Straightening The Record: Morton Feldman's Return To Graph Music

Twentieth-Century Music
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Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman's Return to

Graph Music
DAVID CLINE
Twentieth-Century Music / Volume 10 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 59 - 90

DOI: 10.1017/S1478572212000412, Published online: 27 March 2013
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1478572212000412
How to cite this article:

DAVID CLINE (2013). Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman's Return to Graph Music.
Twentieth-Century Music, 10, pp 59-90 doi:10.1017/S1478572212000412
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Twentieth-Century Music 10/1, 59–90 8 Cambridge University Press, 2013
doi:10.1017/S1478572212000412
Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to

Graph Music
DAVID CLINE
Abstract
Morton Feldman composed his first works on graph paper in 1950–53, but he subsequently abandoned graph
music, before taking it up again in 1958 at a time of rapidly increasing interest in musical indeterminacy and
graphic notations in the United States and Europe. Feldman’s return to graph music was a turning point in his
career that would affect his subsequent output for almost a decade, but his principal surviving account of this
change in his musical direction, which appeared in liner notes for an LP record, is misleading. This article
presents a revised account that highlights a previously undocumented and atypical graph work that was used
by John Cage to derive the graph now known as Ixion. In addition, it reveals links between Feldman’s composi-
tional ideas and those of Henry Cowell, explains how Robert Rauschenberg inadvertently affected the sound of
Feldman’s graph music for several years, and clarifies Feldman’s response to problems he encountered in
performances of his graph music.
Morton Feldman’s output in the 1950s and 60s included groundbreaking works that were
composed and presented in an original notation on graph paper. Feldman was one of the
first composers to present finished works on graph paper, and his earliest graphs seem to
have been the very first examples, in modern musical history, of finished works for pitched
instruments in which pitches were not specified. They may also represent only the second
sustained attempt in the modern era, after Henry Cowell’s ‘elastic’ works for dance, to
introduce substantial indeterminacy into a group of musical works.1
Feldman’s graphs also deserve attention because they exerted a significant influence on
the development of modern music. They greatly affected composers closely associated with
Feldman, especially John Cage and Earle Brown, who would go on to become leading pro-
ponents of the use of graphic notations and indeterminacy in musical works.2 Given this
and their striking visual appearances, it is right to see Feldman’s graphs – and not Cowell’s
elastic works, which were more conventionally notated – as the ultimate source of the spec-
tacular growth in interest among composers in graphic notations and indeterminacy that
flourished, especially in the United States and Europe, in the late 1950s and throughout
the 1960s.
The author gratefully acknowledges assistance given by C. F. Peters Corporation, the Earle Brown Music Founda-
tion, the Getty Research Institute, Northwestern University, and the Paul Sacher Stiftung.
1 Cowell produced his series of ‘elastic’ works for dance in the late 1930s. For a discussion see Miller, ‘Henry Cowell
and Modern Dance’, and the section of this article titled ‘The elastic form of Ixion* ’.
2 For their influence on Cage and Brown see Anthony Brown, ‘An Interview with John Cage’, 29.
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60 Cline Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to Graph Music
There are other reasons for interest in these graph works within the narrower field of
Feldman studies. In terms of sheer numbers, the fact that the graphs represent approxi-
mately one-eighth of Feldman’s currently published output means that a comprehensive
understanding of his music as a whole is impossible without a detailed account of them.
Also, his early aesthetic views are more clearly in action in them than elsewhere in his
output, and his tendency to switch between using graph notation and other formats in the
1950s and 60s is a notable aspect of his development as a composer that demands an
explanation.
It is more than just the paper Feldman used that connects the graphs with one another
and makes it natural to view the resulting works as a single series, even though they were
produced, sometimes only occasionally, over an extended period between 1950 and 1967.3
Feldman’s graphs are all indeterminate, in that they do not specify in detail some of those
parameters that tend to be prescribed most exactly in traditional works of Western classical
music, and they are his only indeterminate works in which pitch is not fully notated.
A striking aspect of Feldman’s graph series is that it is punctuated by a lengthy period of
more than four years, which stretched from the end of 1953 until the autumn of 1958, in
which no graphs were composed. This period is unlike the gaps between other graphs in the
series, not only because it is longer, but also because Feldman subsequently characterized it
as connected with a temporary loss of faith in the efficacy of his graph format. In his most
important surviving statement about the course of the graph series in this period – written to
accompany the LP record Feldman–Brown, which was released in 1962 – Feldman described
how, after producing graph music for several years, he began to discover its ‘most important
flaw’, which was that it was ‘liberating the performer’ and encouraging an ‘art of improvisa-
tion’.4 The implication was that performers were not producing the type of sounds that he
had envisaged. Their efforts, he said, ‘sounded bad’, and this was why he had ‘abandoned’
this type of music and the graph notation in which he had presented it in 1953.5 However,
he went on to explain that, notwithstanding his previous reservations, he subsequently re-
turned to it in 1958. His account of the intervening years and his decision to resuscitate his
graph music was as follows:
Between 1953 and 1958 the graph was abandoned. I felt that if the means were to
be imprecise the result must be terribly clear. And I lacked that sense of clarity to
go on. I hoped to find it in precise notation, i.e. ‘Extensions for Three Pianos’ etc.
But precision did not work for me either. It was too one-dimensional. It was like
painting a picture where at some place there is always a horizon. Working precisely,
3 Feldman usually worked with a type of graph paper whose perpendicular sets of equally spaced horizontal and
vertical lines resulted in a coarse but uniform grid of squares. This grid is not visible in published editions of his
graph scores, which highlight the framework of cells and boxes that Feldman drew over sections of the printed grid.
4 Morton Feldman, ‘Liner Notes’, 59. These liner notes appear to have been published in the journal Kulchur shortly
before the release of the Feldman–Brown LP (see discography). Page references are to this earlier publication.
5 Feldman, ‘Liner Notes’, 59.
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Cline Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to Graph Music 61 |
one always had to generate the movement – there was still not enough plasticity for
me. I returned to the graph with two orchestral works. ‘Atlantis’ (1958) and ‘Out of
Last Pieces’ (1960), using now a more vertical structure where soloistic passages
would be at a minimum.6
This is Feldman’s principal surviving account of his decision to recommence composing
graph music, which was a turning point in his career that would impact his subsequent
output for almost a decade.7 Yet it is hardly perspicuous. What did he mean by suggesting
that the works he had previously composed in conventional notation lacked ‘plasticity’ and
that his newer graphs possessed ‘a more vertical structure’? Also, the account is incomplete
and at least partially inaccurate in ways not previously highlighted in the secondary litera-
ture. For example, it does not explain why he decided to resuscitate his graph format
instead of simply continuing to use his newer notations for fixed pitches and flexible dura-
tions, which he had begun working with in 1957,8 and which we know he regarded as
rhythmically superior.9 More surprisingly, it omits any mention of Ixion, a published graph
work for a large ensemble of three flutes, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, cellos,
and double basses, which is dated August 1958.10 A comparison between completion dates
given in Feldman’s graph scores suggests that it was this work, which was composed to
accompany Merce Cunningham’s dance Summerspace, that marked Feldman’s return to
graph notation in 1958 and not Atlantis, which was the earlier of the two graphs mentioned
in his 1962 liner notes and which was in fact completed in 1959.11
In addition to these failings, his account ignores the role the broader musical context may
have played in his decision. Although Feldman had previously ‘abandoned’ graph music,
the unusual presentation and indeterminate character of his graphs were precursors of the
escalating interest in musical indeterminacy and graphic notations in his circle of friends
and acquaintances in the mid-1950s. It is reasonable to suppose that this escalating interest
in a form of music that he had been influential in developing helped to foster in him a
renewed enthusiasm for his graphs at this time.
For example, 1957 saw première performances of some of the first indeterminate works
from Europe, with David Tudor – a friend of Feldman’s since the 1940s – giving the first
performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI at Carl Fischer Hall in New York
6 Feldman, ‘Liner Notes’, 59–60, with Feldman’s punctuation.

7 Feldman’s last surviving graph, In Search of an Orchestration for orchestra, was completed in 1967.
8 The first of his works with fixed pitches and flexible durations was Piece for Four Pianos, dated 1957.
9 Feldman criticized the rhythmic organization of his conventionally notated works and his graphs in a lecture delivered
in 1972. See Feldman, ‘Morton Feldman Slee Lecture’. For a discussion see the section of this article titled ‘Alternatives
to graph notation’.
10 Sebastian Claren (Neither, 82) notes that Ixion marked Feldman’s return to graph music and gives a brief description
of some of the work’s most important features. However, he does not refer to the deficiencies of Feldman’s 1962 liner
notes.
11 The score of Atlantis for large ensemble is dated 28 September 1959.

