Piano and String Quartet (Feldman)

Piano and String Quartet is a composition by American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman. It was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and pianist Aki Takahashi, who premiered the piece at the 7th annual New Music America Festival in Los Angeles and released a studio recording in 1993.

Piano and String Quartet
Piano quintet by Morton Feldman
Cover sheet of the published score
ISWCT-700.013.459-0
PeriodContemporary
GenreChamber music
StyleAvant-garde
OccasionNew Music America Festival
DedicationAki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet
PublisherUniversal Edition (UE 17 972)
Duration≈1:20:00
Premiere
DateNovember 2, 1985 (1985-11-02)
LocationLeo S. Bing Theater, LACMA
Los Angeles
Performers

Background
Feldman in 1976

Feldman composed Piano and String Quartet in 1985 at the age of 59.[1] It was among his final major completed works.[2][note 1] He had written the composition with the Kronos Quartet and Takahashi in mind as its performers.[4] It was commissioned for the seventh New Music America Festival in Los Angeles. He wrote out the score by hand, as he did for most of his music from the period.[5]

Piano and String Quartet premiered in 1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (pictured in 2012) during the New Music America festival.

On November 2, 1985, the Kronos Quartet and Takahashi premiered the piece at New Music America.[1] The performance took place at the Leo S. Bing Theater in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, beginning at 5 p.m. and lasting 68½ minutes. A recording of the premiere was broadcast at 8 p.m. on KUSC, the region's local classical music radio station.[6]

Feldman died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 61 less than two years after the premiere.[7] Interest in his music grew rapidly in the short period after his death and his previously scarce discography was populated with numerous new recordings, mostly on independent labels.[8] In a 1994 interview, Harrington said the following about the quartet's work with the composer:

Morton Feldman was unlike any other composer we've ever worked with. He wrote pieces that have a sense of time and a kind of realm that is very particular to his music. And I think Piano and String Quartet is one of his great, great pieces. It's almost like feeling these incredible, warm, slow, beautiful drops of water over a long period of time. Not like a water torture, but—for me—a kind of sensual experience. You begin hearing the passage of time differently after listening to Morton's music.[9]

Another great admirer of Piano and String Quartet, the minimalist composer Steve Reich, encountered the piece years after its premiere. Reich regarded Feldman as an early influence and a friend, but they had lost touch in the 1980s: "when Feldman started writing longer pieces," he later wrote, "I foolishly didn't take the time to listen to them and Feldman drifted out of my musical consciousness." After Feldman died, Reich belatedly sought out his final works and was astonished by their sophistication. According to Reich, Piano and String Quartet "is the most beautiful work of his that I know ... I wanted to call him, to tell him, that I had missed the boat with his late pieces, to ask how he made them—but was no longer possible."[10]

Music

Piano and String Quartet is a chamber music composition scored for piano, two violins, viola, and cello, following the standard instrumentation used in most piano quintets since the late 19th century. Feldman's piece is regarded among the most innovative piano quintets of late 20th century, alongside quintets by Rochberg and Schnittke.[11] Although the title is a generic reference to the piece's musical form, it is considered.

Feldman composed the piece during what is now considered to be his late period, spanning 1977 until his death in 1987. In his late-period compositions, Feldman's central concern turned from timbre—i.e., the textural quality of sound—to perception of time. Piano and String Quartet typifies the composer's late-period preoccupation with time and memory.[12] The most salient qualities of Piano and String Quartet are extremes of duration and repetition. The score contains 810 bars.[13] A typical performance takes approximately 80–90 minutes, much longer than most music written by his peers in the avant-garde or even his own early works. However, it is only moderate length by the standard of his late works.[14] Most of his later works last one to two hours, with a handful that endure for three hours or longer.[15] An uninterrupted performance of his longest work—String Quartet II (1983), also composed for the Kronos Quartet—typically lasts six hours; its exceptionally long runtime influenced Feldman to write Piano and String Quartet as a much shorter piece for the quartet.[note 2][16]

As its title suggests, the piece sets the piano and string quartet apart as two distinct, almost detached entities.[17] For the entirety of the piece, the musicians follow a simple pattern: the string quartet plays a sustained chord, and the pianist plays an arpeggiated or "broken" chord.[18] The string instruments occasionally play the same pitch, creating a unison rather than a chord.[19] After about 50 minutes, the string instruments sometimes play pizzicato, plucking rather than bowing.[20] The sustain pedal of the piano remains pressed down for the entire performance, which indefinitely lengthens the notes and causes sympathetic resonance among the strings.[21]

