I spent Saturday afternoon in an empty art gallery in Camden listening to a live performance of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston. In a high-ceilinged back room of the gallery, twenty folding chairs were set out in front of the musicians from the Guildhall School: Siwan Rhys playing piano and celesta, Alasdair Garrett and Martha Lloyd tag-teaming on the flute parts, and finally George Barton on the tuned percussion (once he’d finally turned up, wearing an inside-out jumper and clutching a stack of a hundred-odd dog-eared pages of the score.)
The first four notes sound almost too hushed, like one voice heard amongst the hubbub of the crowd in the other rooms of the gallery. Eventually, but quite quickly, all other noises from the rest of the gallery fade away. I’m assuming everyone else has left us alone, musicians and audience, in the back room. The playing is beautiful and I relax, knowing that I’m going to be hearing a piece of music and not a bystander in an Art Stunt. At times the playing is a little rough around the edges. I can only assume that in writing such unforgiving parts, and making the whole piece four hours long, human frailty must be considered as part of the work itself. The piccolo sections – all soft, sustained notes – must be especially Not Fun.
Every time I hear For Philip Guston I hear something else. Last time I noticed how the piece fell into large sections that repeated the same process, of starting in an even flow and then gradually winding down into stasis. This time I hear how Feldman tricks you into hearing individual sounds outside of their continuity. There’s always the suggestion of those opening four notes returning – and they do, but never in quite the same way. As the pattern gets passed from one instrument to another, you find yourself waiting to hear each sound, and then weighing it in your mind.
The two flautists take one-hour shifts, which unfortunately signposts the passing of time. On the other hand, the sky outside is getting steadily darker and the room starts getting cold, so this feeling is inevitable. I start dozing off a little about an hour into the piece, but that feeling passes and for the rest of the piece I’m more attentive than before. The ensemble passages are beautifully written but today I’m less interested in these more complex effects and become transfixed when the music dwindles to nothing. For minutes on end the piece can be silent, articulated at intervals by a single, repeated note. So little needs to be done. Polyphony sucks.
I think John Cage first described Feldman’s music as heroic, and there is something heroic in the way he can break away from such simple silences after lingering on them for so much time. A minimalist could build a career on them. When the sky is dark and the audience is chilly and the music finally ends it’s like a blanket’s been taken away. Everyone hovers uncertainly in the silence, a little apologetic that it’s over, a little embarrassed that we can’t bring ourselves to applaud. Not just yet, just a little bit longer.
damn. in this run of having to cancel things, i do wish i got to see this work. although the cold and awkward feelings don’t sound so ace.
The cold and the awkward were only minor things, and the gig was pretty special.
[…] hearing something completely new, even though it all seems so familiar. Everyone compares it to Morton Feldman’s late music, understandably, and Harrison himself cites Howard Skempton’s music as an inspiration. The […]
[…] and use of silence, with an organic sense of rhythm, make it seem very similar in many respects to Morton Feldman’s late music. The harmonic language, however, is very different. Johnson’s piece uses clear, familiar […]
[…] Thirteen years ago I heard the GBSR Duo of George Barton and Siwan Rhys performing Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston in the chilly back room of an art gallery for four-and-a-half hours. On that occasion, the flute part was played by a tag-team of two, working in shifts.I remember the earlier performance being slightly rough around the edges, in a clear and sympathetic interpretation – particularly Barton and Rhys. The flute part is especially tricky, for the listener as it is for the flautist: as Feldman understood, it is a loud instrument. How should it blend with piano and celesta, vibraphone and chimes? It can tend to dominate (e.g. the rather forthright recording made by the California EAR Unit). This afternoon, at Kings Place, Rhys on keyboards and Barton on percussion accompanied Taylor MacLennan on the flutes for a new interpretation of the piece, to launch their recording of all three of Feldman’s large trios. In this version, their understanding of how the three musicians relate was clear, with the flute primus inter pares in what aspires to be a solo of the simplest and most elemental gestures, complicated by piano and percussion mirroring and echoing the parts in a fraught balance. […]