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City in April and Pierre Boulez giving the first performance of his own Troisième Sonate for
piano at the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in September.12 Also,
Christian Wolff, another friend of Feldman’s, who had previously experimented with in-
determinacy in 1950, returned to it decisively in 1957 with his Sonata for three pianos and
Duo for Pianists (I). The Sonata was premièred by Tudor, Cage, and William Masselos in
New York City in April, and this was followed by the first performance of Duo for Pianists
(I), given by Tudor and Cage at Harvard University in December.13
In addition to these developments, and no doubt connected with them, Cage’s own inter-
est in indeterminacy and graphic notations intensified at this time. He had previously in-
cluded elements of indeterminacy in his Music for Piano series and in the parts for the
open-ended work he referred to as ‘The Ten Thousand Things’, but his interest in using
graphic notations and including greater degrees of indeterminacy began to intensify in
1957, when he composed Winter Music for one to twenty pianos and began working on
Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which he completed the following year.14 This process
would culminate in Cage’s celebrated lecture on indeterminacy at Darmstadt in September
1958.15
The absence of any mention of these contextual factors in Feldman’s 1962 liner notes is
understandable, given its intended purpose as a device for promoting his own music. His
failure to explain why he resuscitated his graph format rather than simply continuing to
work with fixed pitches and flexible durations is explicable as an unintended oversight or
as precluded by limitations of space.16 However, the absence of any mention of Ixion in his
text is more difficult to explain. Early in 1960, after finishing Atlantis the previous autumn,
Feldman transcribed Ixion for two pianos,17 probably because Cunningham needed a
version of the music that would make performances of Summerspace outside New York
City commercially feasible.18 This derivative work, which is also presented in graph format,
is the only transcription that Feldman ever published. His failure to mention it, even though
12 In the ensuing months, Tudor and Boulez promoted both these works aggressively. For Tudor’s performances of
Klavierstück XI see Emmerik, ‘A John Cage Compendium’. For Boulez’s performances of his Troisième Sonate see
O’Hagan, ‘‘‘Trope’’ by Pierre Boulez’, 29.
13 For the premières of the Sonata for three pianos and Duo for Pianists (I) see ‘List of Works’, in Chase and Thomas
(eds), Changing the System, 220.
14 The solo piano part of Concert for Piano and Orchestra is dated 27 March 1958.
15 Cage, ‘Composition as Process: II Indeterminacy’. Cage’s lecture was the second of three he gave at the event. All
three were grouped under the title ‘Composition as Process’.
16 The suggestion of oversight fits with the fact that his notes appear to contain two overt errors: the date given for
Atlantis appears to be incorrect, as mentioned above, as is that given for . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’. Note that these dates
have been corrected by the editor in the version of Feldman’s article that appears in Give My Regards to Eighth Street.
17 The published edition of Ixion for two pianos is not dated. However, pre-publication versions bear the date 15
January 1960. All future references to ‘Ixion’ are to the earlier version for large ensemble unless otherwise stated.
18 Cage and Tudor were the two musicians that toured with Merce Cunningham at this time. See Brown, Chance and
Circumstance, 313. Their availability made a two-piano version of Ixion appear desirable.

it predated . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’, which he did mention, increases the extent of his over-
sight. It also marks out Ixion as special within his output; arguably, this makes it even less
likely to have been forgotten by him.19
The suggestion that Feldman regarded Ixion as of lesser importance than either Atlantis
or . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’ and therefore chose not to mention it in a brief synopsis of his
career is difficult to accept. The fact that he went to the trouble of transcribing it, the fact
that Ixion and the transcription of it were both published and not – like many other works
he completed – withheld, and the fact that there are many apparent similarities between
Ixion and Atlantis, both in terms of presentation of the score and sound in performance,
all suggest otherwise.
Yet another explanation, and the one favoured here, is that including Ixion would have
complicated his account of his return to graph music in ways he may not have had the
space or inclination to address. For the true story of his return to graph music, which
can be partially reconstructed through analysis of published and archival materials, is, as
this article will demonstrate, significantly more complex than Feldman’s 1962 liner notes
suggest.
This article aims to present a more accurate account of the factors that caused this
important change in Feldman’s direction in 1958 – one that explains why he acted as he
did and why, subsequently, he may have chosen not to highlight some of the contributory
elements. This account will reveal a previously undocumented graph that marked Feldman’s
true point of return to graph music, which was subsequently used by Cage, only a month
or so before he appeared at Darmstadt in 1958, to derive the published graph now known
as Ixion. This previously undocumented graph, some of whose properties can be inferred
from surviving materials, differed from those that have been published by being ‘elastic’ in
the sense of that term previously introduced by Cowell. This alternative history will also
explain how Robert Rauschenberg inadvertently affected the sound of Feldman’s later
graphs for several years, why Feldman subsequently likened Ixion to an ‘oilcloth’,20 and
why Ixion in its published form deviates from his other graphs in lacking any indication of
tempo and by including repeated or near-repeated groups of symbols. A concluding section
draws on this account and highlights unexpected areas of flexibility available to those
intending to perform Feldman’s music for Cunningham’s Summerspace.
19 Ixion for two pianos was premièred less than two weeks after the transcription was completed. Cage and Tudor are
listed as the performers in the programme booklet. See [Unsigned], Merce Cunningham and Dance Company of New
York, N.Y. According to David Vaughan, performances of Summerspace by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
in recent years have tended to be accompanied by a 1958 recorded performance of Ixion for two pianos by Cage and
Tudor. Ironically, this is because two pianists and two pianos have rarely been available in the theatres that the
company has played in (David Vaughan, email to author, 30 May 2008).
20 Orton and Bryars, ‘Studio International Interview’, 65.

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Alternatives to graph notation

In his 1962 liner notes Feldman explained that he returned to graph notation after experi-
encing difficulties while attempting to ‘generate the movement’ in his conventionally notated
works. This suggests that in 1958 he regarded his graphs as rhythmically superior to his
conventionally notated works from the immediately preceding period, but in what way?21
Evidently he was not thinking of his earliest graphs – his Projections – as in them entrances
and note durations are formally tied to a steady pulse. It is likely that he was thinking of
his subsequent Intersections, in which he introduced a bracket notation that allows the
performer to enter at any time within an indicated period.
However, it seems that Feldman was not entirely satisfied with this innovation. In a
lecture on his own music delivered in 1972, he explained the genesis of his methods of
notating flexible durations for sounds with precisely specified pitches, which emerged in
1957, and suggested that his dissatisfaction with the rhythmic organization of his earlier works
extended not only to those that were conventionally notated but also to his Intersections:
In 1950 I began writing a music that gave the choice of pitches to the performer.
[. . .] His rhythmic possibilities were pretty much controlled. What I want to em-
phasise is that my conception of time was still very much limited [. . .] very much
related to a steady beat or pulse. The directions to the player told him to enter
either on the beat, represented by a box, or off the beat. The metronome markings
were consistent throughout each of these compositions. This aspect of my graph
music always disturbed me. I couldn’t understand, and still can’t, how I could
give up all control of pitch and not the rhythmic frame that it takes place in.22
He went on to explain that the perceived problem with rhythmic aspects of conventionally
notated music and his Intersections was
that the rhythmic placement of my sounds never seemed just right. It was years
later that I realised that it was [. . .] this aspect of trying to set something into a
steady pulse which seemed so contradictory to the music I was writing.23
Feldman’s position is probably best understood in terms of a perceived inability to antici-
pate, to the extent that he wished, aspects of the morphology of actual sounds in perfor-
mance, which he termed their ‘shape’ or ‘proportions’.24 His aim was to create a natural
sense of flow or movement, which he once referred to as ‘the breathing of the sound itself ’,
21 These include Piano Piece 1956 A and Piano Piece 1956 B.

22 Feldman, ‘Morton Feldman Slee Lecture’. Feldman’s description of the graphs as instructing the performer ‘to enter
either on the beat, represented by a box, or off the beat’ suggests that he perceived this deficiency as infecting the
Intersections as well as the Projections.
23 Feldman, ‘Morton Feldman Slee Lecture’.
24 For sound having its own ‘shape’ see Feldman, ‘. . .Out of ‘‘Last Pieces’’’, G. For sound having ‘proportions’
see Feldman, ‘Vertical Thoughts’, 12, and Zimmermann, ‘Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter
Zimmermann’, 56.

