Theory IV

Homework #6

Listen to (at least) the first 15 minutes of Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet.
My suggestion would be to listen first without the score, and then listen a second time with the score
(provided in the youtube video). Then answer the following questions:

1) For much of the work, there are two categories of musical notation notably absent from the score.
What are they, and why might Feldman have left them out (for the most part)?

2) With the distinction between phenomenological (felt) and chronological (measured) time in
mind, find and define (in a sentence or three for each) at least 6 places in the piece (these can either
be small details or short sections or longer sections) which present distinct temporal phenomena.

Imagine that you are writing a paper about this piece or about Feldman’s music in general, and want to
create a taxonomy of ‘temporal manipulation techniques’ (TMTs) for you to reference. Each ‘place’
must display a distinct ‘TMT’, but it’s OK if some TMTs are actually combinations of other ‘TMT’s, so
long as that combination creates a distinctive effect. Feel free to inter-relate these ‘TMT’s as you go, and
also to speculate how they might relate to other aspects of the music — form, harmony, texture,
orchestration, etc.

Here’s an example: The detail of the rippling squiggly arpeggio notation in the piano effects the way time
is felt in that it softens or blurs the starting boundary of the measure it occurs in. This perhaps helps to
ensure that a listener will not hear the opening bars of the work as ‘measured’ in time — more as an
undefined gesture than a trackable pulse.

You can use the arpeggio as one of your 6, so long as you expand on what I’ve said here (perhaps
regarding how the arpeggio squiggly is used differently at different points, or how it might relate to the
texture/orchestration.)