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Bleakness

Carolyn Chen

“…the problem is how to end, not how to begin.”

- Aldo Clementi “Think of a runner trained to run backward at great speeds, or what is even more difficult, to run backward very slowly and steadily.”

- Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman and Aldo Clementi both write slow, quiet, repetitive pieces. Beyond these surface

similarities, their musics evoke distinct affective positions in regards to the music of the past.

Though both write of the “death of music,” Clementi’s work suggests a bleaker outlook on

Romantic music than that of Feldman, who seems to write from inside the melancholic tradition.

The inflections of their varying relationships to a musical past can be traced through harmony,

notation, and performative situation.

Melancholy, nostalgia, and bleakness are all points on a spectrum of slow, quiet, bittersweet

affects. Melancholy, a prolonging darkness, might be the distinguishing affect of Romantic music.

Nostalgia, a yearning to return to a former time, reflects a contemporary position of listening to

music of the past. Bleakness encapsulates an extreme of erasure, removal, and unsentimental

desolation, which in conjunction with an acute awareness of the past, characterizes some aspects of

the music of both composers.

***

Surfaces

Surface resemblances connect both composers’ music to music of the past. In their choice

of instrumentation, both composers favor strings, winds, and women’s voices – indoor instruments,

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associated with salons, parlours, and private music-making. In combination with slowness and

quietness, this inclines their music toward a focus on timbre, harmony, and melody – parameters not

usually at the forefront of 20th-century avant-garde concerns.

A sense of intimacy and privacy pervades the music of both. Chamber music is intended for

people in close proximity – both physically and socio-economically. Historically, the genre originated

with musicians playing in small rooms, with people of comparable social background and music

education.

Repetition is a shared fixation with both Feldman and Clementi, stressing the music of the

very recent past: the past of the same musical work and the composer’s larger body of work.

Within pieces, local activity often consists of small cells, scales, or melodic fragments repeated.

Over an entire work, material is often also self-similar – so that a moment stolen from beginning,

end, or mid-section might be indistinguishable from another moment elsewhere in the piece.

Further, there is repetition over entire bodies of work. Both Feldman and Clementi work with

established personal techniques and palettes, flouting the modernist precept to make all new. To

some extent, as Joanna Bailie writes, all their music sounds the same.1 They are “craft” composers,

not reinventing the rules for each piece, but working within established individual idioms.

Within pieces, Feldman and Clementi dwell on related musical materials, which reference a

historical musical past to different degrees. A preponderance of activity operates within a small

space, registrally, rhythmically, and affectively. Lines are modest, without strong profile (no

triumphant leaps or virtuosic flourishes), often not individually highly demanding either in terms of

the listener’s attention or the performer’s skill level. The music resists specific focal points. The

confined ambitus and rhythmic similarity can recall chant lines, the origins of Western classical

music. Notational choices reinforce this suggestion: Both Feldman and Clementi sometimes

                                                                                                                         1 Joanna Bailie, “Aldo Clementi and the art of ‘writing the same piece over and over again,’” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 2001.

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employ noteheads without stems, visually recalling plainchant neumes of unspecified duration, and

sonically echoing that music’s intended aura of internal reflection. Clementi’s instructions for

Cantilena 2 (1997) for voice(s) and 4 instruments are “flexible, almost rubato, as a lullaby.” 2 This

notion of a private song from the past is reinforced by both composers’ practice of dedicatory titles

and subtitles. Clementi’s titles and musical fragments also suggest specific points of return to a

musical past, simulating a past vocabulary even if not specifically quoting it: Intermezzo (1977) for 14

wind instruments and prepared piano takes a four-note motif from Brahms’s E minor Intermezzo,

Op.119 No.2.

***

Reading

On a deeper level, works of both composers interrogate the practice of reading music, an

abstracted process made possible through notation. Reading music is an internalized listening, a

recalling of aural memories of music played and heard. Reading involves taking in a score visually,

and internally referencing a private library of imagined sound built over a lifetime of listening,

practicing, and playing music. The process draws upon ingrained bodily involvement and physical

memory, extending through fingers, arms, vocal chords. Physical gestures are not expressed on a

familiar instrument, but enacted within. The memory of movement reverberates internally,

sympathetically resonating with affective feelings associated with bodily positions and movements –

their smoothness, struggle, spaciousness or constriction. Listening is already a private activity,

dependent upon ear curvature and state of mind, invisible to the external viewer. Reading, in a sense,

is even more intimate than listening – its substance not vibrating in physical space, but confined to

the chambers of memory. Reading is the act of playing, abstracted – or the act of playing, withheld.

                                                                                                                         2 Aldo Clementi, Cantilena 2, Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1997. S. 11226 Z.

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This holding back, allowing sensual memory to entangle with hypothetical lingering of the

imagination – epitomizes the act of longing.

Both Feldman and Clementi began their musical lives as amateur pianists whose significant

personal engagement with the classical tradition manifested in significant bodies of piano music, and

complex relationships with reading music. Feldman: “My earliest recollection of music – I couldn’t

have been more than five – is my mother holding one of my fingers and picking out ‘Eli Eli’ with it

on the piano.”3 He went on to study with Mme. Press, a Russian aristocrat whose image, “a

nonprofessional with all the ability and brilliance of the ‘pro’ – that ‘dilletantism’ – has always

remained with me.”4 As a student, Feldman learned Scriabin and Busoni, composers personally

connected to his teacher. Clementi’s relationship with amateur music-making and Romantic music

history has similar familial derivation: his grandfather was an assistant to Billroth, the Viennese

surgeon who was a friend and patron of Brahms, and who made the assistant promise to teach his

children music. Aldo Clementi was a pianist who first learned music by ear.5 Learning to read

scores constituted a significant rupture in his musical upbringing:

My first ‘serious’ confrontation with music was rather disconcerting, in that I passed from a sensory, auditory dimension to a conceptual one: to perform music while reading it was truly a great shock, a sort of block that I managed to overcome only through long hours of study and passionate insistence.6

David Osmond-Smith sees throughout Clementi’s work “a constant tension between the brain’s

making and reading of scores and the raw, risky interface between mind and body brought into play

by performing them.”7

                                                                                                                         3 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 3. Morton Feldman, Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B.H. Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), 3. 4 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 3. 5 David Osmond-Smith, “Temps perdu: Aldo Clementi and the eclipse of music as praxis,” in The modernist legacy: essays on new music, ed. Bjorn Heile (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 124. 6 Osmond-Smith, “Temps perdu,” 124. 7 Osmond-Smith, “Temps perdu,” 124.