by harnessing aspects of this morphology,25 but the difficulty he confronted was that the
properties he wished to harness are, in practice, unpredictable. This is because they depend
on contextual factors, such as the character of the instrument being played, the way in
which the performer plays the instrument, properties of the performing space, and prevail-
ing atmospheric conditions.
From this perspective, placing sounds relative to a regular pulse in conventional staff
notation – which, in his 1962 liner notes, he compared with the suffocating effect of tradi-
tional illusionistic methods of unifying an image by portraying spatial relationships within it
from a single viewpoint – was tantamount to force-fitting unpredictable, potentially irregular
elements into a contrived regularity, riding roughshod over aspects of their morphology
that he wished to harness in creating a natural sense of flow; it was in this sense that he
conceived of conventional notation as lacking what he termed ‘plasticity’ and forcing him
to ‘generate’ movement rather than to discover it in the sounds. Although Feldman re-
garded the bracket notation of the Intersections as superior, because it gave the performer a
limited degree of flexibility to mould aspects of rhythm during performance, his perspective
was that this was not enough. His reservation cannot have been that the performer is
required to sustain each sound until the end of the bracket in which it occurs, thereby
anchoring its endpoint to the beat, as this constraint was too easily relaxed. Instead, the
difficulty as he saw it was that the imposition of a pulse transformed the grid into a temporal
framework that was simply too rigid to accommodate unpredictable, potentially irregular
elements.
The solution favoured by Feldman in 1957 was to reduce substantially the precision with
which durations were specified in pieces with precisely notated pitches. Feldman said very
little in print about how this was supposed to help, but his idea seems to have been that
it would allow each individual performer to determine an appropriate rhythm during a
performance in view of the morphologies of sounds they were producing.26 If the performer
was sufficiently sensitive, then this would enable them to discover a natural sense of move-
ment of the type that he sought.
This assessment raises two questions about Feldman’s views at this time, neither of them
addressed in his surviving comments. One concerns the nature of the link that he envisaged
between morphology and movement in his works with precisely notated pitches and flexible
durations. Any satisfactory account of this link seems likely to connect it with Feldman’s
interest in the decay of sounds, which he emphasized in the 1960s.27 The account favoured
here is that the movement he sought was, in many cases, to derive from the periodic varia-
tion in the amplitude of a sequence of sounds from a single instrument, each of which is
allowed sufficient space for its decay to be, or begin being, heard when they are presented
25 For ‘the breathing of the sound itself ’ see Feldman, ‘Vertical Thoughts’, 13. Feldman suggested that sounds should
‘breathe’ in Zimmermann, ‘Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter Zimmermann’, 56.
26 This implies a degree of spontaneity in any appropriately sensitive performance, and this is confirmed in the follow-
ing remark about Four Instruments for chimes, piano, violin, and cello: ‘the actual duration between sounds is
determined at the moment of playing by the performer’. See Feldman, ‘Four Instruments’, 20.
27 For Feldman’s interest in the decay of sounds see Morton Feldman, ‘The Anxiety of Art’, 25.

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as a contiguous series. The amplitude of each individual sound begins low, rises to a maxi-
mum level, and subsequently fades away gradually. Consequently, a contiguous sequence of
such sounds generates an undulating envelope of sound, provided that each sound is given
sufficient space. It was these undulations, from low to high amplitude and gradually back
to low amplitude, which in many cases underpinned the natural sense of movement that
he was seeking. For example, this conception is implicit in the notes provided with many
of the works he produced in 1963, which generally included words to the effect that each
instrument should enter when the preceding sound begins to fade.
A second question is why Feldman decided to resuscitate graph notation given that he
appears to have had reservations at this time about its reliance on pulse. An alternative
would have been to continue using his newer notations for fixed pitches and flexible dura-
tions which, by the time he resuscitated the graph format in 1958, he had been working
with for approximately a year.
Probably Feldman was searching for a different kind of effect. In his works with fixed
pitches and flexible durations, in which instruments are usually encouraged to proceed at
their own pace after a synchronized start, he compared the sound he was aiming at to ‘a
series of reverberations from a common sound source’.28 In the graphs, by contrast, he
evidently aimed to produce works in which he could explore the superposition of timbres
in ways fully or partially controlled by him, without using conventional notation.
A desire to compose works for larger ensembles may have been another factor. Perhaps
Feldman was initially uncomfortable with the idea of applying his notations for fixed
pitches and flexible durations to larger instrumental combinations because he feared that
a proliferation of uncoordinated activity might produce an overly chaotic effect. All his
published works from 1957 to 1959 that use these notations are for small ensembles, and
he did not produce a work of this type for a larger configuration until 1960, when he com-
posed The Swallows of Salangan for chorus and chamber ensemble. By contrast, the graphs
he produced immediately after resuscitating the graph format are for large ensembles.
The Summerspace commission

As previously discussed, the explanation given by Feldman’s 1962 liner notes for his new
enthusiasm for his graphs in 1958 is incomplete. A pressing catalyst not mentioned was a
request from Cunningham for a composition to accompany a new dance production, now
known as Summerspace and regarded as one of the dancer and choreographer’s ‘signature’
works.29 Cunningham mentioned his initial conception of the dance and Feldman’s involve-
ment in the project to Rauschenberg, Cunningham’s set and costume designer since 1954, in
a letter dated 12 July 1958:
28 From the written notes that accompany his Structures for orchestra, which is dated 1960–62.
29 Feldman explained that Ixion was commissioned by Cunningham for Summerspace in the written notes that accom-
pany the published edition of the score. See also Claren, Neither, 82–3. For Summerspace as a ‘signature’ work, see
Vaughan, Merce Cunningham, 112.

I’m trying to get two pieces done for this-here Festival [. . .] one with new work, a
new intersection for orchestra by Morty. about 15 minutes long, seems to be doing
with people and velocities, at least a hell of a lot of it is on the fast side, four girls
and remy and myself, i have the feeling it’s like looking at part of an enormous
landscape and you can only see the action in this particular portion of it. i hope
it’s dazzling rather than willy-nilly.30
This request triggered Feldman’s return to graph music, for the work that he went on to
compose for Cunningham was Ixion, his first graph since 1953.31 Cunningham’s comment
that the dance would be ‘about 15 minutes long’ suggests another reason, in addition to
those explained in the previous section, why Feldman may have felt that music with fixed
pitches and flexible durations would be unsuitable for this project. His works with fixed
pitches and flexible durations are inherently of indeterminate length; consequently, they
cannot be tailored to fit a defined time span, meaning that it would have been necessary to
artificially curtail a performance in order to ensure that it ended simultaneously with the
dance. This left him to choose between using conventional notation, which he regarded as
rhythmically inadequate at this time, and graph notation, which, we have seen, he regarded
as rhythmically flawed but superior.
Perhaps it was Cunningham’s comment that ‘you can only see the action in this particular
portion of it’ that gave Rauschenberg the idea of camouflaging the dancers when they stopped
moving and which eventually led him to select the same pointillistic design consisting of a
dense array of luminous dots on a neutral background for the costumes and set, so that the
dancers would blend into the background, at least to some extent, when stationary.32 In
Rauschenberg’s words: ‘I wanted to work with the dancers and the movement as camou-
flage [. . .]. As they moved you could see them, but if they stopped you couldn’t.’33
In an interview conducted in 1976, Feldman explained that he learned of Rauschenberg’s
intended ‘pointillistic’ approach and decided to ‘melt into the décor’.34 His scheme was to
mirror Rauschenberg’s idea by producing what he would later describe as a ‘pointillistic’
score, a term that he would also use, subsequently, to describe the intended aural effect of
30 Cunningham, letter to Rauschenberg, 12 July 1958 (reproduced in Cunningham, Changes [no page no.]), with
Cunningham’s punctuation. The festival in question was the Eleventh American Dance Festival held at Connecticut
College, New London, Connecticut on 14–17 August 1958. The other dance referred to would come to be known as
Antic Meet. ‘Remy’ refers to Remy Charlip, one of Cunningham’s dancers at that time.
31 More precisely, the work he would go on to produce – which was probably named ‘Ixion’ – was subsequently used
to produce the work now known by that name. For a discussion see the section of this article titled ‘Evidence for
Ixion as descended from a predecessor work’.
32 For black and white photographs of Rauschenberg’s costumes from early performances of Summerspace, see
Vaughan, Merce Cunningham, 109–11, and Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 551. According to Jasper Johns, the
idea of the dots was his own, and Rauschenberg’s original idea was to paint flowers (Chance and Circumstance, 220).
33 Tracy, ‘a Summerspace for Merce’, 56.
34 Orton and Bryars, ‘Studio International Interview’, 65. See also Feldman, ‘Neither European Nor American’, 642–4.

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the music.35 The slowly unfolding lines of most of his music with fixed pitches and flexible
durations, which overlap one another in unpredictable ways, were evidently unsuited to
producing this type of sound, and this may have been yet another reason why he turned
instead to graph music.
Feldman’s method of achieving the desired effect using graph notation was to alter the
meaning previously ascribed to number symbols appearing in his graph scores, a move
that would have important repercussions on the sound of his subsequent graph music. In
the Projections and Intersections, numbers indicate the quantity of sounds to be produced
simultaneously. However, in his new graph Feldman used them to indicate the quantity of
sounds to be produced consecutively, permitting him to specify more than one sound in a
single ictus. This allowed a proliferation of shorter sounds within individual units of pulse
that had an evident affinity with Rauschenberg’s arrays of luminous dots. In the majority of
cases, numbers were used this way in his subsequent graphs.36 This would result in a pro-
liferation of attacks that was instrumental in producing a more scintillating sound.37
Although Cunningham’s initial conception of Summerspace was of a dance with a fixed
duration, his view of it appears to have evolved. For practical reasons, explained in the
following passage, his subsequent vision of Summerspace was of a dance with a duration
that might vary between performing spaces to a greater extent than he typically envisaged
for his dances:
in this dance, the lengths of time were enlarged. previous to this, the lengths of the
dances had been fixed in short time periods, one minute, 2½, up to 5 minutes, or
according to the musical phrase. here I decided to have a dance roughly 15 to 17
minutes long. the time has never been fixed closer than that. different size stages
make the lengths different, and extend or diminish the time. mr. feldman’s score
allows for this. if we did fix it to a length as being ‘what it should be,’ in trying to
reproduce this exact length on the next stage, we would be imitating and approxi-
mating something. i decided to let it be what it was each time.38
One aspect of the published edition of Ixion that differentiates it from Feldman’s other
published graphs is the absence in it of any indication of tempo, and it is tempting to
suppose that this was Feldman’s response to Cunningham’s request for music with an
35 For Feldman’s description of the score as ‘pointillistic’ see Orton and Bryars, ‘Studio International Interview’, 65.
For his description of the intended aural effect as ‘acoustical pointillism’ see Feldman, ‘Neither European Nor
American’, 642–4. The close affinity between the design of the set and the presentation of the music in this case is
somewhat at odds with Cunningham’s stated aim of bringing together dance, décor, and music that were otherwise
independent of one another and not based on common ideas. For Cunningham’s stated aim see Cunningham, The
Dancer and the Dance, 137.
36 Another important innovation in Feldman’s new graph was his use of general guidance about which register to play
in, which would be a norm from then onwards in his graph series. Instead of specifying the register (high, middle, or
low) of each individual sound, as he had in the Projections and most of the Intersections, Feldman specified that
all sounds were to be played in high registers, except in a brief section towards the middle of the piece, where low
registers were to be used.
37 Ironically, it also reduced the performers’ scope to adjust rhythmic aspects of their performance in response to
aspects of the morphologies of sounds being produced.
38 Cunningham, Changes [no page no.], with Cunningham’s punctuation.

