For Frank O'Hara: Morton Feldman's Three Voices as Interpretation and Elegy

Abstract

Morton Feldman’s 1982 Three Voices, a large concert work for solo voice that takes its textual materials from Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem ‘Wind’, is perhaps the most unusual musical setting of a poem in the history of the genre. Lasting anywhere from forty-five to ninety minutes in performance, Three Voices is composed for three equivalent and otherwise unaccompanied musical ‘voices’. Probably the longest work in the Western concert tradition for unaccompanied solo voice, the work appears in score as three staves of unidentified single musical lines. In its original performance, soprano Joan La Barbara sings one of the work’s musical lines, while accompanied by the work’s remaining two musical lines, which are played back by two synchronised tapes of her voice through two loudspeakers that are placed visibly onstage on either side of the live performer. The work is a trio for one, and its text consists mainly of vocalise, open vowels without semantic content that are sung in an extensive variety of small rhythmical and melodic cells. Some of these cells are diatonic, some chromatic, often shifting, in Feldman’s signature style, in asymmetrical and subtly changing rhythmic dislocations. At key junctures, however, and increasingly throughout the work, the text consists of repeated fragments from the O’Hara poem. Two disjunct and fragmentary lines (‘Who’d have thought/ that snow falls’) and, for a brief period about two thirds through the work, the phrase ‘nothing ever fell’, constitute the sole text of this massive exploration of voice.1 The audacity of Three Voices as both a concert work and as a textual setting, as well as the aesthetic and personal associations between