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Passing into the dimension of reading had lasting impact. Clementi’s scores often stand as

conceptual works of art in themselves – sometimes seeming more complete as texts independent of

performance. Many pieces are formed through the letters of names of dedicatees, a musical

tradition connecting to Bach’s self-named motive in the Art of Fugue, Schumann’s ABEGG

variations, Berg’s violin concerto, and many others. Apprehending the construction depends on

seeing the score, or knowing the system of notation which assigns pitches to letters. The dedication

of the musical composition is a personal evocation – a calling out to history both musical and

personal, and an abstruse form of secret epistolary expression, writing letters to oneself and intimate

circle, or for anonymous posterity to decode as a message in a bottle.

This hermetic aspect of preserving mystery of intention might be epitomized by Feldman’s

thorny mixtures of unorthodoxly written accidentals. From the late 1970s, Feldman composed

many pieces in which the spellings of the written pitches, especially for string instruments, evoke

enharmonic variations. Double-flats, flats, naturals, sharps, and double-sharps abound in Violin and

String Quartet (1985) and Clarinet and String Quartet (1983). As with his intricately inflected notations

of rhythm, Feldman explores visually distinct notations that signify the same pitch, but suggest

shadings of sonic difference. An untitled solo violin fragment (1984) consists of pairs of double-

stops forming repeating progressions, including perfect fifths and major thirds notated as triple-

diminished fourths and double-augmented thirds. Brambles of accidentals mask open sonorities,

suggesting that simplicity may not be so easily conjured, or that inner identity withdraws from

immediate categorization.

In his writings, Feldman seems to long for privacy. Noting the inherently performative

nature of music, he finds, “Yet somehow there is something demeaning in the fact that there is no

other dimension for music than this public one.”8 A composer lacks the privacy of the playwright,

                                                                                                                         8 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 24.

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whose work can exist as literature – music must be played in order to exist. The resistance of the

score is a request for greater privacy – or a more intimate relationship.

These tendencies have received critical disparagement. Paul Griffiths calls Clementi’s Reticolo:

4 (1968) for string quartet “one of his earliest, most extreme and most austere musical corpses.” 9

Although instructions indicate that the 24 aleatorically achieved parts can be performed in three

different versions, “one could learn all that this music has to ‘say’ in one hearing or in none.”

Performer decisions of rhythmic value and playing technique are dismissed as null: “whatever the

choices made, the effect will be a fast flickering in the treble register, lasting about five minutes.”

David Fanning exhibits a similar disdain for the predetermined, unresponsive aspect of the

music: “Each piece is to be played quietly and with a gradual decelerando. With that, the music is

just about fully described.” There is a degree of resentment toward the score:

And are there really seven misprinted accidentals (in five pages of uncomplicated score), or does Clementi intend deliberate illogicalities to subvert his ‘authoritarian’ construction? The rhythmic notation is also unhelpful to the performers.10

Both composers’ notations might be read in this way – as “misprinted,” “authoritarian” and

“unhelpful.”

At the same time, the visual forms of both afford another kind of access. From a greater

distance, pages of scores are immediately apprehensible as visual patterns, each with a distinctive

look – Feldman’s blocks of repeating patterns, and Clementi’s overlapping arrays of identically

contoured lines. Clementi’s frequent omitting of note stems aids the viewer in this level of

recognition. The first invitation to the eye is not to move across minutely, parsing pitches and

durations, but to register the whole page as shape. These scores are visually recognizable in a way

that does not require musical-note-reading ability. In this aspect, they point to a level at which

                                                                                                                         9 Paul Griffiths, “Italian,” The Musical Times 129, no. 1742 (1988), p.193. 10 David Fanning, “Recent Italian Music,” Music and Letters (1983).

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reading music separates from reading notes – recognizing form as pattern or density, separating

from sound, venturing into tactility or spatial perception. Still, moments of visual clarity often belie

sonic ambiguity and distortion through the closeness, interference, slowness, and other blurring

techniques.

Both Feldman and Clementi held strong interesting in painting, particularly abstract

expressionism. Feldman’s New York circle included Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline,

Philip Guston. Clementi’s work suggests connection to art informel painters Jean Fautrier or

Antoni Tapies, with their densely obscured layers of textures. Abstract expressionist aesthetics

might parallel the music in flatness of form and textural composition (Feldman’s engulfing

sparseness, Clementi’s miniature impenetrability).

In terms of compositional process, both composers utilized visual layout techniques

affording distance from traditional musical notation. Feldman’s grid notations were horizontal rows

of boxes indicating pitch range and number of articulations in a given rhythmic unit. In Projections

(1950-51); Atlantis (1959), Out of “Last Pieces” (1961) and In Search of an Orchestration (1967) for

orchestra, and The King of Denmark (1964) for solo percussion, the grids map textures of changing

density, reflecting Feldman’s obsession with hand-dyed pattern rugs of fine tint gradations.

Clementi plotted out serial canons on long stretches of graph paper and used collage processes to

map the flow of sound. In ES (1980) and Cent Sopirs (1983), canons at the unison, he physically

photocopied the theme, shifting cut-outs until arriving at a satisfactory superimposition.11 The

process bears some resemblance to Conlon Nancarrow’s techniques in working with player pianos –

visually laying out the polyrhythms and larger metrical structures governing the piece. This

translation into a visual medium offers an additional layer of abstraction from the practical

limitations of instruments and performers. The composition process draws closer to the realm of

                                                                                                                         11 Osmond-Smith, “Temps Perdu,” 130.

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architecture or engineering, privileging conceptual integrity over adherence to ordinary physical

limitations or learned bodily habits.

***

Pianos, Four Pianos

A comparison of Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos (1957) and Clementi’s Madrigale (1979)

illuminates their distinctive affective inflections. Both pieces are for multiple keyboards, or forests

of keyboards. The consort instrumentation is a common choice for both composers, who have a

number of other pieces for multiples of the same instrument – Clementi’s Ouverture (1984) for 12

flutes, Fantasia (1987) for 4 guitars, Melanconia (2001) for 8 violins; Feldman’s Three Clarinets, Cello and

Piano (1971), Trio for Flutes (1972), Three Voices (1982). Feldman’s particular interest in the piano and

its multiples is evidenced by a number of works: Two Pieces for Two Pianos (1954), Two Pianos (1957),

Work for Two Pianists (1958), Piano Four Hands (1958), Ixion (1960) for two pianos, Vertical Thoughts 1

(1963) for two pianos, Two Pieces for Three Pianos (1966), Extensions 4 (1953) for three pianos, Five

Pianos (1972), and Pianos and Voices (1972) for five pianos and five sopranos. Independently

operating multiples of the same, or one divided into multiple, provide material for the blurring of

individual identity.

Piece for Four Pianos is a single sheet of pitches for which the duration of each sound is chosen

by performers. After the first simultaneous sound, performers are given the interpretive freedom to

proceed at their own pace. However, the consequences of their decisions are not drastic. The

affective result has been fixed by the instructions for low dynamics and a minimum of attack – the

overall effect is of echoes, ripples, and tensionless drifting apart.