adjustable span.39 Although Feldman may have resorted to this simple device when prepar-
ing the score for publication several years after the work was first performed, the suggestion
made here is that his initial response was more involved. In fact, some pre-publication
copies of the scores of Ixion and Ixion for two pianos circulated with a typed set of notes
that include tempo guidance that seems to have been deleted before publication. These
are matters taken up again in a later section of this article. Evidently, the issue of intended
tempo has a special importance in connection with the work that Feldman composed for
Cunningham, given that the music was to accompany a dance with a length that might vary.
Evidence for Ixion as descended from a predecessor work

A clearer picture of Feldman’s initial response to Cunningham’s request for music to
accompany his new dance production – and therefore his return to graph music – begins
to emerge from a study of a revealing, but previously unpublished, document that will be
referred to here as the ‘paperboard score’ of Ixion. This item, reproduced in Figure 1, is
now part of the John Cage Collection of Northwestern University Music Library.40 The
paperboard score is presented on a large sheet of paperboard, measuring 36cm by 72cm.
Graph notation has been glued onto the paperboard in two columns, one on each side of a
central fold, with each column containing six systems. Most of these are of similar length.
However, the system located at the bottom of the first column is much shorter. The organi-
zation of the paperboard score is shown schematically in Example 1, with each system labelled
for ease of reference in the following discussion.
Examination reveals that the paperboard score includes three different types of materials:
e Ten longer strips of graph paper (A–E, G–I, and L–M), which are fairly similar in length.
These strips contain numbers that are written in pencil in Feldman’s handwriting, and
they appear to have been carefully cut from larger pieces of graph paper. Faint traces of
numbers that are otherwise erased appear in some of these strips and are still legible in
many cases.
e Three shorter strips of graph paper (F, J, and K), which appear to have been torn from
one or more larger pieces of graph paper in an untidy manner. These also contain
numbers, but these numbers are written in black ink, with no corrections, and they are
not in Feldman’s handwriting. One of these shorter strips is the short system at the
bottom of the first column on the paperboard. The other two sit side by side and form
the fourth system in the second column.
e Markings of various types in black and red ink that appear to have been superposed on
and around the graph paper. Some of these markings, such as ‘Entrance’ and ‘Carolyn
Entrance’, clearly concern Cunningham’s dance while others,41 such as the labels that
indicate elapsed time every fifteen seconds, evidently concern Feldman’s music.
39 The written notes that accompany the published edition of the score state that ‘each box’ is ‘equal to MM or
thereabouts’.
40 Morton Feldman, Ixion, 1958. Series III, box 2, folder 1. John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music
Library.
41 ‘Carolyn’ refers to Carolyn Brown.

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Figure 1 Ixion, paperboard score. John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library. Reproduced by kind permission.

Example 1 Ixion, schematic diagram of paperboard score.
The ordering of the instrumental parts within each strip in the paperboard score differs
from that found in the grids of the published edition of Ixion. However, a comparison
reveals that the musical contents of the two are similar, and it is therefore likely that the
paperboard score is the original source of the published edition. The numbers that appear
in the paperboard score differ from those that appear in the published edition in relatively
few places.42 All these are explicable as copying errors; none of them involves what is evi-
dently a deliberate revision. The only substantial differences concern tempo and duration.
These are unspecified in the published edition, as previously mentioned. However, in the
paperboard score the given indications of elapsed time imply a total duration of fifteen
minutes and a range of tempos that differ between subsections. Some verbal guidance of
tempo within subsections (‘Slower’, ‘Faster’) is also given.
The provenance of the paperboard score is not described in the inventory of the John
Cage Collection of Northwestern University Music Library. However, the reference to Carolyn
Brown points to its having been worked on during rehearsals for the first performance of
Summerspace, which took place on 17 August 1958 at Connecticut College, New London,
Connecticut, and it is reasonable to assume that it was used by Cage when conducting the
work on that occasion.43
42 Numbers differ in eighteen cases, equivalent to 0.7 per cent of those found in the published edition of the score.
43 The records of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company indicate that Summerspace has tended to be performed with
the version of Feldman’s music for two pianos. Indeed, during Carolyn Brown’s tenure with the company, which
ended on 29 October 1972, they indicate that Summerspace was performed with the earlier version of Ixion only
twice: at the première and at the Phoenix Theatre, New York, on 16 February 1960. Although it cannot be ruled
out that the paperboard score was worked on in the run-up to the later performance at Phoenix Theatre, it seems
more likely that it was worked on in the rehearsals for the première. The date of Brown’s last performance with
the company is given in Vaughan, Merce Cunningham, 186. Cage is listed as conductor at the première in the
programme booklet. See [Unsigned], Eleventh American Dance Festival. Cage gave his celebrated lecture on indeter-
minacy at Darmstadt on 8 September 1958, less than a month later.

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Example 2 Ixion, published edition, sequence that occurs at ictuses 460–526 and 527–93, with repeated constituent elements highlighted. 6 Copyright 1962 by
C. F. Peters Corporation, New York. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Ltd, London.
Example 3 Ixion, published edition, sequence occurring at ictuses 594–611 and its near-repetition at ictuses 612–29, with difference highlighted. 6 Copyright
1962 by C. F. Peters Corporation, New York. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Ltd, London.

Example 4 Ixion, schematic diagram of published edition of the score showing locations of passages that
are repeated or near-repeated.
One aspect of the published edition of Ixion, which distinguishes it within Feldman’s
graph series, is that the score includes repeated or near-repeated passages. The first case
involves the exact repetition of a complex sequence of 254 symbols, spanning more than
two pages of the score, which is shown in Example 2. This sequence begins on page 12 at
ictus 460 and extends over sixty-seven ictuses to end on page 14 at ictus 526, and it is
immediately repeated, beginning at ictus 527.44 The second case involves the near-repetition
of a sequence of thirty-two symbols, which begins on page 15 at ictus 594, immediately after
the second occurrence of the passage shown in Example 2, and extends across eighteen
ictuses to end at ictus 611 on page 16. This sequence is immediately repeated from ictus
612, except that on its second occurrence one of the thirty-two symbols is omitted. Both
occurrences are shown in Example 3. The missing symbol is the number 2 in the top row
(allocated to one of the three flutes) that appears at ictus 609. This is not repeated at the
corresponding point in the restatement.45 The locations of these passages in the published
edition of the score are shown schematically in Example 4.
The two passages in the published edition that repeat, or near-repeat, immediately pre-
ceding material correspond to J–K and F in the paperboard score. J–K corresponds to the
second occurrence of the longer passage shown in Example 2, while F corresponds to the
near-repetition of the shorter passage shown twice in Example 3. J–K and F are the untidily
torn strips of graph paper containing numbers that are not in Feldman’s handwriting, and it
is likely that these were introduced at a different stage of the compositional process from the
other materials. An excerpt from K is shown in Figure 2 in order to highlight the hand-
writing. The unusual presentation of the number 7 in this excerpt, which features a short
but pronounced vertical line suspended from the left end of the horizontal element, is a
44 Each row is allocated to an instrument or instrument group. The allocation is in the following order (from top to
bottom): flute I; flute II; flute III; clarinet; horn; trumpet; trombone; piano; cellos; and double basses. Repeated
elements have been highlighted in grey.
45 In Example 3 this symbol and the location it would have appeared in if the passage in which it occurs had
been repeated without omissions have been highlighted in grey. Note that the allocation of rows to instruments in
Example 3 is the same as in Example 2.

