Feldman - Triadic Memories for piano

Triadic Memories is jointly dedicated to Aki Takahashi and Roger Woodward. After the
first German performance, Morton Feldman
laconically described it as the “biggest
butterfly in captivity", and it is indeed vast, lasting over an hour
and a half. During the eighties, Feldman's pieces began to escalate in length –
compared to the 5-hour String
Quartet No. 2 or the 4-hour For Philip
Guston, Triadic Memories is
almost aphoristic. Why these enormous lengths? Feldman says: "Personally, l think the reason the
pieces are so long is that form, as I understand it, no longer exists... I'm
not looking so much for a new form,
I’d rather substitute the word scale
or proportion, and in music it's very
difficult to distinguish between a thing's proportions and its form...My pieces
aren't too long, most pieces are actually too short...lf one listens to my
pieces, they seem to fit into the temporal landscape I provide. Would you say
that the Odyssey is too long?”

Let's not argue about
Homer; there are other factors. During the eighties, Feldman became obsessed
with 19th century Turkish carpets. Part of this interest was financial, and
allowed him to die rich. But the patterning of these carpets also became a
(musical) preoccupation for him, and is reflected in titles of late pieces such
as Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetries. This interest led
him to completely reassess the role of pattern and repetition in his work, and,
as indicated above, of 'scale':

“Music and the designs or a repeated pattern in
a rug have much in common. Even if it be asymmetrical in its placement, the
proportion of one component to another is hardly ever substantially out of scale
in the context of the whole. Most traditional rug patterns remain the same size
when taken from a larger rug and adapted to a smaller one...

I was once in Rothko's studio when his assistant
restretched the top of a large painting at least four times. Rothko, standing
some distance away, was deciding whether to bring the canvas down an inch or
so, or maybe even a little bit higher. This question of scale, for me,
precludes any concept of symmetry or asymmetry from affecting the eventual
length of my music.

As a composer I am involved with the
contradiction in not having the sum of the parts equal the whole. The scale of
what is actually being represented, whether it be of the whole or of the part, is
a phenomenon unto itself. The reciprocity inherent in scale, in fact, has made
me realize that musical forms and related processes are essentially only
methods of arranging material and serve no other function than to aid one's
memory.

What Western forms have become is a paraphrase
of memory. But memory could operate otherwise as well. In Triadic Memories, there is a section of different types of
chords where each chord is slowly repeated. One chord might be repeated three
times, another, seven or eight – depending on how long I felt it should go on.
Quite soon into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it. I
then reconstructed the entire section: rearranging its earlier progression and
changing the number of times a particular chord was repeated.

This way of working was a conscious attempt at
formalizing a disorientation of memory. Chords are heard repeated without any
discernible pattern. In this regularity (though there are slight gradations of
tempo) there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional,
but we soon realize that this is an illusion: a bit like walking the streets of
Berlin –
where all the buildings look alike, even lf they're not.”