The notated musical material – stemless noteheads, alone or sometimes aligned as chords,

assigned a system of relative duration ranging from open noteheads to grace notes – has the feeling

of a happened-upon fragment, or a ruin of a once-more-specifically-formed music. There is a

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contour to the overall activity – areas focusing on a single sonority, moments of interruption and

outlying events. Common intervals and sonorities – ninths, tenths, octaves, seventh chords –

occupy a nebulous atonal territory in traditionally spacious registration, which seems not to erase

tonal reference, but trace over its no-longer-functioning ruins.

Four pianos is a rare instrumentation, and the dynamics of the piece are markedly different

from duo piano or four-hand classical repertoire, which often creates a parlour-room orchestra of

differing textural effects and separated soloing/accompanying functions. Here, there seems no

intention to build a larger, richer sound world dependent on the efforts of multiple virtuosi. The

performers may at times drift far enough apart that the resulting music could be played by a single

performer on a single piano, or on no piano at all. There is a handmade quality to the organization

of rhythm – onsets are unique, not automatic – personal inflections, but not assertions of identity

(“minimum of attack”). Listening to a recording, or even watching a live performance, there can be

a general confusion as to who has done what. Four pianos are a great number to keep track of, and

their material is all the same. There are no timbral distinctions or parameters of individual

expressive decision to distinguish one part from another. The four performers might easily be

another number. Further, there are no instructions for reacting to one another’s durations as

contingent, expressive decisions. The instruction “All beats are slow and not necessarily equal” does

not assign creative agency as much as prescribe a suspended feeling of uncertainty. The ideal seems

to be one of rhythmic independence, but the pitch material is non-independent in that it is identical

for each performer. The degree to which the music of any single piano may be heard as an

individual voice or part is questionable. The overall effect is not of distinct voices, but an

environment of echoed events, recurring sonorities, often blending into a somnambulant cloud of

sound. The four performers seem to function as ghosts or shadows of one another, illuminations of

possible selves in alternate presents, moving independently, unaware of one another.

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In later music, Feldman creates the same effect without incorporating the aleatoric aspect –

composing out subtle shifts in alignment through small rhythmic differentiations in traditionally

notated rhythms. In the Turfan Fragments, for example, noteheads are written in the same vertical

alignment despite differing rest values, suggesting that pitches were written first, then subtly

differing rhythmic values added afterward – the composer in effect carrying out the activities of the

four pianists by himself. Metric differentiation is not clearly heard, even if notated. There is usually

no audible pulse or regularity against which to orient the gradations – in performance, this hidden

grid effects a disciplined struggle of the player meeting the friction of the page.

***

Four hands

While Feldman’s piano sounds blend together in a pedaled Romantic miasma, Clementi

divides the piano into smaller, more peculiar worlds through preparations and registral separation.

His piano writing often separates the work of a single performer into distinct voices – as if music

were not intended for the piano as a particular instrument, but the piano as a shorthand for

multiplicity, a practical method of achieving many voices with limited forces. Preparations are not

specified – the requirement is merely that sounds be distinct, or occupy a certain place along a

gradation of resonance. Microvariations in timbre are left ungoverned in a composerly divestment

from sonic detail. The piano, a keyboard kingdom of multiple small individually operating territories,

is a sort of collection of musical machines unto itself, in an extended family with music boxes,

carillons, and other musical automata.

The forest of small machines, a fixation of Clementi’s, is also explored in works such as his

Concerto (1975) for piano, 24 instruments and carillons, Concerto (1977) for violin, 40 instruments and

carillons, many works for prepared pianos and various pianists, such as Danze (1989) for two pianos,

twelve hands. Carillon (2012) was the title of an opera commissioned by La Scala.

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In Concerto (1975), the pianist chooses five different preparations to distinguish registers.

The score is to be repeated “at least fourteen times” in various instrumental combinations.12 The

ensemble plays isolated points of sound, rarely more than one note per measure. Suspended to the

edge of the piano are twelve string-wound music boxes, the kind that might hang from a child’s crib,

each playing a different tune, all continuously reactivated by strings pulled by the pianist. The

carillons, as well as the isolated instrumental writing, constitute a collection of music fragments.

They are found objects. 13

Madrigale (1979), for piano four hands and two taped instruments, is a densely overwhelming

texture. The score consists of four sheets of 10 staves each – two for prerecorded glockenspiel and

vibraphone parts, two each for the right and left hands of the live performers (one performer

distributed entirely to the treble register, the other to the bass). The prerecorded mallet parts serve

as tempo guides to the divided pianists – the piece begins as fast as possible and slows down

imperceptibly to the end, repeating “at least twice.” Each piano stave is prepared with a different

material at the pianists’ discretion, the pitch material consists of mirror forms derived from names of

pianists to which the piece is dedicated.

In Madrigale, as with the independently operating carillons in the concerti, each stave seems

an enclosed world, pure of subjective influence. Materials on a stave do not react to external

encounter, but maintain their status as self-contained, self-sufficient objects, with predetermined

destinies, confined to repeat themselves exactly as they began. There is a coldness to this aleatoric

aspect. It does not matter what music is played – music is present as a static object that plays itself

                                                                                                                         12 Aldo Clementi, Concerto per pianoforte ventiquattro strumenti e carillons, 1975. Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1975. 13 In his fascination with mechanical automata, Clementi had a predecessor in Ravel. Anthony Burr, “Machine for Two Instruments: Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello,” Camera Lucida: Texts on Music, Dec. 2009, http://cameralucida.ucsd.edu/Burr_1.html.

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out – its value in the piece is to contribute to a din in which nothing can be clearly discerned in its

individual characteristics, none of it necessary in specificity.

A Fluxus counterpart to this collection of small percussive toy sounds would be Joe Jones’

orchestras of small, self-propelled, homemade machine instruments that flagellate over motley

surfaces. Inspired by a neighborhood fan shop, the collections of musical automata create a

playfully boisterous, beating noise music. In Clementi, however, the feeling is different. This is not

a celebratory improvisational exploration exalting in the unpredictable accidents of physical materials.

It is more focused, even obsessive. There is the image of a mad toymaker’s workshop.

Amidst the densely interwoven texture of small beatings, the status of the live performance

is uncertain. Though not entirely lost, its presence is not the most prominent or even relevant in the

texture. The prerecorded parts are rhythmically more reliable (quarter note pulses punctuated on the

22nd note by a dotted half, the two parts off-set from one another by an eighth), and thus, to some

extent come to function as guides for the listeners in addition to the pianists. The pianists, with

their hands divided into multiple staves, sounding variously unfamiliar through timbrally distorting

preparations, are literally fragmented. Rhythmically, their task is harrowing compared to that of

Feldman’s four pianists – aside from keeping together with each other and the tape, the lower voice

of each hand anticipates the value of the upper voice by a grace note. Each performer, then, clings

to their guidepost-on-tape for orientation amidst the slow rallentando, but must play simultaneously

with and against the indicated tempo on each hand. With all these dividing tasks, listening for a

relationship to the other performer, or to the overall sound created, is a significant challenge.