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Figure 2 Ixion, paperboard score, excerpt. John Cage Collection, Northwestern University Music Library.
Reproduced by kind permission.
hallmark of Cage’s calligraphy.46 A similar presentation of the number 7 is found in the

published edition of Feldman’s Intersection 2 for piano, which is known to be in Cage’s
handwriting.47
Two of the added elements in the paperboard score, J and K, appear side by side and
form the fourth system in the second column of graph notation, as previously mentioned.
These exactly reproduce the numbers in the third system, I, in this column, suggesting that
Cage copied the third system in this column to produce the fourth.
The other added element, F, which appears at the bottom of the first column, exactly
reproduces the numbers at the start of the fifth system, L, in the second column. Given
that L probably followed on from I in Feldman’s original materials, it is likely that Cage
copied two adjacent sections of the grid from Feldman’s original materials, one of which
now makes up all of I and the other of which now makes up the beginning of L.
Although F is pasted at the base of the first column, annotations – also in Cage’s hand-
writing – indicate that it should be understood as appearing within L, immediately after the
section it reproduces.48 Consequently, the intended ordering of the materials in the paper-
board score is A to F, then G to the first part of L, then F, then the remainder of L to M.
Interestingly, the musical content of F does not differ from that of the material in the first
part of L, on which it is based, unlike the corresponding passage in the published edition,
which differs in one respect from the immediately preceding passage. Although it is possible
46 Cage usually added a short, transverse bar across the oblique element in the number 7 in the published editions of
his own scores.
47 Intersection 2 is dated August 1951. Various factors suggest that Cage recopied the score from Feldman’s original
manuscript (now apparently lost) towards the end of 1951. The re-copying exercise is described by Feldman in
Williams, ‘An Interview with Morton Feldman’, 153.
48 The annotations in question are an ascending series of Roman numerals with Arabic numerals as superscripts. The
reason why F was pasted away from its intended location is not clear.

that Feldman deliberately introduced a discrepancy when producing the copy of the score
he presented to C. F. Peters Corporation for publication, the omission may have been a
copying error, in which case an exact replica of the preceding passage was intended. In the
corresponding passage in Ixion for two pianos, which was transcribed from Ixion, the repe-
tition is exact. This suggests that the omission of one number in Ixion was indeed a copying
error.
These factors suggest that the paperboard score – the original source of the published
edition – was put together by Cage from Feldman’s original materials, and it is reasonable
to assume that the repetitions in Cage’s handwriting were introduced as extensions, intended
to lengthen the overall duration of the music. This implies that strictly speaking Cage was a
co-author of Ixion in its published form. Although it is possible that Cage used his own
initiative in lengthening the score that Feldman prepared for Cunningham, the concluding
section of this article will argue that this is unlikely. Probably Cage acted as he did because
the work that Feldman presented to Cunningham, which was in all likelihood named
‘Ixion’ but which will be referred to in this article as Ixion* to avoid any confusion with
the derivative graph that now bears that name, licensed him to do so.
An ‘oilcloth’ that could be shortened or lengthened

Although it is not known if Feldman’s instructions about how to lengthen the materials that
he presented to Cunningham were written or oral, or if he identified which sections were
repeatable, we can reasonably assume that eliminating Cage’s repetitions – which were
optional additions – will take us closer to the original core of Ixion*. The resulting form is
shown schematically in Example 5, which should be read from A to E, then G to I, and then
L to M.
Example 5 Ixion*, schematic diagram of possible core.
As a matter of fact, Example 5 may be identical with the original core of Ixion*, but this is
not certain. One possibility is that original material was discarded by Cage. Although this
would be consistent with small variations in the lengths of systems A–E, G–I, and L–M in
the paperboard score, it is unlikely that substantial cuts were made given that extensions –

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F, J, and K – were deemed to be necessary. Another possibility is that the intended ordering
of the ten systems in Ixion* was indeterminate, in which case their placement in Ixion may
be only one of many legitimate arrangements. This is difficult to rule out, but nothing
points unambiguously to them having been presented in a different order in the score of
Ixion*, which would have implied a subsequent rearrangement. Also, the material in M
has the character of an ending, which is where it is located in the paperboard score. The
density of indicated sounds rises steeply to a peak of 101 in its last ictus, far above levels
found elsewhere in this work, consistent with this being fashioned as a concluding climax.49
The first passage that Cage chose to repeat was shown in Example 2. A striking aspect of
it is that it contains four occurrences of one substantial group of symbols; these were high-
lighted in grey in Example 2. This element of repetition within the passage may have been
intended to signal that the section containing them could be duplicated if an extension of
the work were deemed necessary, although this would make it unclear why Cage repeated
the first half of Example 3. If so, then the three areas, of increasing length, towards the end
of the score in which the number 1 appears in every cell might also be a signal of a similar
type. These are shown in Example 6.50 A study of the paperboard score suggests that Cage
chose not to take advantage of any implied offer in their case.
There is an independent reason to think that Feldman intended these areas as expandable
and retractable. In 1976 he likened Ixion to an ‘oilcloth’ because it had ‘plenty of material
to work with, to either shorten or lengthen’.51 The significance of this remark for present
purposes lies in his description of Ixion as a work that can be made shorter as well as longer.
Perhaps he was thinking of the flexibility attributable to the absence of tempo guidance in
the published edition of the score when he made this remark but, if so, his reference to
there being ‘plenty of material to work with’ appears out of place. However, his remark
reads naturally if he was thinking of Ixion* and the fact that he had envisaged that certain
passages might be shortened or even excluded. If so, it is reasonable to assume that he
regarded the passages in Example 6 in which the number 1 appears in every cell in this
way. Although these passages occupy only thirty-eight ictuses in all, and would therefore
allow only a modest shortening of the whole, this facility would have been useful in fine-
tuning the total duration after replicating longer sections.
The elastic form of Ixion*

In his 1937 essay ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, Cowell proposed a closer alignment
between music and dance through the production of what he called ‘elastic forms’.52 His
idea was that a composer writing music to accompany a dance should produce a musical
49 In five of the ten instrumental parts (flute I, flute II, flute III, trumpet, and cello), the indicated numbers are higher
than those elsewhere in these parts. The indicated numbers in two other parts (horn and double basses) are as high
as any found elsewhere in them.
50 The allocation of rows to instruments in Example 6 is the same as in Examples 2 and 3.
52 Henry Cowell, ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, 229.

Cline Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to Graph Music 77
Example 6 Ixion, published edition, sequence that occurs at ictuses 628–78. 6 Copyright 1962 by C. F. Peters Corporation, New York. Reproduced by kind
permission of Peters Edition Ltd, London.
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composition that would have adjustable elements that could be altered in order to improve
its degree of fit with the dance.53 This would allow the music to be altered in response to
changes in the dance during rehearsals without entirely undermining its structure.54
Cowell went on, in the same article, to suggest several ideas for introducing this type
of elasticity. These included the use of melodic phrases or whole sections that could be
repeated, rearranged, expanded, contracted, or otherwise altered (within given limits).55
He also suggested the use of flexible instrumentations that would allow performances using
a variety of solo instruments and instrumental combinations.56 These ideas, which Cowell
applied in several works, had special utility for him given that at this time he was forced to
write music for dance at arm’s length. This was due to his incarceration in San Quentin
prison.57
Feldman’s method of dealing with Cunningham’s request to write music to accompany
Summerspace appears to be so similar to the one that Cowell recommended that one
wonders whether he had Cowell’s ideas in mind. There is reason to believe that Feldman
would have been familiar with Cowell’s thoughts on these matters. Cage, who had been
close to Feldman since early 1950, had known of Cowell’s innovations since the late 1930s,
and he would go on to write about them in 1959, the year after Summerspace was pre-
mièred.58 Feldman composed several works that would accompany dances in 1950–51,
making it probable that he and Cage would have discussed Cowell’s ideas in the early stages
of their friendship,59 and Cowell’s active support for their music at the time makes this even
more likely.60 Also, Feldman had been introduced to Cowell by Cage in the early 1950s and
Feldman remembered that they ‘talked for hours’ when they first met.61
The suggestion that Feldman may have had Cowell and his ideas on elastic form in mind
while he worked on Cunningham’s request is not intended to belittle the interest of
53 Cowell also suggested that a choreographer designing a dance to be accompanied by music should create a dance
composition with adjustable elements that can be altered in order to improve its degree of fit with the music. See
Cowell, ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, 229.
54 Cowell, ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, 227 and 229.
55 Cowell, ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, 230.
56 Cowell, ‘Relating Music and Concert Dance’, 230–31.
57 Cowell was incarcerated in 1936–42. For a discussion see Hicks, ‘The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell’.
58 For evidence that Cage knew of Cowell’s ideas about elastic form in 1938 see Miller, ‘Henry Cowell and John Cage’,
68. For Cage’s comments on Cowell’s ‘Elastic Musics’ see Cage, ‘History of Experimental Music in the United
States’, 71. Perhaps it was Feldman’s use of elastic form in Ixion* that stimulated Cage’s mention of Cowell’s ideas
in his article.
59 Feldman composed the unpublished work Three Dances for piano in 1950. Variations for piano and Nature Pieces
for piano, both of which were published after Feldman’s death, were composed in 1951 to accompany dances by
Cunningham and Jean Erdman respectively. On the origins of Variations and Nature Pieces see Straebel, ‘Morton
Feldman: Early Piano Pieces’, 60–62.
60 Cowell’s support manifested itself in a number of ways. For example, he published a detailed article about the music
of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Boulez in 1952. See Cowell, ‘Current Chronicle’, 123–36. In addition, he sometimes
introduced concert performances of their music around this time. See Cage, ‘History of Experimental Music in the
United States’, 71, and Perkins, ‘New School Recital’, 8.
61 For Feldman’s description of his first meeting with Cowell see Feldman, ‘Give My Regards to Eighth Street’, 94.