The harmonic content shifts throughout, but without a traditional sense of musical development. Its stillness has drawn comparisons to ambient music.[22] But contrary to its apparent lack of direction, its structure is highly complex. According to the Rough Guide to classical music, the piece initially "seems to have no beginning or end, no intention or direction"; however, the listener's attention is gradually enhanced and subtle changes in tone become magnified as it progresses, until even the subtlest differences take on the capacity to impart "a resonance and an intensity that is startling."[4] Upon reading the score, Steve Reich found that many of its "quiet mysterious chords" were in fact "inversions of themselves", and that "[r]epetitions of material were never exact repetitions".[10] A cello motif recurs throughout, albeit in transposed variations.[23]

Recordings

As of August 2020, five recordings of Feldman's Piano and String Quartet have been commercially released.[24]

Released Performers Length Recording information Producer(s) Label (catalog no.)
Quartet Pianist Recorded Studio Country
1993 Kronos Quartet Aki Takahashi 1:19:33 November 1991 Skywalker Ranch
(Nicasio, California)
USA		 Judith Sherman Nonesuch
(7559-79320-2)
2001 Ives Ensemble John Snijders[note 3] 1:13:51 October 1–2, 1998 Sendesaal des Hessischen Rundfunks
(Frankfurt)
DEU		 Michael Peschko Hat Hut
(hat[now]ART 128)
2009 Smith Quartet John Tilbury 1:29:30 November 26, 2006 St. Paul's Hall
(Huddersfield, England)
UK		 Sebastian Lexer Matchless
(MRDVD-01)
2011 Eclipse Quartet Vicki Ray 1:19:10 February 8, 2011 Firehouse Recording Studios
(Pasadena, California)
USA		 Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick
Jeff Gauthier		 Bridge
(9369)
2014 Opus Posth Ensemble Mikhail Dubov 1:19:22 2009 Rachmaninoff Hall, Moscow Conservatory
(Moscow)
RUS		 Lyudmila Dmitrieva Long Arms
(CDLA 14096)
Average: 1:20:17

Kronos Quartet with Aki Takahashi (1993)
The Kronos Quartet c. 1987
Skywalker Ranch, 2009

The Kronos Quartet and Takahashi recorded the piece in November 1991 at Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio, California, with production by Judith Sherman. By that time, the Kronos Quartet and Sherman had become frequent collaborators.[25] She had produced some of the quartet's most acclaimed albums, including their 1990 studio recording of George Crumb's Black Angels. Sherman called the Skywalker facilities "the most perfect recording room", noting that the reverberation was distributed remarkably evenly across the frequency band.[26]

The album was released on September 28, 1993, through Nonesuch Records, a subsidiary of Elektra that had been the quartet's record label since 1985.[27] It was positively received by critics. John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune praised the performers' "miraculous control, dedication and concentration". Although he cautioned that less-adventurous listeners may find the recording to be "the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture, made all the more excruciating by its quiet dynamics and lack of rhythmic, melodic or harmonic gesture", he noted that "[o]thers will find Feldman's tranquil, self-contained sounds a balm for ears and spirit long since turned off by the busy density that characterizes so much new music."[28] Art Lange called it "[m]usic unlike any other" in a review for the classical music magazine Fanfare, though he hedged that those already "familiar with Feldman's idiom" would likely consider the newly recorded piece "different enough, without making any major breakthroughs".[29] The Wire's Andy Hamilton wrote "I'm not sure I fully understand what it's about, but this composer is certainly a deep cat."[30]

Glenn Swan of AllMusic called the recording "[b]reathtaking" and wrote that the musicians "conjure up the ghost of Feldman to wander the streets of New York as if they were abandoned. This single piece, over 79 minutes in length, is like an icy flower that blooms almost undetected."[31] Reviewing the Kronos Quartet for the 1995 Spin Alternative Record Guide, critic Alex Ross gave the record a perfect score—the highest rating for the quartet's discography—and called it "the group's major achievement so far".[32] In the 2002 book Classical Music: The Listener's Companion, Raymond S. Tuttle recommended it as an "excellent" and comparatively accessible entry point for a listener new to Feldman's music: "Once you surrender traditional expectations about what music is supposed to do, you're overwhelmed by its ethereal beauty".[33] In an article recommending the best music for each hour of the day, rock musician Elvis Costello cited it as the best record to listen to at 4 a.m., writing "Feldman's almost seamless fabric of music ... is both hypnotic and transporting".[34] When Takahashi returned to Los Angeles in 2006 for her first concert there since the 1985 premiere of Piano and String Quartet, Mark Swed said her recording with the Kronos Quartet was "now a classic in the modern chamber repertory".[35]

Sherman received the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year, Classical at the 36th Annual Grammy Awards in March 1994. The studio version of Piano and String Quartet with Takahashi appeared on the third disc of the 1998 compilation Kronos Quartet: 25 Years, a ten-CD box set.[36]