The gradually, inexorably slowing tempo – a characteristic feature of Clementi’s music – is

not an expressive interpretive choice, but human mimicry of machine activity, or a machine

overtaking of the human. The music recalls the past in its use of archaic musical technology, and its

emphasis on the mechanical limitation or failure of this technology. The rallentando is a modeling

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of entropy, the winding-down of what once took on the appearance of life. The obscured, confused

quality of the live interaction might model the relationship of the listener’s consciousness to a

proliferation of recorded music from the past. The live activity is not more vital or urgent than the

prerecorded. Its division into multiple distorted voices further diffuses its presence. The present is

camouflaged into the recorded past.

***

Feelings in music

The Baroque doctrine of affections, derived from classical theories of rhetoric, held that the

motivic origin of a composition was an embodiment of affect, an emotional or spiritual state of

being. For example, a lamenting bass line descending by half steps represented sadness, while

rapidly rising thirds embodied euphoria. A single piece should aim at one affect, the doctrine

held. The rest of the work was derived by elaboration. Affects were not personal, but

representations of states of the soul as objective reality.

Romantic expression of emotion was more individual. Greater expressivity came in part

through the expansion of timbre, harmony, and form. Advances in instrumental technology

increased the instruments of the symphony orchestra, expanded their range, improved their

projection. Harmonic conventions loosened. In Baroque and Classical music, non-harmonic tones

came in passing as expressive dissonances, reinforcing cadences. In Romantic music, resolutions

were delayed. Composers modulated to more remote keys with less preparation. The path from any

given moment or state to the next blurred – implied directions could be many, the next step more

difficult to predict. Harmony became a means to explore color. Things did not resolve. The

sustaining of this delay into a system of unresolved tension is the characteristic of Romantic

melancholic longing.

***

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Melancholy and Romantic music

In the ancient theory of the four humors, melancholy (from the Greek for “black bile”) was

linked to autumn and to Saturn, the planet of slowest known rotation. Melancholics were

characterized as black in complexion, skilled at measuring land and counting money, and depicted as

resting head on hand. Later, melancholy came to be associated with heroes, artists, philosophers,

prophets – a madness of divine inspiration. Melancholic features – the black face, downcast eye,

hermetic life, penchant for studying alone at midnight – were reinterpreted. Blackness was a

brilliance too bright for human vision; the solitary meditation, an ecstatic, visionary trance. From

this angle, the melancholic in solitary meditation was precursor to the Romantic artist-genius.

Melancholy in Romantic music might be traced to the songs of troubadours, depicting

sadness and longing for an unreachable beloved. Courtly love was intrinsically unrealizable,

unresolvable, and thus inexhaustible. Desire extended song, extended desire. Desire, extending,

could be sung, and could extend through being sung. Song, the dominant genre of the Romantic era,

filtered into instrumental music from operatic vocal technique – chromatic ornamentation,

portamento, rubato. A singing quality, a melancholic sustain, seems to stretch over Romantic music

as a whole. The unmitigated piano pedaling in Feldman and Clementi would seem to summon the

remnants of this sustain.

*

Sustain

The piano itself is a keyboard aspiring to greater sustain. As an instrument it carries

nostalgic connotations of its central role in salon and parlour music of the past, in addition to its

continuing role as a favorite childhood first instrument. For many, including Feldman and Clementi,

a piano signifies the beginning of a musical education. Both composers returned to the piano

throughout their compositional lives. A signature aspect of Feldman’s piano writing is the practice

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of keeping the damper pedal depressed or half-depressed for the entire duration of a piece –

emphasizing the sustain of the sound, maintaining a dreamlike Romantic atmosphere in which all

the collected music of the past seems to hang over indefinitely.

In his essays, Feldman writes of his own focus on the dying away of sound, and the attempt

to “make its attack sourceless… Decay … this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound

exists in our hearing – leaving us rather than coming toward us.”14 The attack or onset of sound is

the aspect most privileged by Western musical notation, a focus that projects forward in time.

Allowing time to examine the decay of sound, then, is allowing space for the contemplation of what

is no longer moving forward. In stillness, focus drifts toward what has passed.

Feldman’s concentration on decay and “sourcelessness” extends to other pieces as well. In

notes to Coptic Light (1985) for orchestra, he describes the piece as a response to Sibelius’s

observation “that the orchestra differs mainly from the piano in that it has no pedal,” aiming “to

create an orchestral pedal, continually varying in nuance.”15 This aim is not confined to decay, but

the extension of sound in general. An orchestra of many is capable of overlap, breathing widened

into a superhuman exhale of seemingly endless sustain.

*

Fragment

At the level of form, sustain is paradoxically embodied in the quintessentially Romantic form

of the fragment, a piece projecting beyond its own borders. Romantic phrases do not close, but

open up to new possibilities. The fragment implies something greater than what can be

witnessed. The Romantic interest in fragments and ruins responded, in part, to the rediscovery of

the art of classical antiquity – the enigma of ancient marbles in decay. Political, social, and

technological upheavals led to a departure from Enlightenment views of nature and classical ideals

                                                                                                                         14 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 25. 15 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 201.

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of balance, harmony, and perfection. The fragment does not provide a whole and uplifting

experience of beauty – it invites the perceiver to reach further. Extending across time, the ruin

points toward a previous epoch of greater grandeur. Physical incompleteness and the trace of the

past conjure an aura of mystery.

Clementi’s fragments might be ruins, mirrored over themselves, uncertain of origin. They

recall past music of emotional immersion, but sound with innumerable other echoes and

doppelgangers of themselves that distort the quality of their presence and emotional associations.

The presentation forces critical reevaluation. The imagined past, of wholeness and intimacy in the

expression of sincere emotion, shines brighter in its distance.

Lost worlds can return.

To the 19th-century imagination, Atlantis was not a ‘golden age’ to be reconstructed but a ‘lost civilization’ to engage with through ruins, traces and fragments. The melancholic sense of loss turned into a style, a late 19th-century fashion.16

Feldman’s Atlantis, in its grid notation, returns to his own compositional past. The orchestral sound

itself is a lost world of preserved time which Feldman returned to throughout his life. Atlantis

overflows with myriad non-isolable, unpinnable activities.

*

In his later life, was preoccupied with terse formal structures: the short piano pieces,

op.115-118 (intermezzos, rhapsodies, capriccios), are often as harmonically ambiguous as Chopin’s

preludes.