Feldman’s efforts or the associated music, but merely to suggest a significant point of con-
tact with a composer whose work his has rarely been associated with. Even if Feldman did
not know of Cowell’s ideas or did not remember them at the time, this article suggests that
the work that he produced to satisfy Cunningham’s request possessed the type of form –
elastic form – that Cowell had recommended.
Ixion* was not Feldman’s only work with elastic form. Northwestern University Music
Library has an unpublished score by Feldman for solo piano, written in conventional nota-
tion, which can also be elongated.62 This score is addressed to Cunningham, and a hand-
written note states that the first eight bars can be ‘play[ed] over as many times as needed’,
with Feldman adding that ‘For me 3 times sounds just right.’ The score is undated. Since
dated items by Feldman in the same collection stem from 1949 to 1964, it is not clear
whether it was composed before or after Ixion*.
Feldman had experimented with mobile works that prefigure aspects of Ixion* as early as
1953. In Intermission 6, for one or two pianos, any of the given sounds can be repeated any
number of times or omitted altogether, and a performance may, therefore, be of any length.
The fact that omissions and repetitions are permitted is, evidently, a point of contact with
Ixion* and Cowell, as is the fact that the durations of performances can vary markedly.
However, there are differences as well. For example, Intermission 6 gives no indication of
the ordering of sounds in performance, which implies formlessness, whereas all aspects of
form in Ixion*, other than the length of the expandable and contractable sections, are
assumed to have been specified.
Another area of difference concerns the manner in which Feldman expected performers
to select material. In the case of Intermission 6, it is likely that he originally envisaged per-
formers deciding which sounds to play spontaneously during the course of a performance,
thereby linking it with the culture of spontaneity that permeated contemporary American
art, and which Feldman so admired, at this time.63 Although there are no surviving indica-
tions about when Feldman intended additions to, or subtractions from, Ixion* to be made,
he must have intended them to be made before a performance, which was when Cowell
envisaged alterations being made to his works with elastic forms. There is no evidence of
the elaborate preparations that would have been needed to facilitate selections being made
in a coordinated fashion within a large ensemble as a performance progresses. Earle Brown
established a workable method of doing so in his Available Forms 1 for orchestra, which is
dated July 1961, three years after Ixion* was completed. This work uses a large movable
arrow on a placard displaying numbers to communicate decisions made by the conductor
during a performance to the orchestra.
62 Morton Feldman, Untitled ‘tune’ for Merce Cunningham, n.d. Series II, folder D-167. John Cage Collection, North-
western University Music Library.
63 An early version of the score of Intermission 6, which is part of the Morton Feldman Collection at the Paul Sacher
Stiftung, includes the note ‘This piece is just the outline of becoming.’ Another, which is among the David Tudor
Papers at the Getty Research Institute, includes the similar statement that ‘This piece is just the outlines of becom-
ing.’ Feldman’s reference to ‘becoming’ in both may have been connected with his assumption that performers
would decide which sounds to play spontaneously.

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Cage’s tempo changes for Ixion

In a previous section it was noted that some pre-publication copies of the score of Ixion
and the subsequent transcription of Ixion for two pianos appear to have circulated with a
set of notes that differ from those with the published edition. How these fit into the preced-
ing account is an outstanding question.64 Whereas the set of notes that accompanies the
published edition does not specify tempo, the pre-publication set specifies two different
scenarios. One is explained like this:
Numbers indicate the amount of sounds to be played on or within the box, each
box being equal to MM92 or thereabouts.
An ‘alternative’ scenario, described as the ‘John Cage tempo changes’, gives verbal indica-
tions of tempo in each of thirteen subdivisions of the work as follows:
Moderato
V 2 Slower
I 4 Moderato
I 5 Slower
V 5 Faster
IV 6 Slower on second measure
V 6 Lento at second measure at ‘low’
III 7 Slightly faster at ‘high’
II 8 Fast
V 8 Faster
III 12 Suddenly slow
II13 Accelerando on second measure
III13 Fast to end65
The fact that the John Cage tempo changes are attributed to Cage suggests that they did
not reflect Feldman’s initial conception of tempo. Nevertheless, it is probable that they were
used in the first performance of Ixion in August 1958. Several of them are marked on
the paperboard score and all are marked on the two surviving instrumental parts that were
prepared by Cage for the first performance.66 It is tempting to suppose that they were intro-
duced at Cunningham’s request in order to underpin changes in the tempo of the associated
dance. However, Carolyn Brown, who danced in the 1958 première, has stated categorically
that changes of rhythm in the dance are unrelated to Feldman’s music.67
There are several puzzling aspects of this alternative set of notes. One is the suggested
steady pace of approximately 92 ictuses per minute, which is surprisingly fast given the
64 This alternative set of notes is reproduced in Cunningham, Changes.

65 The Roman numerals with Arabic numerals as superscripts in this list refer to specific locations in the score that are
similarly labelled.
66 Morton Feldman, instrumental parts for Ixion, not dated. Series III, box 2, folder 1. John Cage Collection, North-
western University Music Library.
67 Brown, ‘Summerspace: Three Revivals’, 75.

music’s intended purpose of accompanying Cunningham’s dance.68 At a tempo of 92 ictuses

per minute, the 745 ictuses of Ixion would extend only a little over eight minutes, but per-
formances of Summerspace are considerably longer than this. For example, timings marked
on the paperboard score suggest that the first performance lasted fifteen minutes, as previ-
ously mentioned; this is consistent with Cunningham’s initial conception of the dance, set
out in his letter to Rauschenberg, as ‘about 15 minutes long’ and his more mature vision of
the dance as ‘roughly 15 to 17 minutes long’.69 A 1999 recorded performance lasts a little
over twenty minutes.70
One possibility is that 92 ictuses per minute was the intended tempo if the work were to
be played on a stand-alone basis, although why Feldman would have wished it to be played
faster without Cunningham’s dance is not clear. A more probable scenario, and the one
favoured here, is that 92 ictuses per minute was the tempo originally intended for Ixion*,
in which case Feldman may have anticipated a greater number of legitimate repetitions
than were actually used in creating Ixion. If so, this raises the subsidiary question of why a
smaller-than-intended number came to be used. The most likely explanation is that members
of the ensemble that played at the première were incapable of performing the work at the
indicated pace, necessitating the use of a slower tempo and a smaller-than-intended number
of repetitions.
This explanation is credible. With a tempo of 92 ictuses per minute, Ixion is a challenging
work to perform, with performers regularly asked to produce large numbers of consecutive
sounds within single ictuses each lasting only 0.65 seconds. The extent of the difficulty is
evident from a review of the maximum number of consecutive sounds specified within an
ictus in each instrumental part, shown in Table 1. Although Feldman indicated in the notes
with the published edition how most of the performers should respond if they proved
unable to play the indicated number of consecutive sounds in the designated span, it is
difficult to believe he intended these get-out clauses to be exercised frequently in an opti-
mum performance.
An examination of the tempos recommended by Feldman in the four graphs for larger
ensembles composed after Ixion lends additional weight to the view that he originally in-
tended the materials he prepared for Cunningham to be played at a tempo of 92 ictuses
per minute and with a greater number of repetitions than Cage included. As shown in
Table 2, tempos indicated in three of these works are close to, or identical with, this rate.
Another puzzle is why the alternative set of notes was subsequently not included with
the published edition of Ixion.71 Perhaps Feldman became increasingly uncomfortable with
68 Orton and Bryars suggested that Ixion has a tempo of ‘approximately MM92’. See Orton and Bryars, ‘Studio Inter-
national Interview’, 65. This suggestion also appears in Claren, Neither, 82. These suggestions may have been based
on the indications given in the set of typed notes currently under discussion.
69 Tempo varies between 16 and 80 ictuses per minute, with approximately two-thirds of the work (measured in
ictuses) played at tempos between 40 and 60 ictuses per minute.
70 See Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Robert Rauschenberg Collaborations – Three Films by Charles Atlas, DVD,
ARTPIX, 2011. I have not been able to uncover evidence of a performance that was shorter than fifteen minutes.
71 I have been unable to find any mention of a revision in Feldman’s surviving correspondence with Peters, which
suggests that the change was made prior to publication.

