Aspects of Performance Practice in Morton Feldman's Last Pieces

Abstract

Morton Feldman’s Last Pieces for piano solo of 1959 poses an interesting interpretive problem for the performer. As in many Feldman compositions of the 1950s and 60s, the first movement of the work is notated as a series of "sound events" to be played by the performer choosing the durations for each event. The only tempo indications are "Slow. Soft. Durations are free." This situation is complicated by Feldman’s remark about a similar work from 1960, "[I chose] intervals that seemed to erase or cancel out each sound as soon as we hear the next." I interpret this intension to keep the piece fresh and appealing from sound to sound. So, how the pianist supposed to play Last Pieces in order to supplement the composers desire for a sound to "cancel out" preceding sounds? To answer this question, I propose a way of assessing the salience of each sound event in the first movement of Last Pieces, using various means of associating each of its 43 sound events according chord spacing, register, center pitch and bandwidth, pitch intervals, pitch-classes, set-class, and figured bass. From this data, one has an idea about how to perform the work to minimize similarity relations between adjacent pairs of sound events so that they can have the cancelling effect the composer desired. As a secondary result of this analysis, many cohesive compositional relations come to light even if the work was composed "intuitively".