*

Harmony

The place of melancholy in Romantic music might be aptly characterized by Johannes

Brahms in a letter to Clara Schumann from 1893, regarding his Intermezzo, Op. 119:                                                                                                                          16 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001) ,16.

17

The little piece is exceptionally melancholic and ‘to be played very slowly’ is not an understatement. Every bar and every note must sound like a ritard[ando], as if one wanted to suck melancholy out of each and every one, lustily and with pleasure out of these very dissonances! Good Lord, this description will [surely] awaken your desire!

The ritardando implied in every note is a slowing down, a taking of more time, in order to regard the

quality of harmony. It is the dissonances (not melody or figuration or dynamics or phrasing) from

which Brahms would “suck melancholy.” Slowness in itself is not the sole sign of this regard – but

slowing – the change in expected pacing, responding in the moment to the pull of the sensual

experience of music.

Brahms’ music, teeming with dense counterpoint, cross-rhythms, dovetailing

accompaniments, bears a melancholic sense of heaviness. The proliferation of background

figuration creates fullness and weight, which is furthered by extended phrases, delayed cadences and

the orchestration of close intervals in low registers. Clementi shares the close intervals, full textures

of small movements, and proliferative background. However, resolution is not just delayed, but

impossible.

***

Nostalgia

Both Piece for Four Pianos and Madrigale are dominated by an overall sense of dissipation, non-

contingency, and predetermination. There is an expansion of emptiness, of concentrating on the

quality of absence. This feeling may be further elucidated by an examination of melancholy in the

context of nostalgia.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym explores the cultural history of nostalgia from its

beginnings as a medical condition of Swiss mercenaries, whose symptoms included hearing voices of

the beloved, seeing ghosts, confusing past and present and real and imaginary, and general

18

indifference toward the present. Disembodiment and dislocation are fundamental aspects of

nostalgia. From a Swiss doctor’s report in 1688:

One of the earliest symptoms is the sensation of hearing the voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom one is conversing, or to see one’s family again in dreams.17

A mania of longing could be triggered by trivial sensations reminiscent of home: cowbells and

shepherd songs to Swiss soldiers in France, bagpipes to Scottish highlanders. As Feldman

remembers Rousseau writing, the music “does not act precisely as music, but as a memorative

sign.”18

Feldman’s diagnosis of the problem with traditional functional harmony is strikingly similar

to Rousseau’s description of the operation of nostalgic music.

One of the problems about functional harmony is that it hears for us, see. We no longer have to hear. We are the found object, you see, where it’s listening for us. Harmony is like going to a public accountant to do certain work.19

Feldman derides the automatic aspect of listening to functional harmony: it works without our

being conscious of its working. Its “functioning” signifies something other than a genuine, heartfelt

response. The harmony reaches into our musical memory and pushes buttons that supply certain

affective associations, without more specific input from the music or the listener. We are found

objects, like Clementi’s music boxes. The interaction feels false.

Nostalgia, incited by the sound of home, taps into an involuntary recall of familiarity, safety

and comfort associated with an imagined place of belonging, in contrast with present circumstances

which may be more adverse. To listen to classical music today is, to some degree, to occupy, or to

                                                                                                                         17 Dr. Albert von Haller, “Nostalgia,” in supplément to the Encyclopédie. Quoted in Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes, 54 (1966), 93. : 81-103. Quoted in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 3. 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionary of Music, W. Waring and j. French, trans. (London, 1779), 267. Quoted in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 4. 19 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 174.

19

traverse this territory. Romantic music and harmonically functional music, music of the tradition, is

the voice of the beloved, the family seen in dreams.

To listen to contemporary music today, on the other hand, is to come to terms with

something less comfortable. The soldiers’ sentiment of indifference might parallel the contemporary

listener’s situation in the ruins of demolished pitch hierarchies. Functional harmony offers a

situatedness, a sense of orientation. Established hierarchies built on extensive histories of music-

making point to moments that matter. Music can be followed through departures and arrivals,

occurrences distinguishable as more and less important. Contemporary music seeking to refute

these established paths also in turn counters developed listening capabilities. Serialism diminishes

the relevance of pitch by leveling traditional hierarchies, erasing patterns and predictability. In de-

emphasizing a dimension foundational to the development of Western music – particularly in its

notation system and formal orientation – the effect on listening is a loss of learned and acculturated

listening strategies. In Clementi, one may hear the voice of the beloved in the voice of another, or

the voices of many others – nostalgia in its disembodying aspect.

Melancholy resonates with Boym’s conception of “reflective nostalgia.” In contrast to

restorative nostalgia, which unconsciously stresses the reconstruction of a lost home, tradition and

truth – reflective nostalgia, calls truth into doubt, “thrives in ‘algia,’ the longing itself, and delays the

homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately… dwells on ‘the ambivalences of human longing and

belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.20 This concentration on

longing itself, endless delay – conjures the sensibility of Romantic music, with its endless modulation,

chromaticism, delayed resolution. The singing line at the center of it all is an extending force.

For Boym, melancholy and nostalgia often overlap. However, while melancholy largely

“confines itself to planes of individual consciousness,” nostalgia brings into discussion a broader

                                                                                                                         20 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xviii.

20

social and historical perspective, through themes such as modernity, progress, and conceptions of

home. Nostalgia relates individual to group biography, personal to collective memory.21 In

considering music from the point of view of nostalgia, the focus shifts to a musical past from a

greater contemplative distance.

***

Time

As a historical emotion, nostalgia is a longing for a “shrinking ‘space of experience,’” which

can be understood in relation to progress as both a temporal and spatial narrative.22 While

premodern space was measured by the human body – lengths of arms, hands, feet, modern space

was conceived with the development of Renaissance perspective and the desire to “objectively” map

newly discovered worlds. The early modern state relied on a standardization, or ‘legibility’ of space

in order to functionally collect taxes, recruit soldiers, and colonize new territories. Progress became

a marker of global time, a central narrative against which to evaluate foreign cultures.

… [T]he thicket of incomprehensible local customs, impenetrable and misleading to outsiders, were brought to a common denominator, a common map. Thus modernization meant making the populated world hospitable to supracommunal, state-ruled administration bureaucracy and moving from a bewildering diversity of maps to a universally shared world. 23

This narrative resonates both with the social world of new music and the formal and sound world of

its musical works. The thicket described, “of incomprehensible local customs, impenetrable and

misleading to outsiders,” might well describe the situation of new music in society – its intellectual

and aesthetic hermeticism and general position of self-declared and self-reinforcing alienation. At a

more specific sonic level, the thicket describes the sound world of Clementi and Feldman’s thicker

works (Feldman’s late orchestra works seem especially relevant in this context – For Samuel Beckett,

                                                                                                                         21 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvi. 22 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 10 23 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 11.

21

Coptic Light) – a dense texture of small motions, obscured to listeners outside, and, in many ways, to

the performers inside.