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Table 1 Ixion, published edition, maximum number of consecutive sounds per ictus, by
instrument.
Instrument(s) Maximum number of

consecutive sounds per ictus
Flute I 12
Flute II 14
Flute III 19
Clarinet 12
Horn 8
Trumpet 11
Trombone 9
Piano 24
Cellos 12
Double basses 7
Table 2 Indicated tempos in published editions of graphs for larger ensembles composed
after Ixion.
Year dated Work Tempo (ictuses per minute)

1959 Atlantis 92
1961 . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’ 80
1961 The Straits of Magellan 88
1967 In Search of an Orchestration 88 or a little faster
the John Cage tempo changes. The fact that he labelled them as Cage’s is consistent with the
thought that he wished to distance himself from them, and there is independent reason to
think that this was likely. This is because they appear contrary to the spirit of Feldman’s
graph music, in which the proportional character of the graph notation was evidently in-
tended to facilitate a more transparent link with the associated music than is typically found
in music presented in more conventional notation.
Remedying graph notation

In his 1962 liner notes, Feldman explained that he had returned to graph music ‘with two
orchestral works [. . .] using now a more vertical structure where soloistic passages would
be at a minimum’. This description of Atlantis and . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’ appears to have
been presented as giving his solution to the difficulties that he had experienced in per-
formances of some of his graphs composed before he temporarily broke with graph music
in 1953. Elsewhere he made clear his view that the choices made by some performers of

these earlier graphs were merely formulaic, reflecting conditioned responses or remembered
sequences.72
This account of his solution to the difficulties he had previously encountered is too terse
to be satisfying. Evidently he saw himself as having responded by composing in what he re-
ferred to as a more ‘vertical’ fashion and thereby keeping what he termed ‘soloistic passages’
to a minimum, but what did he mean by these claims? In a lecture hosted by Dore Ashton
that was given in the run-up to several performances of . . .Out of ‘Last Pieces’ by the New
York Philharmonic Orchestra in early 1964, Feldman spoke extensively about his graph
music and was more forthcoming:
I no longer would have the areas this long. The areas became much shorter. Every-
thing was more compressed. And we always had the orchestra en masse; we never
had soloistic situations.73
It seems that Feldman saw himself as having responded to the problems that he had pre-
viously experienced on three connected fronts: by minimizing the presence of intended
continuities in the works themselves; by curtailing the freedom given to performers to inject
unwanted continuities in performance; and by reducing the probability that any unwanted
continuities that they inject are heard.
There can be no doubt that Feldman’s more ‘vertical’ method of composing involved
an intensified focus on the internal organization of groups of sounds within single ictuses
and that by focusing his efforts in this way, within individual columns of his grids, he saw
himself as minimizing the risk of inherent soloism – in the form of intended continuities –
in his own thinking and therefore in the works themselves. Ensuring that intended con-
tinuities were not present in them would, he felt, make certain that his efforts did nothing
to encourage performers to insert continuities of their own making.
Probably this was only one aspect of his method of reducing the risk of unwanted
continuities being inserted. Another aspect of his method was to avoid soloism of the
type made possible by allocating long stretches of continuous play to single instruments. In
doing so, his idea was to purposely limit the performer’s scope to forcibly inject conditioned
or remembered sequences. Judicious placement of columns of numbers relative to one
another in his grids would evidently assist him in achieving this aim, given his ‘vertical’
method of working.
If both these aspects failed, his last line of defence was to avoid soloism in the form of
unaccompanied playing. This would reduce the audible impact of a particular instrument
injecting formulaic selections by locating its sounds in close proximity to those of other
instruments.74 Evidently this aspect of his response was closely connected with his ‘vertical’
method of working, which tended to deploy several numbers within single columns in his
72 See, for example, Gagne and Caras, ‘Soundpieces Interview’, 91.

73 See Morton Feldman and Dore Ashton, ‘American Music Series: Interview no. 248 a–d’, 9.
74 This second aspect of Feldman’s response is mentioned in Claren, Neither, 82.

|
grids and therefore a proliferation of activity within individual ictuses.75 Example 7, which
shows an extract from page 6 of Atlantis, illustrates these ideas. In this extract Feldman’s
compositional approach was patently ‘vertical’ in the sense of being focused on individual
columns. These columns were evidently conceived of as units, and there is little in this
passage to suggest any inherent soloism in Feldman’s own thinking. The relative placement
of the columns ensures that they are well demarcated and emphasizes their individuality, but
it also ensures that individual instruments are only rarely permitted to play in consecutive
ictuses, thereby reducing the scope for soloism in the form of continuous play. The fact that
most of the vertical groups contain several numbers, and therefore require activity from
several instruments, evidently reduces the scope for soloism in the form of unaccompanied
playing.
Example 7 Atlantis, published edition, ictuses 196–213. 6 Copyright 1962 by C. F. Peters Corporation,
New York. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Ltd, London.
With these thoughts in mind, it is significant that music rehearsals for the first performance
of Summerspace do not seem to have proceeded smoothly. In interviews, Earle Brown recalled
being present when Feldman interrupted proceedings in order to criticize a performer for
75 Evidently, Feldman’s response would not have concealed a coordinated infringement of his intentions by several
performers. For a description of a performance of one of Feldman’s graphs involving a problem of this type, see
Wolff, ‘In a Kind of No-Man’s Land’, 254.

playing pitches that he disliked, even though they were consistent with the indications given
in the score.76 The implication is that the performer’s selections were not masked by
concurrent sounds and that Feldman’s solution to the problem of performers making un-
desirable choices was either not fully formed in Ixion* and Ixion or not entirely successful.
In fact, Feldman’s solution does not seem to have been fully formed in Ixion, as performers
are regularly required to play throughout extended periods and are sometimes entirely un-
accompanied or accompanied by very few other members of the ensemble. The passage
highlighted in Example 3 is a case in point, in which the clarinet and trombone are both
required to play long sequences of consecutive sounds, sometimes simultaneously with one
another and at other times unaccompanied. Even if Feldman originally conceived of this
passage ‘vertically’, as a succession of single columns or ictuses of activity, each conceived
individually, the use of only two instruments and the placement of columns adjacent to
one another leaves scope for the performers to forcibly inject conditioned or remembered
sequences and for them to be heard.
This suggests another possible explanation of why Feldman decided not to refer to Ixion
in his account of his return to graph music in his 1962 liner notes, namely that he did not
regard his emerging response to performance-related problems with his graphs as suffi-
ciently well developed within it. However, there are several factors that argue against this
explanation. In fact, there are many places in Atlantis in which Feldman’s compositional
approach is less patently ‘vertical’ than in Example 7. Also, in this work the piano is
required to play unaccompanied throughout several extended periods. Perhaps Feldman
saw the performance-related risks as limited, at least in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as
the piano part was almost certainly written for Tudor, who had by then been performing
Feldman’s graph music for many years and must have known what Feldman expected.77
Nevertheless, this aspect of Atlantis leaves the work itself inherently susceptible to the same
types of problem in performance that had beset some of his earlier graphs, including Ixion.
These are not the only performance-related risks in Atlantis. Feldman’s liking for numbers
higher than 2 could also be seen as inviting trouble. Except in the piano part, numbers are
used to indicate the quantity of consecutive sounds that the performer should play within
the given ictus, meaning that the inclusion of higher numbers could allow a performer to
inject ingrained or remembered sound sequences even within a single unit of pulse.78 This
was a continuing legacy of Rauschenberg’s influence. In the event of performance-related
difficulties of this type, the only line of defence offered by Feldman’s work is that they will
be made less audible by concurrent sounds from other performers, but there are many
places in which instruments are required to play several sounds within a single ictus un-
76 See, for example, Cohen, interview with Brown, 24 May 1983.

77 Tudor is listed as the pianist in the programme booklet for the première. See [Unsigned], Music In Our Time: 1900–
1960.
78 Feldman’s written notes with the score imply that numbers in the piano part differ in meaning from those that
appear elsewhere in the score.

|
accompanied by other instruments. Evidently, this risk is also present in performances of

Ixion.
Arguably, Feldman’s response to this problem only began to emerge in . . .Out of ‘Last
Pieces’. In this work the number 1 is used more frequently in the score than in Ixion
and Atlantis, and several new symbols designating single notes or chords were introduced,
thereby reducing the ease with which undesirable sequences of notes could be inserted by a
performer within an ictus. Although this constrained the maximum number of consecutive
sounds that each instrument could produce per ictus, the resulting sound remains pointil-
listic in some passages, with Feldman apparently compensating for the effect of the con-
straint by using the significantly expanded scale of the ensemble in this work to specify
simultaneous activity from a larger number of instruments.
In fact, this evolution of Feldman’s graph music would continue after the 1962 liner
notes were issued, with the process culminating in his last graph, In Search of an Orchestra-
tion, in which the vast majority of sounds indicated are single notes or chords. Feldman
himself explained his strategy in In Search of an Orchestration in picturesque fashion in a
letter to Earle Brown dated 16 June 1967:
it’s a more complex ‘Out of Last Pieces’ with no passage – single notes – long or
short [. . .] No crawling up and down those little ole white and black notes for us!!79
Implications for performers

This article has argued that Feldman’s principal surviving account of his decision to recom-
mence composing graph music in 1958, which appears in his 1962 liner notes, is mis-
leading. It has presented an alternative history that suggests that Feldman’s efforts at this
turning point in his career were shaped by a complex array of factors, which included not
only his dissatisfaction with conventionally notated music at this time and with performances
of his earlier graphs, but also the influence of Cage, Cowell, Cunningham, Rauschenberg,
and, perhaps, the prevailing musical context.
Central to this alternative history is the assumption that Cage used Ixion* as Feldman
intended it to be used, to derive a performable work with an appropriate duration, but at
least some of the evidence is consistent with the theory that Cage used his own initiative in
cannibalizing the materials that Feldman prepared for Cunningham – contrary to Feldman’s
intentions – in order to produce a work with the desired span. This would provide a straight-
forward explanation of why Ixion was not mentioned in Feldman’s 1962 liner notes: the
work was not mentioned because Feldman was embarrassed by the circumstances that
gave rise to it. It is also consistent with the fact that he went on to publish it nevertheless,
as we can reasonably assume that he would have felt a duty to Cunningham to do so.
79 Feldman, letter to Brown, 16 June 1967.

