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Morton Feldman: Intersection for magnetic tape (1953)

From the album First Recordings: The 1950s

Among the composers of the postwar avant-garde, a dividing line can be drawn between those who saw electronic sound production as an essential aspect of the new music and those who, after some experiments, more or less dismissed it. The former group was likely the larger of the two, including composers such as Cage, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Xenakis, but the electro-skeptics were a formidable bunch, including in their numbers Berio, Ligeti, and Boulez. (Berio and Ligeti, of course, made substantial contributions to the genre around 1960, but soon moved on; Boulez produced an early Etude, then dismissed electronic music, only to return as an advocate of “live electronics” when he became director of IRCAM in the early 1980s.)

Another major modernist composer of the second half of the century who eschewed electronics was Morton Feldman. Feldman’s lone effort in this domain was created under the influence of John Cage, who initiated a “Project for Magnetic Tape” in 1952. The score for Intersections consisted of eight channels of graphically notated spans of tape length in which a certain number of sound events are directed to take place. The sounds themselves were chosen by Cage and Earle Brown, so the piece can be seen as a kind of collective composition which reflects the aesthetics of the group rather than that of any one person.

Feldman later said he “loathed” the sound of electronic music, and compared it to neon lights and plastic paint, but this piece is an important part of the history of tape-based composition in the so-called New York School in the early 1950s. Along with Cage’s Williams Mix, Christian Wolff’s For Magnetic Tape (both 1952), and Brown’s Octet (1953), Feldman’s foray into electronic music illuminates a distinctive approach to the medium that stands alongside the simultaneous European schools as well as the better-known American efforts of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. All the tape compositions produced in the Cage circle have in common a slapdash texture, projecting a flurry of disparate sonic fragments with disorienting, cartoonish rapidity. This is especially striking in light of Feldman’s later music, which would abandon all radical contrast in pursuit of a monolithic and slowly shifting sound-field.

[Note: if you are in the Philadelphia area or within travelling distance, check out American Sublime, a festival of Feldman’s rarely-performed late works taking place in Philly until June 12.]

June 07, 2011, 12:16pm