The thicket also extends to the process of reading. Both composers’ oblique stances with

regard to the score have already been addressed. Feldman’s intuitive compositions might be visually

analyzed as a collaboration with the dimensions of score paper, but as a process for musicians to

interpret, the work can often be contradictory (measures that do not match up), and wrought with

tension. Clementi’s music, though highly ordered from the perspective of its canonical structures

and pre-compositional workings-out – can be similarly opaque to musicians at their instruments.

The Modern project of assimilating the world into a common map describes the function of

notation in general: packaging sound into reproducible units, moving away from unbounded sensual

experience into measured time, systematized pitches and rhythms. Notation is the common

denominator, allowing readers to play, and works to travel across time and physical distance.

Notation maps sound into legible space.

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.24

The slower rhythms of dreams and the “revisiting of time like space” resonates with both Feldman

and Clementi’s closeness to painting, and the quality of stasis that pervades their music, a freezing of

time. Rebellion against the passage of time is itself the function of musical notation. As notation

allows for a record of fleeting sounds, it constitutes a history of a musical past. Historical record

begins with writing. Western music history has been singularly shaped by it.

                                                                                                                         24 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xv.

22

The idea of progress underlies the construction of a history of Western music – from the

classification of music into different periods and styles to the development of instruments and

individual composers’ styles and periods, techniques of playing, forms of composition and analysis.

In interlacing the idea of feelings about social, historical time and feelings in the time of a musical

world, a number of histories can be considered:

-­‐ music history as a social history of a body of music and its practitioners in dialogue across a

number of centuries

-­‐ a composer’s history, in personal musical biography, in scores, in conversation with past

compositional work

-­‐ a performer’s history, incorporating bodily practice and received oral tradition into live

experience and momentary reaction

-­‐ a listener’s history, experiencing a work in the time of its performance or its recording,

perhaps evolving over multiple listenings, or in relation to listenings of other music over the

course of a lifetime

-­‐ the history of work as a formal object of theoretical analysis, in relation to other works or

influences, or to its own material

-­‐ the history of a sound as vibration, physically moving through a space

Walter Benjamin compares memory to archeology:

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging … He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter … For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious

23

fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.25

Benjamin’s imagery seems aptly suited to aspects of this music. The metaphor of the past hidden

below – requiring uncovering, a repetition of return – parallels the repeated sounding of similar

material. The search for the past is a repeated action of “returning again and again to the same

matter.”

Clementi’s repeating motives, purified into streams of letters and canonically permuted, are

in a sense “torsos severed from all earlier associations,” removed from familiar listening context of

tonal music. There is something objective, distanced about this presentation that can suggest the

atmosphere of a gallery collection. The severed torsos also echo the Romantic image of a ruin, a

return to incompleteness projecting outward. Treasure, hidden, asks for active effort, investment,

engagement.

Feldman, seeing Coptic textiles at the Louvre, wrote,

…what struck me about these fragments of colored cloth was how they conveyed an essential atmosphere of their civilization. Transferring this thought to another realm, I asked myself what aspects of music since Monteverdi might determine its atmosphere if heard two thousand years from now. For me, the analogy would be one of the instrumental imagery of Western music.26

***

Bleakness

Bleakness refers to the somber, unencouraging, and depressing. Beyond the

straightforwardly emotive meanings, a number of definitions relate the loss of color to loss of life.

Stemming from the Middle English for “pale,” there is a layer of reference to natural elements.

Bleak is “cold, cutting, raw,” “exposed to the elements; unsheltered and barren.” To bleak is to

bleach by exposure to light, to make livid with cold, and to blacken. In this last definition, bleakness

                                                                                                                         25 Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), quoted in Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 78. 26 Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, 201.

24

returns to the darkness of melancholy, which it might also echo in its measuring, intellectually

contemplative aspect.

Bleakness is cold, stripped, absolute. But unlike sadness and gloom, bleakness does not

appeal directly to feeling. Bleakness is beyond emotional construction, beyond feeling, with its

connotations of subjective uncertainty. It is the opposite of sentimentality. There is an objective

superiority to bleakness. Its utter hopelessness, unforgiving, unrelenting quality parallels that of

nature. Bleakness is unencumbered by human inhibition and sentimental consideration.

Bleakness represents something of a return to the objectivity of the Baroque doctrine of

affections, as an embodiment of an objective state, but without the construct of the soul. Bleakness

might be an affect describing the general condition of a depersonalized environment, independent

of personal ego or influence.

In some ways, Clementi might seem the opposite of this characterization – carillons,

childhood instruments and small ringing objects are not explicitly cold, cutting, or raw. The

materials and techniques are not in themselves explicitly shocking or extreme – they are modest,

traditional in outlook. The sound world of Madrigale teems with material, the opposite of barren.

However, there is a coldness in their proliferation that comes to result in bleakness. The

music is unresponsive to its situation. The narrowness of the process is cutting in its precision. The

coldness, like that of Xenakis, is the coldness of un-listening indifference to sonic detail. It is the

opposite of Brahms’ sucking melancholy from ritardandos – bleakness is a freedom from sensual

influence through loyal fulfillment of the larger structure of visual, spatial or scientific metaphor. In

this approach there is an indifference to the feeling of listening, to the experience of sound.

Clementi describes his own technique after 1961, influenced by informal abstraction in

painting:

The need to avoid hearing individual intervals or any other detail, and to wipe out any type of articulation led towards a sort of static

25

attention to material (materismo), achieved by a close-knit counterpoint around a cluster that provided a pan-chromatic continuum, blotting out the perception of individual movements within it…

After 1966, he describes his counterpoint as “more optical-illusory than material.” Clementi’s

described goals are negative: to avoid hearing intervals “or any other detail,” “wiping out”

articulation, “blotting out” individual movements. The quality of disappearing into density

maintains.

***

No breathing

Starker depths of bleakness arise in music for sustaining instruments. In Clementi’s

Impromptu (1989) for clarinet and string quartet, melancholy, stretched to its extreme, stops breathing.

Breath provides phrase demarcation and space for consideration. As a metaphor for vitality,

breathing brings new air to a living body. What is lost in this music is the possibility of newness, of

meaningful, substantive change or invention.

The autumnal instrumentation of clarinet and string quartet – as well as the shapes of lines –

recall late Brahms. Timbres are warm, but their accumulation is smothering. The music feels as if

slowly asphyxiating. At the level of phrase construction, breathing time is absent. Figures overlap

without silences to mark their borders. Traditional phrases and forms venture and return. This

music has discarded any sense of trajectory, and with that, the release of arrival. Without trajectory,

the music settles into a state of continually unresolved tension. There is a claustrophobic

crowdedness, a closed, trapped feeling. Density is overwhelms, obstructs of comprehension or

perception of detail. The beginnings of an exposed melodic line suggest the initial possibility of

following a voice. This resemblance to a line issues an invitation to follow with specific attention –

but the invitation is simultaneously negated by the crowding of other lines around it. The number

26

and identity of string instruments is never entirely clear. Their materials are too closely intertwined

to allow for analysis.

