen to write about a piece that is mosaic-like in its construction, it is perhaps inevitable that the writing has ended up taking on a similar form. In the interest of clarity, I have chosen to present my own perceptual analysis in italics as a means of making this distinct from the context that supports it.

The last decade has seen an increasing number of publications on Feldman’s work, and there are several excellent articles that cover certain aspects of these late works in detail. I have drawn upon some of these texts here, although a survey of the literature is beyond the scope of this chapter. I am indebted to Dora A. Hanninen and Catherine Laws, who have written so clearly and perceptively on the late works of Feldman, as well as to Brian Kane, whose excellent essay “Of Repetition, Habit and Involuntary Memory: An Analysis and Speculation upon Morton Feldman’s Final Composition”³ provides the only in-depth commentary on this work in English, to my knowledge. Additionally, in order to clarify some issues relating to cognition and perception, I look to the work of music psychologist Bob Snyder, whose book Music and Memory⁴ offers particular insight. Beyond musicology, the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold has also been helpful in illuminating issues of temporal organization. His argument for “thinking through making”⁵ has some resonance, I feel, with Feldman’s through-composed “intuitive” approach to form and structure, and with my own thoughts on listening through this work.

My listening sessions, in preparation for writing this chapter, were separated by a period of several months. Although this gap occurred through necessity, with hindsight it seems something of a blessing, inasmuch as it prevented me from becoming overly familiar with the music. While it is inevitable that I should become more accustomed to the events of the piece with repeated listenings, one of the continually perplexing aspects of my listening experiences is that Feldman’s sequence of events, nonetheless, always remains somehow slightly beyond comprehension. The way in which duration operates when I listen to this work is both fascinating and frustrating; it seems that one cannot fail to get lost in the intricacies of its creation. Time passes in unpredictable ways, coaxing and teasing the memory into making associations, providing false anticipations and, in a Proustian sense, making one forget, if only to remember.

While actively engaged in the process of listening, I made copious notes. Admittedly, this is perhaps not the ideal way to listen, since information gets missed during the act of writing and, conversely, events become solidified through the act of note-taking. When my mind wandered, as it does from time to time in music of such demanding duration, these points were also duly noted.

Some of the following observations might also bear relevance to the other works from the last decade of Feldman’s life. Indeed, the uniqueness of Feldman’s approach is such that these works elicit responses that are unlike any other music that I have experienced. However, it is important to note that, although other commentators have often described these pieces collectively—as if there should be one, unified perceptual response to these works—there are, nonetheless, important distinctions to be made between one long late Feldman piece and the next, in terms of the experiential perspectives they provide. Especially notable is the differing degree to which segmentation operates in these works. While single-movement pieces such as Three Voices (1982) and String Quartet II (1983) have high degrees of segmentation, works such as Violin and String Quartet (1985) and For Samuel Beckett (1987) sound as if they have been hewn from one piece of material, leading commentators such as Sebastian Claren to describe them as “monolithic.”⁶

Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello might be described as somewhere between the two; the various materials deployed provide clear points of differentiation, but in a manner wholly different to that in evidence in String Quartet II. In the latter, each page operates as a “frame” that “contains” musical materials. Each set of pages contains clearly contrasting materials and can be registered aurally as being significantly distinct from the last. In Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, materials are also varied and, in some cases, highly distinct, but they are presented in close succession. Often, short phrases will be reintroduced alongside newer materials, or older materials will be reintroduced in new ways. The pages of the score offer no specific structural framework for the piece, and repeated sections occasionally go back to the previous page. While specific discussion of the score itself is largely absent from the following perceptual descriptions, knowledge of it provides a deeper contextual understanding of the work and highlights intrinsic differences to the block form approach of String Quartet II in which one page of material contrasts starkly to the next. The specificities of the integration of materials and the resultant sense of recontextualization that this provides are discussed further in the observations that follow later in the chapter.

Over the last decade of his life, Feldman composed single-movement works of long duration, including nine works that last over ninety minutes. The longest of these is String Quartet II (1983), which can last over six hours without an intermission. Working with such extended durations puts issues regarding the form and structure of these works into question. Once the graspable limits of the duration of the work are perceptually out of sight, part-to-whole relationships begin to take on new meanings and the differences between those aspects of the music that provide proximity and those that create segregation are difficult to discern. What Jonathan Kramer describes as “nondirected linearity”⁷ is supported by the use of a pitch language that is imbued with a sense of anticipation, but cleverly avoids the directional implications of functional, tonal harmony. Rhythm provides impetus while offering little indication of beat placement or meter. As Feldman has said:

My sense of time had been altered, so intently focused was I on the way the music changed from note to note and chord to chord. It created a living, breathing network of relationships that extended across its length. You don’t really listen to these pieces, you live through them and with them. By the end of the Second String Quartet, I felt it was living inside me too.⁸

This sense of the material “living inside me” might be said to extend not only from moment to moment but from piece to piece. Although each work establishes its own sound world, its own working processes, and its own internal logic, a workable harmonic vocabulary is transferred from one piece to the next and through changes in instrumentation. The language of the music does not change dramatically from one piece to the next. Rather, there is a rethinking of the situation, in a manner not unlike the late Beckett novels such as Company (1980), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), and Worstward Ho (1984) in which the same vocabulary, the same place, and the same types of characters enact the same scenario but from a new point of view.

In the case of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, it seems to have been Feldman’s intention from the outset to create the work from two distinct timbral components: that of the different instrumental groupings of string trio and piano. Indeed, not only do the strings operate largely as a unit, but rarely do they sound at the same time as the piano. This dynamic interplay forms much of the dialogue and rhetorical underpinning of the piece.

***

From the opening moments of the piece, the bowed string chords emanate physicality. The act of drawing the bow in broad strokes from left to r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Foreshadowing and Recollection: Listening Through Morton Feldman’s Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
• 2. Musical Brevity in James Saunders’ Compatibility hides itself and 511 possible mosaics
• 3. Separation and Continuity in Chiyoko Szlavnics’ Gradients of Detail
• 4. Filtering Temporality in Ryoji Ikeda’s +/−
• 5. Granulated Time: Toshiya Tsunoda’s O Kokos Tis Anixis
• 6. Monoliths: Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe and André O. Méller’s musik für orgel und eine(n) tonsetzer(in)
• 7. Observations on Musical Behaviors and Temporality
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Suggested Further Reading and Listening
• Index
• Imprint