Ives Ensemble (2001)
CD cover (Hat Hut)
HR-Sendesaal, 2011

Tilbury and the Smith Quartet (2009)
John Tilbury, 2011
St. Paul's Hall, 1980

John Tilbury and the Smith Quartet played the piece at the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival on November 26.[37] Selected live recordings from those performances were released in three volumes by Matchless Recordings in audio-only DVD format, which allowed for uninterrupted playback of the long recordings on a single disc.[38] At just shy of 90 minutes, it is the longest recorded performance of the piece.[24] The Smith Quartet played without vibrato and loosened their bows to enable longer, softer tones.[39] Colin Clarke of the journal Tempo praised "the utmost delicacy" of Tilbury's playing and compared the recording favorably to the original: "The sense of space, so evident in the Nonesuch version, is here even more entrenched—there is almost a feeling of risk in how long the gaps between statements of the prevailing arpeggio figure can last."[40] Critics named it among the 10 best "Modern Composition" releases of 2010 in The Wire's year-in-review Rewind issue.[41]

Opus Posth Ensemble and Mikhail Dubov (2014)

The CD was released by Long Arms Records, a label co-founded by the composer Sergey Kuryokhin. Opus Posth performed the piece once more for a CD release concert at the Moscow International House of Music on January 31, 2015.[42]

Notes
  1. According to a list compiled by Chris Villars of Feldman's known compositions—totaling 197 published and unpublished works—Piano and String Quartet was his ninth-to-last composition overall.[3]
  2. The Kronos Quartet had to rush through the broadcast premiere of String Quartet II to meet a four-hour time limit imposed by CBC/Radio-Canada. First violinist David Harrington observed during the applause that Feldman, who he noted "was not shy", stayed in his seat rather than standing. Afterward, the composer explained "I had to take a pee so bad that I was afraid to stand." Harrington replied "Maybe your next piece for us should be shorter." That next piece was Piano and String Quartet, which Harrington regarded as "svelte" next to String Quartet II.[16]
  3. Unlike most recordings of Piano and String Quartet—performed by a pianist and a string quartet, who are credited separately—the Ives Ensemble is a complete quintet with Snijders as a member. For this reason their recording is credited only to the Ives Ensemble, not to the ensemble "and" or "with" Snijders.

References
  1. Slonimsky 1994, p. 956.
  2. Ross 2006.
  3. Villars 2019, pp. 9–10.
  4. Staines & Buckley 1998, p. 147.
  5. Pluhar-Schaeffer 2014, p. 22.
  6. Cariaga 1985, p. 1.
  7. Slonimsky 1994, p. 966.
  8. Slonimsky 1994, p. 966; Tuttle 2002, p. 315.
  9. Simons 1994.
  10. Reich 2002, p. 202.
  11. Fenton 2001.
  12. Staines & Buckley 1998, p. 146.
  13. Sani 2000, "B) Chordal Patterns" ("With the piece ending at b. 810 ...").
  14. Clements 2012.
  15. Paccione 2010, p. 136; Pluhar-Schaeffer 2014, pp. 41–42.
  16. Harrington 2009, p. 97.
  17. Keillor n.d. ("The opportunity to hear these different musical bodies luxuriating as separate bodies in a common soundscape is a uniquely revealing method for Feldman ..."); La Nación 2011 ("Lo primero que llama la atención es el nombre; más que un quinteto con piano, Piano and String Quartet es realmente un piano y un cuarteto de cuerdas enfrentados como dos instancias independientes." Translated from Spanish: "The first thing that stands out is the name; more than a piano quintet, Piano and String Quartet is really a piano and a string quartet facing each other as two independent instances").
  18. Staines & Buckley 1998, p. 147; Tuttle 2002, p. 315.
  19. Swed 1993; Clark 2001, p. 45.
  20. Clark 2001, p. 45.
  21. Swed 1993; Staines & Buckley 1998, p. 147.
  22. Sanderson n.d. (reviewing the Nonesuch recording); Kuhn 1985, p. 438 (reviewing the premiere).
  23. Sani 2000, A) Melodic Patterns; Clark 2001, p. 45.
  24. Villars 2020, p. 42.
  25. Blumenthal 1998, p. 196.
  26. Bambarger 1995, p. 100.
  27. Staines & Buckley 1998, p. 147; Blumenthal 1998, p. 196.
  28. von Rhein 1993.
  29. Lange 1994, p. 184.
  30. Hamilton 1993–1994, p. 81.
  31. Swan n.d.
  32. Ross 1995, pp. 217–218.
  33. Tuttle 2002, p. 315.
  34. Costello 2003, pp. 287–288.
  35. Swed 2006.
  36. Taylor 1999.
  37. Gardner 2006, fn. 6.
  38. Clements 2010.
  39. Clarke 2010, p. 67; Maddocks 2010.
  40. Clarke 2010, p. 67.
  41. Clark & Hamilton 2011, p. 48.
  42. The Moscow Times 2015.

Bibliography
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