There is something negative about its construction – not an active self-violence (as might be

exemplified by pointillist explosions of line) – but a passive sinking into a toxic swamp. The past

clings. Its specter haunts the landscape of listening, hovering close, circling, slipping continually

from the ear’s grasp. Loss is constant, and all the more existential for its being achieved through

proliferation. This is the making of longing for orientation.

The clarinet in this situation is the only voice with timbral distinction. However, its

movement is slower than that of the strings. The distribution of instruments might suggest a

melody-accompaniment relationship, but the more discernable clarinet lags behind, reluctant to take

initiative or attention. The strings, sul ponticello, sit timbrally more forward – the effect is an

impression of greater numbers, pressing, unsteady, unstable. The melody is continually searching,

never resolved. Other music retaining the rhetoric of the past can shift attention through motion,

gesture, textural change. Here, however, there is not enough change to distract from the stagnating

impenetrability. No one plays clearly together, but no one plays clearly against another either. What

is lost is counterpoint, moments of alignment. Traditional canons are carefully constructed for

voices to resonate with and amplify one another at relevant moments. Clementi’s careful

construction is self-obliteration. The gradual slowing does allow for an opening of the texture, a

closer view of materials. However, the unchanging narrowness of their activity create an overall

effect of dissolution instead of expansion.

27

Aus Tiefer… (2004) for women’s choir and instruments (Luigi Nono in memoriam) follows a

similar pattern of self-erasure through repetition.27 On pages when the ensemble is sparser, the page

takes on the appearance of a Sapphic fragment (in section I). At other moments, the proliferation of

clearly identical material, aligned in a diagonal – takes on industrial connotation of machine

repetition – the lost fragment amplified into a mass-manufactured monument (IV).

The full instrumentation is 4 soprani, 4 mezzosoprani, 4 contralti, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, 3

clarinets, 3 horns, and organ. The ensemble is split into twelve pairs of singer-instrument

articulating the same theme at a close distance. The line is taken up in staggered pairs starting at

chromatic intervals – B-flat-A, G-flat-F, D-D-flat. Each of these lines is sung by a singer doubled

by an instrument, staggered to begin the line on the singer’s second note. The pairings precisely

obscure one another at regular intervals of time and pitch. There is a degree of objectivity to the

regularity and orderliness of their entry, the consistent intervals of copying, the palindromic larger

formal structure. Visually, materials are simple, and their layout conceptually transparent. Sonically,

the haze of Romantic atmosphere thickens with the degree of chromatic saturation. The gestures,

multiplied to overlaid density, suggest drowning, with its all-encompassing, immersive quality. The

sound is unbounded, its limits beyond what can be perceived or responded to.

In terms of readability, barlines are set between staves, suggesting a more open temporal

regulation than in standard notation, an allowance for small drifting, allegiance to the individual

horizontal line. In an ensemble of this size, however, local coordination may be possible, but the

number of staves and the similarity of different lines make it difficult to hear clearly how things fit

into the larger whole. The situation is exacerbated by giving identical lines to all instruments. There

are no separate functions or textures, save an organ interjection, a found object of four-part chorale

harmonization midway through the piece. Otherwise, everyone is playing the same thing. Clementi

                                                                                                                         27 Aldo Clementi, Aus Tiefer… per coro femminile e strumenti. Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2004. S. 12411 Z.

28

cultivates a musical myopia. There is a loneliness, a solitary quality to this music, despite its

plenitude. Many voices at once are still effectively alone. They cannot hear through to one another.

Emotional reference is explicit in the text from Psalm 130: “Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu

dir,/ Her Gott, erhör mein Rufen (In deep distress I cry to thee, / God, hear my call).” The

association of spiritual reflection – in the psalm text and organ fragment – is unavoidable – but the

tone uncertain, in this cry that replicates itself into disappearance.

***

The death of music Listening to Clementi, Griffiths hears a “deadly evenness,”28 Christopher Fox, a “non-

human chill…which deprives all hedonism of its right to existence.”29 Roger Smalley calls out a “a

morbid interest in the process of decay” in “atmosphere of impotence and collapse…” on “a record

for the necrophiliac,” for which “repeated listening has failed to reveal more than a flicker of life in

the corpse.”30 Clementi’s own assessment of his task is similar, but purposefully bleak:

Music (and Art in general) must simply have the humble task of describing its own End, or at the very least, its slow dying out… [Each work is] a finely-wrought compound made from microscopic, jumbled details, an aimless continuum…an extremely dense counterpoint, relegating the parts to the shameful role of inaudible, cadaverous micro-oganisms…31

The work must be carefully, skillfully crafted, but its results “aimless,” “shameful,” “inaudible,”

“cadaverous.” Its finely-wrought details are consigned to imperceptibility. There is no purpose, no

larger governing property than its own slow self-digestion. Why?

Clementi himself sees his own position in music history with an air of resignment to

predetermination:

                                                                                                                         28 Paul Griffiths, “Italian,” The Musical Times 129, no. 1742 (1988), p.193. 29 Christopher Fox, “Huddersfield Festival 1985,” Tempo, New Series, No. 156 (Mar., 1986), pp. 35-37. 30 Roger Smalley, “Review,” The Musical Times, Vol. 113, No. 1555 (Sep., 1972), 877. 31 Aldo Clementi, “A Commentary on My Own Music,” transl. D. Osmond-smith, Contact23 (1981), 4.

29

… the march of events must express only itself: great fluctuations only obstruct it. They are the residual caricature of a senseless dialectic… The end germinates naturally from saturation and fatigue, but it is never definitive: through a desolate familiarity we suddenly fall into the infinite and eternal.32

Feldman echoes the sentiment: “… everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it.”33 On

the contemporary position, he writes:

Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.”34

Music has run out of possibilities – or the possibilities are no longer relevant. Despite an open mind,

loss abounds. The future holds no promise or potential. There is only obsessive recirculation of

present materials. Feldman identifies a backwards motion, comparing music to “some extraordinary

athletic feat”:

Think of a runner trained to run backward at great speeds, or what is even more difficult, to run backward very slowly and steadily. Why backward? Since music is increasingly obsessed with this one idea – variation – one must always be looking back at one’s material for implications to go on.

Slow, steady and backwards might describe the music of both Feldman and Clementi. The

imperative to always be looking back suggests a contemporary position of loss, tied to the workings

of the tradition.

