Allover Method and Holism in Morton Feldman's Graphs

Abstract

ALLOVER METHOD AND HOLISM IN MORTON FELDMAN’S GRAPHS DAVID CLINE THE ALLOVER METHOD N HIS 1981 ESSAY “CRIPPLED SYMMETRY,” Feldman looked back on his early works on graph paper and suggested a parallel between the method he had used in composing them and Jackson Pollock’s method of painting: I realize now how much the musical ideas I had in 1951 paralleled his mode of working. Pollock placed his canvas on the ground and painted as he walked around it. I put sheets of graph paper on the wall; each sheet framed the same time duration and was, in effect, a visual rhythmic structure. What resembled Pollock was my “allover” approach to the time-canvas. Rather than the usual leftto -right passage across the page, the horizontal squares of the I Allover Method and Holism in Morton Feldman's Graphs 57 graph paper represented the tempo—with each box equal to a preestablished ictus; and the vertical squares were the instrumentation of the composition.1 In this passage, Feldman drew attention to an aspect of his own technique that he referred to as “allover.” This term is typically used by art critics to refer to the absence of identifiable points of emphasis in some paintings, including many of Pollock’s most famous works.2 However, Feldman was evidently alluding to an aspect of Pollock’s method and not to a property of the paintings that he produced. What he seems to have had in mind was Pollock’s tendency from the mid-forties onwards to roam freely around, over, and occasionally on his canvases, which were placed on the floor, as he painted.3 In describing his own compositional technique in the graphs as allover, I believe that Feldman was alluding to the fact that their gridbased structure—which he predefined—gave him greater freedom of movement within the score, when composing, than was normally available when working with more conventional notation at that time. For example, in one place, he referred to his ability to carry out what he called a “retrograde of action” in the graphs,4 and by this he probably meant an ability to move right to left on the page during the compositional process. Before the advent of computer technology, this mobility was more difficult to achieve using conventional notation as its bar-based structure was not typically predefined, meaning that the pattern of notes tended to be built up, from left to right across the page, in the order in which the notes were to be played. I believe that the ability to carry out a retrograde of action was only one aspect of the allover approach that Feldman nurtured in his earliest graphs and which eventually gave him total mobility along the horizontal and vertical axes of his grids. Once perfected, this approach allowed him to drop symbols in any order, anywhere in the grid or grids on which he was working, with each symbol selected, from the first to the last, capable of being placed in any previously unoccupied location. The opening of Projection 1 for solo cello, Feldman’s first surviving graph, dated 1950, is shown in Example 1. Three kinds of sound are specified—harmonic (“◊”), pizzicato (“P”), and arco (“A”)—and, in each case, the presence of a sound is indicated by a square or rectangular symbol in a horizontal line of boxes. Register is given as “high,” “middle,” or “low” by the vertical position of the symbol within its line of boxes whereas the onset, duration, and end point of the sound are indicated by the location of the symbol relative to the horizontal axis and the symbol’s width, with the width of each box set 58 Perspectives of New Music equal to four ictuses at 72 ictuses per minute “or thereabouts.” Each line of boxes is incomplete, but the internal organization of each line and their juxtaposition against one another implies that complete lines are implicitly present. This notation is underpinned by a grid of squares that is invisible in the published edition of the score—from which Example 1 is taken— but which informs what is visible on each page. This is the grid of...