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Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel / For Frank O‘Hara (Real Gone Music)

THE New York School of the 1950s and ’60s was an avant-garde movement in which different art forms intermingled, composers, poets and writers rubbing shoulders with painters, jazz musicians and directors. This made it the perfect habitat for Morton Feldman, a classical composer whose music drew as much from the field of visual art as it did from his earliest musical inspirations like Arnold Schoenberg and Edgard Varèse. Feldman was a friend of John Cage, and early in their friendship the pair reflected ideas off each other, developing their notions of chance and indeterminacy. But Feldman also cultivated connections with artists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, and perhaps it’s easiest to understand his music in painterly terms: a sort of abstract expressionism in sound. 

Rothko Chapel/For Frank O’Hara was first released on the Columbia Records imprint Odyssey in 1976, and 50 years on stands as some of Feldman’s best – and best-known – work. Both show off some of Feldman’s key attributes: a focus on the tone and the feel of sound over melody, rhythm or compositional structure; a quietness, employed as if to sharpen the listener’s focus; and the use of the visual art concept of negative space, in which silence becomes a feature in itself. This new vinyl edition is cut from new transfers taken from the original master tapes, designed to minimise surface noise and keep Feldman’s vision intact. 

The first of two pieces here, Rothko Chapel, was commissioned in February 1971 by the donors of the Rothko Chapel, a multi-faith church in Houston, Texas that features 14 original works by the painter Mark Rothko, a friend of Feldman’s who had committed suicide the year before. The paintings are some of Rothko’s bleakest and most mysterious – dark, rich washes that fill the chapel’s octagonal walls, enveloping the viewer. Feldman’s composition seems similarly designed to fill the space, a mournfully beautiful viola occasionally surfacing from soft rumbles of timpani, gentle vibraphone and plangent wordless swells from a choir. This is quiet music, but that is only part of the story: its restraint reflects a meticulousness, every sound imbued with purpose.

Morton Feldman: sound and vision 

The second piece, For Frank O’Hara, is another tribute, and speaks even more to feelings of mourning and loss. O’Hara was a poet, critic and curator of the New York School who was killed in a tragic road accident in 1966. Feldman’s composition seems designed to make this absence tangible. For a moment, clarinet and piano play together – then fall silent. They strike up once more – and then quiet again. This intermittence runs through the piece, even as it evolves, sometimes shrill and uncomfortable, sometimes hauntingly beautiful. There is no grand climax or denouement to Feldman’s music – it simply is, and it lingers, becomes part of you, like a treasured memory or an ache of grief.

Louis Pattison (Uncut Magazine)