First performed in 1982, Morton Feldmans' monumental composition for piano and violin dedicated to peer John Cage creates a distinctive environment of instrumental interaction where patterns are subtly varied in a virtual suspension of time as the music drifts and reflects, beautifully rendered in this 2021 recording by pianist Judith Wegmann and violinist Andreas Kunz.
Performed by Judith Wegmann on a Bösendorfer piano 280VC and by Andreas Kunz using a Baroque violin bow.
UPC: 752156103622
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 2-1036 Squidco Product Code: 31195
Format: 2 CDs Condition: New Released: 2021 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Mazzini Stiftung, in Grenchen, Switzerland, in February, 2021, by Michael Gallusser.
"For John Cage was premiered on 13th March 1982, just four and a half years before Morton Feldman's untimely death at the age of 61. Like most of Feldman's music it was written for performers whose musicianship he admired, in this case the violinist Paul Zukofsky and the pianist Aki Takahashi. For Zukofsky he had already written two works, Spring of Chosroes (1978) and Violin and Orchestra (1979), and Takahashi was the dedicatee of Triadic Memories (1981); in For John Cage there is a sense that the expressive range of these previous works has been radically reduced to create music of the greatest intimacy.
A month after the premiere of For John Cage Feldman gave a lecture in Toronto and talked about this intimacy, about the way that the violin and the piano are 'both in the same space, no business of this one here that one there at all, of course it happens, but it's like one instrument in the same space, just a little echo of sorts.' The instruments interlock, like the warp and weft of the Persian and Turkish rugs that Feldman loved to collect, notes passing back and forth between violin and piano. The score echoes this sense of equality, the piano part notated like the violin, on just a single stave.
There is an intimacy too in the naming of this work. For John Cage was written for a marathon concert in New York, organised to celebrate Cage's 70th birthday, and the title might seem to be no more than a dedication to Feldman's great friend and mentor. But the title has a deeper significance: Feldman was preoccupied by the nature of his creative relationship with Cage, the composer who had given him 'permission, the freedom to do what I wanted', and it was a topic that recurred in the lectures and interviews of his later years. In January 1982 he remarked that 'I see John very infrequently' but 'he's always on my mind' and For John Cage can be thought of as music in which Feldman set out to explore how different he was from Cage.
Writing for violin made it easy to establish this difference. Cage had recently completed a set of seventeen solo violin studies for Paul Zukofsky, the Freeman Etudes (1977-80). They are spectacularly difficult, a sonic universe in which every possible violin sound will at some point make an appearance, often before or after sounds that require quite different types of playing technique, and, as far as Zukofsky was concerned, they frequently edged into unplayability. In For John Cage Feldman is, as he put it, 'trying out another option': this music is made up of just a few handfuls of notes and intervals, a succession of sounds, consistently very quiet, that gradually threads its way through time.
In 1981 Daniel Charles published the English translation of a book of interviews with John Cage, For the birds. The interviews originally date from 1970 but for the 1981 edition Cage added footnotes, in one of which he wrote, 'Earlier this year I heard a String Quartet by Morton Feldman that was a single movement lasting an hour and a half. It was beautiful because it wasn't beautiful. Through length it became not an object.' Cage might almost be describing For John Cage, except that this music is very beautiful and perhaps never before so beautiful as it is in this new recording by Judith Wegmann and Andreas Kunz, the latter gently caressing each sound into being with a Baroque violin bow.
But Cage's emphasis on the significance of 'length' is misplaced. That For John Cage is 'not an object' has less to do with its length than with its elimination of conventional musical subject matter. In that Toronto lecture Feldman said, 'My piece that I wrote For John Cage, it is so difficult, it's the most tenuous type of supple rhythms, just it's not even like rhythms at all, you know how difficult it is to write a complicated rhythm that doesn't even sound like a rhythm?' He might have added that, as well as rhythms that don't sound like rhythms, the music also involves sequences of pitches that don't cohere into melodies, alternations of instrumental register that resist any sense of the rhetorical, and pauses that are never dramatic.
John Cage was an evangelist for a new mode of listening in which we would listen to everything with the same attention that we bring to music. For John Cage proposes instead that we listen to this music as if it were everything. While these two instruments are playing there is nothing else, just a violin and a piano. Even the process of remembering, normally so important in helping us make sense of what we hear, is altered: the 'tenuous' rhythms of For John Cage articulate patterns in which notes and figures are reiterated or subtly varied, the music becoming its own memory. Eventually it finishes and we remember: what? That we were listening to a violin and a piano and that it was quiet and beautiful."-Christopher Fox, 10th July 2021
Performed by Judith Wegmann on a Bösendorfer piano 280VC and by Andreas Kunz using a Baroque violin bow.