The Smith Quartet with pianist John Tilbury perform two long works by Morton Feldman: "For John Cage" (1982) and "Piano and String Quartet" (1985) on DVD Audio.
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Sample The Album:
The Smith Quartet:
Ian Humphries-violin
Darragh Morgan-violin
Nic Pendlebury-viola
Deirdre Cooper-cello
with
John Tilbury-piano
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Region: 0, PAL format. This is a video DVD, although images are only used for the DVD menu and the first 25 sec of each track. The screen will be black for the remainder of the pieces. The disk can only be played on a computer with DVD drive or DVD player.
UPC: 502049250120
Label: Matchless
Catalog ID: MRDVD01
Squidco Product Code: 12771
Format: DVD Audio
Condition: New
Released: 2009
Country: Great Britain
Packaging: Cardstock Gatefold Sleeve
Recorded live at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, 2006.
"Morton Feldman
For John Cage and Piano and String Quartet
Several lifetimes ago, when I was nineteen, I was interviewed by Wilfrid Mellers for a place at York University. That I failed to win a place may have been due in part to the confinement of our discussions to the music of Morton Feldman. Wilfrid (a friend of Feldman's and, in later years, a friend of mine) saw Debussy as a powerful influence. My own view was that Feldman's music was much closer to the cool jazz of the Forties and Fifties. My guess is that Feldman would have supported Wilfrid's argument and been dismissive of mine.
Well, my crazy notion won a new lease of life recently when I read John Fordham's Guardian obituary of George Russell, jazz drummer, composer and theoretician, who not only had worked with Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan but had studied with Stefan Wolpe, Feldman's teacher at the same time. One wonders whether Russell and Feldman knew each other. Russell published The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation in 1953 and I strongly suspect that this Lydian concept is not a million miles (no pun intended!) from Feldman's harmony which remains powerfully, uncompromisingly ineffable.
One senses a connection to jazz in Feldman's subtly emotive chords. And beyond that, in the music's "touch" and "swing". The touch is in the minimising of attack (Baroque bows are used on this recording). The swing is in the rhythmic dislocation, a feature from the beginning but pursued most exhaustively in the long works of the last years, For John Cage being a prime example.The only problem with genre is that we cannot wish it away. If Cage spent his life beating his head against the wall of harmony, Feldman preferred to dwell on thresholds, exploring limits and intersections, as Samuel Beckett did in Neither, the libretto he wrote for Feldman.
The personal character of these notes seems appropriate. Feldman was close to the Abstract Expressionists. He worked intuitively, and the Abstract Experience of his music is subjective. George Russell studied structure with Wolpe, but Feldman had no time for structure. He had time in the end only for the manipulation of time (as in For John Cage) or for the observation of time as it slipped through his fingers (as in Piano and String Quartet). These pieces exist at the intersection of the everyday and the transcendent. Piano and String Quartet is like breathing; and like dying. The matter is of life and death."-Howard Skempton, from the liner notes
See also Volume 2.Region: 0, PAL format. This is a video DVD, although images are only used for the DVD menu and the first 25 sec of each track. The screen will be black for the remainder of the pieces. The disk can only be played on a computer with DVD drive or DVD player.
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for John Tilbury "John Tilbury (born 1 February 1936) is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM. Tilbury studied piano at the Royal College of Music with Arthur Alexander and James Gibb and also with Zbigniew Drzewiecki in Warsaw. 1968 he was the winner of the Gaudeamus competition in the Netherlands. During the 1960s, Tilbury was closely associated with the composer Cornelius Cardew, whose music he has interpreted and recorded and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. His biography of Cardew, "Cornelius Cardew - A life unfinished" was published in 2008. Tilbury has also recorded the works of Howard Skempton and John White, among many others, and has also performed adaptations of the radio plays of Samuel Beckett. With guitarist AMM bandmate Keith Rowe's electroacoustic ensemble M.I.M.E.O., Tilbury recorded The Hands of Caravaggio, inspired by the painter's The Taking of Christ {1602). In this live performance, twelve of the members of M.I.M.E.O. were positioned around the piano in a deliberate echo of Christ's Last Supper. The thirteenth M.I.M.E.O. member (Cor Fuhler) is credited with "inside piano" as he interacted and interfered with Tilbury's playing by manipulating and damping the instrument's strings, essentially doing piano preparation in real time. Critic Brian Olewnick describes the album as "A staggering achievement, one is tempted to call The Hands of Caravaggio the first great piano concerto of the 21st century." Another notable recent recording of Tilbury's was Duos for Doris (like The Hands of Caravaggio also on Erstwhile Records), a collaboration with Keith Rowe. It is widely considered a landmark recording in the genre of electroacoustic improvisation (or "EAI"). In 2013 he collaborated with artist Armando Lulaj in FIEND performance at the National Theatre of Tirana (Albania)." ^ Hide Bio for John Tilbury
10/2/2024
Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.
Track Listing:
1. For John Cage, 1982 1:29:01
(Darragh Morgan and John Tilbury)
2. Piano and String Quartet, 1985 1:29:30
Matchless
Compositional Forms
Avant-Garde
Stringed Instruments
Piano & Keyboards
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