Morton Feldman: One Whose Reality Is Acoustic

Abstract

As friends and I entered the Whitney Museum (Sunday, 6/25/78) to see the remarkable Steinberg exhibition -particularly the March-April series and The Real Table-then rode upstairs to find a substitutive Rothko on display, presentiment led me to discover, in painting whose images speak, the poetic reserve: a pleasure to record. Comparing construction (the historical aspect) to surfaces (the poetry) in a work, Morton Feldman often mentioned Rothko so I searched the pink, orange, and blue field: the crucial unseen figure there appears... Moved by Cezanne's Sainte-Victoire, the composer once evoked neutral visionary space -through which, with greater and greater freedom, everything comes forward in the series work-that exceeds the difference, classically speaking, presences form between backand foreground. Musical events Feldman moves away from, drawn to what Rothko had said about image-disclosure: darker tones work to slow down formation of objects, withhold their approach; near death, like Rothko, Mozart measured subtle disappearance... And so, same night, listening to series he wrote as tryout (at the piano, no conceptions, just play), Feldman's face burst from a death mask into smile where color frames acoustic reality to say: There's a Rothko edge.*