Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman's String Quartet II and Triadic Memories

Abstract

I. String Quartet II In the summer of 1996, the Kronos Quartet was scheduled to present Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II (1983) at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. The performance was being promoted as the centerpiece of a much larger Feldman tribute and retrospective that was to go on for several days. Feldman’s legendary quartet had never before been given in its entirety, which, if faithfully done would last, uninterrupted, around six hours. Shorter versions had been performed in the 1980s—in Toronto, in Darmstadt—abridged by Feldman himself to fit specific programs, or to accommodate the pleas of musicians, but the composition in all its intended dimension had not been heard. Like a well-concealed object, the complete string quartet’s non-performance seemed only to heighten the anticipation and the uniqueness of the upcoming event, the silence surrounding this monumental piece contributing to its growing aura. No one had heard it, and yet much had been heard about it. More than any other contemporary composer, Feldman over the years had become known for the length of so many of his pieces, their extreme duration seen as both a compositional strategy and a recognizable signature statement of his late work. Asked about it, he would sometimes cryptically justify the unusual length of his music as his way of adding “a little drama” to the work, or that he was “tired of the bourgeois audience” and their conventional expectations, or, more seriously perhaps, he would quote Varese’s comment that people “don’t understand how long it takes for a sound to speak” (Give My Regards 44). And though much of Feldman’s music of the late 1970s and 1980s ranged from one hour to four (breaking what he saw as the stale durational mold of