To David Osmond-Smith, a sociological explanation of Clementi’s bleakness is the advent of

sound recording, which accounts for the decline of amateur music-making and its culture of deep

first-hand involvement, replaced by passive consumption.35 Historically, the development of

nostalgia coincided with Romanticism as well as the birth of mass culture. Music recording allowed

                                                                                                                         32 Clementi, “A Commentary on My Own Music,” 4. 33 Feldman, 23. 34 Feldman, 30. 35 Osmond-Smith, 124.

30

for the repetition of the same in many contexts, doubling and confusion in proliferation. The

current situation of widespread instantaneous access and involuntary environmental reception

amplifies the disorientation and dislocation. Music is drowned out by the sound of itself.

Clementi’s methods might model Walter Benjamin’s description a mass-produced object losing its

aura of magical uniqueness of the handmade, unique ritual object.

*

Susan Stewart: “Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetitions

and denies the repetition's capacity to define identity.”

*

What has been lost in Clementi is the possibility of listening. Though both composers have

been described as composing textures, what separates Feldman from Clementi is the space to hear

variation, and the ever-present possibility of change. With Feldman, instruments and their specific

materials matter – the time they take to sound, the quality of their attack, sustain, decay – how long

it takes to get to the listener, as he recounts his orchestration lesson from Varése. Feldman’s love of

orchestration can be seen as a continuation of the Romantic expansion of instruments and

capabilities. Even the grid scores – which have the appearance of painterly distance, and the

objectivity of a grid, dealing with non- emotive points of sound even more distanced from melodic

line than intervals or Clementi’s phrase fragments – still maintain this attention to instrumental

timbre in its specificity. Timbre and a loose sense of its rate of change are the only parameters

mapped – but they are mapped – they take on shape. What is woven is a texture of subtly shifting

consistency.

Listening to music of the past, Feldman hears Webern’s image as “blurred, so almost

submerged in the cultural inundation that has engulfed it,” because of the quantity of music that has

imitated his. The history of music itself is a history of the cannibalization of the music of the past.

31

Discovering that the slow movement of Pierre Boulez’s first sonata mirrors the attacks of Webern,

he writes, “…isn’t that tradition, if we suck out the blood and the knowledge of the past, we are

going to get its strength.”36 However, Feldman does not consider Webern’s fate inevitable. Artists

like Josquin or della Francesca were not imitated.

…[T]hrough the centuries their work has never lost its intense focus on its own particular moment. It hasn’t grown old and finally dropped dead of culture. At the exact moment, probably before it was seen or heard by anyone else, the artist in some mysterious way embalmed it. When della Francesca painted the cross in the background, it had nothing to do with subjectivity, or objectivity – it was memory. There’s something almost a little scary about this kind of art. Other artists keep away. They don’t understand this ‘strange simplicity’ in relation to anything as dramatic as the Crucifixion. They leave it alone… intact.37

There is a magical quality of preserving its own privacy and uniqueness – proofing itself of imitation,

through the simple act of following memory, a private, internal past.

***

The beauty of bleakness – in its stance of independence from human reaction, resisting

communicative interaction with performers and listeners – may echo Hanslick’s position that music

is expressive solely by virtue of its form. Hanslick argued for abstracted, intellectualized aesthetic

pleasure, considering beauty independent of human emotion, and independent of the observer. In

the ideal of absolute music, beauty exists in the elegance of structures paralleling universal forms.

Absolute music, not to conforming to the practical limitations of the shapes of hands and or minds,

but expanding in private experience – maintains a purity of form, epitomizing what is possible

through the abstraction of notation.

***

                                                                                                                         36 Feldman, 172. 37 Feldman, 58.

32

Clementi’s dedications – to his teachers, collaborators, objects of inspiration – narrate his

relationship to the musical past. Clementi references traditional forms – Halleluja (Variazione sul

Corale), Berçeuse 2, Romanza, Rapsodia, Passacaglia 2, Intermezzo, Capriccio, Elegia, Prelude (Hommage à Ravel),

Cantabile, Adagio cantabile, Adagio, Duetto, Scherzo, Fantasia, Serenata, Tribute, Impromptu, Preludio, Sonatina,

Sonata – all the while subverting these forms, and any kind of formal orientation through his

unrelenting, saturating canonical maneuvers. Other titles make explicit his mode of operation:

B.A.C.H. (1970), GiAn(ca)rlo CarDini (1978), Variazioni su B.A.C.H. (1984), LuCiAno Berio (1995),

Fantasia su roBErto FABbriciAni (1980-81). Personal musical history, intertwined with its translation

into notes, is situated in context of a broader history of Western music.

Feldman makes a similar gesture in his tonally referential harmonies, idiomatic instrumental

writing, and acceptance of melodic line in The Viola in My Life (1970), whose title explicitly ties

personal recollection explicitly to musical history. Feldman’s many dedicatory titles attest to this

tradition. A list of titles might describe his biography to a surprising degree of detail: For Franz Kline

(1962), Christian Wolff in Cambridge (1963), De Kooning (1963), Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety

(1970), I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg (1971), For Frank O’Hara (1973), For Aaron Copland (1981),

For John Cage (1982), For Philip Guston (1984), For Bunita Marcus (1985), For Christian Wolff (1986), For

Stefan Wolpe (1986), For Samuel Beckett (1987). Longing, in a sense, is embodied already in the

preposition – for – whether a recognition of purpose, response, consideration, adaptation,

contribution, regard, respect, continuance, interest, or desire the word reaches, longs toward its

object.

***

For: in order to save, in order to become, with the purpose of reaching, since.

Objects of longing: friends, muses, musics present or departed.

33

Sources Books Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Feldman, Morton. Give My Regards to Eighth Street, ed. B.H. Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000). Articles Bailie, Joanna. “Aldo Clementi and the art of ‘writing the same piece over and over again,’” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 2001. Clementi, Aldo. “A Commentary on My Own Music,” transl. D. Osmond-smith, Contact23 (1981), p.4. Fanning, David. “Recent Italian Music,” Music and Letters (1983). Fox, Christopher. “Huddersfield Festival 1985,” Tempo, New Series, No. 156 (Mar., 1986), pp. 35-37. Griffiths, Paul. “Italian,” The Musical Times 129, no. 1742 (1988), p.193. Osmond-Smith, David. “Temps perdu : Aldo Clementi and the eclipse of music as praxis,” in The modernist legacy : essays on new music, ed. Bjorn Heile (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). Smalley, Roger. “Review,” The Musical Times, Vol. 113, No. 1555 (Sep., 1972), 877. Web Marc Sabat, “Feldman's Composition for violin (1984): Extended Just Intonation in interpretative practice,” New Music Box, Published: April 30, 2005, http://newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=4210 Scores Clementi, Aldo. Aus Tiefer… Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 2004. S. 12411 Z. Clementi, Aldo. Cantilena 2, Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1997. S. 11226 Z. Clementi, Aldo Concerto per pianoforte ventiquattro strumenti e carillons, Milano: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1975.