However, this theory leaves important questions unanswered. For example, why did
Feldman prepare materials that appear so short with the tempo guidance of 92 ictuses per
minute specified in the pre-publication set of notes? If a slower tempo was originally envisaged,
why did he subsequently single out 92 ictuses per minute as an appropriate rate? And why,
years later, did he suggest that he had provided Cunningham with ‘plenty of material to
work with, to either shorten or lengthen’?
The alternative account outlined in previous sections of this article, which presents both
Cage and Ixion in a considerably more favourable light, provides credible answers to these
questions and is therefore to be preferred. It too can explain why Feldman declined to refer
to Ixion in his account of his return to graph music in his 1962 liner notes. One possibility
is that he may have regarded the chain of events that gave rise to Ixion in its currently
published form as too complex for outlining in a short summary of his career. Another
possibility is that, at the time of writing his 1962 liner notes, he may not have decided
whether to present his music for Summerspace in published form as Ixion or as Ixion*.80
Why did Feldman choose not to recreate Ixion* for publication? Undoubtedly, it was
different in type from other graphs that he published in that, unlike them, it was designed
to give others the means to construct a range of performable works of varying lengths.
Although the unspecified tempo of Ixion marks it out as different from Feldman’s other
graphs, indeterminacy of tempo is not only more common in Western classical music in
general but it is also commonplace in Feldman’s works with fixed pitches and flexible dura-
tions, meaning that Ixion fits more neatly with the rest of his published output. This may
have been a factor in its eventual promotion over its less characteristic parent.
Another possibility is that Feldman’s confidence in the utility of Ixion* was undermined
by the inability of the performers at the première to play the work at the originally intended
speed. If so, then he may have come to see that a sufficient degree of indeterminacy of
overall duration could be obtained without resurrecting Ixion* – by taking the derivative
work that had been produced from it, with the extensions added by Cage, allowing the
performers to select a tempo that was much slower than he had originally envisaged, and
accepting a less scintillating sound than he had originally intended.
The account of Feldman’s return to graph music outlined in this article may be of interest
to those intending to perform Feldman’s music for Summerspace. This is because it implies
that those performing Ixion* can legitimately tamper with Ixion in certain ways. This will
not result in a performance of Ixion but it may still count as a performance of Ixion*. This
80 In a letter to Earle Brown, dated 29 September 1961, Alfred Frankenstein, who had previously been commissioned
to write liner notes for the LP Feldman–Brown, referred to a ‘very remarkable’ text that he had received from
Feldman, which Frankenstein described as ‘a contribution of considerable importance to the history of modern
music in America’. In the same letter Frankenstein recommended that Feldman’s text ‘should be published intact’,
under Feldman’s name, as liner notes to the LP. He also suggested that Brown should prepare a similar set of notes,
so that he could withdraw from the project altogether, and the LP duly appeared with liner notes by Feldman and
Brown. See Frankenstein, letter to Brown, 29 September 1961. This letter indicates that Feldman drafted his liner
notes before he signed a publishing contract with Peters in February 1962.

|
is provided that the performers do not alter Ixion in ways that transgress the limits originally
set by Feldman. While these limits are not known for certain, three interpretative strategies
are likely to be consistent with them. These are the elimination of Cage’s repetitions, the
inclusion of additional repetitions identical in kind to those that Cage introduced, and the
expansion and contraction of the areas in Example 6 in which the number 1 appears in
every cell. The first strategy is likely to be within the limits set by Feldman because it prob-
ably takes us closer to the original core of Ixion*, as previously discussed. The second
strategy is likely to be consistent with the limits he set because it duplicates repetitions that
Feldman licensed. This strategy would be undermined if Feldman’s instructions with Ixion*
had limited the number of legitimate repetitions to those included by Cage, but we have no
good reason to think that this is likely.
A previous section mentioned that performances of Cunningham’s dance sometimes last
longer than twenty minutes. Performing Ixion for this length of time would involve playing
it at a steady tempo of less than 40 ictuses per minute, resulting in a less scintillating sound
than that produced by playing it more quickly. Reverting to the precursor work from which
it was derived and expanding its length by adding and, if necessary, subtracting elements in
the ways suggested above is a method of producing scintillating music of longer duration
consistent with Feldman’s original intentions without slowing it down.
The importance of the issue of tempo for the resulting sound is evident from a brief
review of two currently available recordings of Ixion for two pianos. A 2002 recording by
Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson is played at a steady tempo of around 100 ictuses per
minute and has a total duration of approximately 70 3000 , while a 1958 recording by Cage
and Tudor, which appears to be the one used by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
to accompany its performances of Summerspace in recent years, is played at a variable, but
consistently much slower, tempo, and this version lasts a little over 200 . This difference and
the more frequent recourse to playing chords in Cage and Tudor’s version mean that their
1958 performance lacks the sparkling energy that characterizes the performance by Scholz
and Persson. In view of Rauschenberg’s dazzling costumes and set and Feldman’s previously
noted aim to ‘melt into the décor’, it is reasonable to suppose that this sparkling energy is
the effect that Feldman originally envisaged.81
Discography
Feldman, Morton. Ixion. Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson (pianos). Morton Feldman: Complete Works for Two
Pianists. CD, Alice Musik Production ALCD 024, 2002.
——. Ixion. John Cage and David Tudor (pianos). Music for Merce (1952–2009), vol. 2. CD, New World Records
NW-80712, 2010.
——, and Earle Brown. Feldman–Brown. (Feldman, Durations I–IV; Brown, Music for Violin, Cello, and Piano;
Music for Cello and Piano; Hodograph I ). LP, Time/Mainstream MS/5007, 1962.
Bibliography
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Brown, Carolyn. ‘Summerspace: Three Revivals’. Dance Research Journal 34/1 (2002), 74–82.

——. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
Cage, John. ‘History of Experimental Music in the United States’ (1959), in Cage, Silence. 67–75.
——. ‘Composition as Process: II Indeterminacy’ (1961), in Cage, Silence. 35–40.
——. Silence: Lectures and Writings, 5th edn. London: Marion Boyars, 1999.
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2010.
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Dick Higgins. New York: McPherson, 2001. 223–31.
——. ‘Current Chronicle’. Musical Quarterly 38/1 (1952), 123–36.
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——. The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. New York and
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Regards to Eighth Street. 3–7.
——. ‘Vertical Thoughts’ (1963), in Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street. 12–14.
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Lincoln Center, New York, 6–9 February 1964, G.
——. ‘Four Instruments’ (1965), in Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street. 20.
——. Autograph letter to Earle Brown, Paris, 16 June 1967. Earle Brown Foundation, Rye, NY.
——. ‘Give My Regards to Eighth Street’ (1971), in Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street. 93–101.
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of New York’. <http://library.buffalo.edu/music/spcoll/feldman/mfslee315.html> (accessed 5 September 2012).
——. ‘The Anxiety of Art’ (1973, dated 1965), in Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street. 21–32.
——. Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman. Cambridge,
MA: Exact Change, 2000.
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2006.
——. ‘Neither European Nor American: Conversation with Konrad Boehmer, 2 July 1987’, in Morton Feldman in
Middelburg: Words on Music, ed. Raoul Mörchen. Cologne: MusikTexte, 2008. 634–705.
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Ashton: place, date not given’. Oral History of American Music, Yale University Library.
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New York City. Morton Feldman Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung.
Gagne, Cole, and Tracy Caras. ‘Soundpieces Interview, Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras, 17 August 1980’ (1982), in
Feldman, Morton Feldman Says. 87–94.
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92–119.
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1–24.
——. ‘Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1941’. Journal of the American Musicological
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(1976), in Feldman, Morton Feldman Says. 63–73.
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Vaughan. New York: Aperture, 1997.

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234–77.
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Straightening The Record: Morton Feldman's Return To Graph Music

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Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman's Return to

Twentieth-Century Music / Volume 10 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 59 - 90

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Straightening the Record: Morton Feldman’s Return to

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6 Feldman, ‘Liner Notes’, 59–60, with Feldman’s punctuation.

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Alternatives to graph notation

21 These include Piano Piece 1956 A and Piano Piece 1956 B.

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The Summerspace commission

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Evidence for Ixion as descended from a predecessor work

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Example 1 Ixion, schematic diagram of paperboard score.

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hallmark of Cage’s calligraphy.46 A similar presentation of the number 7 is found in the

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An ‘oilcloth’ that could be shortened or lengthened

Example 5 Ixion*, schematic diagram of possible core.

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The elastic form of Ixion*

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Cage’s tempo changes for Ixion

64 This alternative set of notes is reproduced in Cunningham, Changes.

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music’s intended purpose of accompanying Cunningham’s dance.68 At a tempo of 92 ictuses

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Instrument(s) Maximum number of

Year dated Work Tempo (ictuses per minute)

Remedying graph notation

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72 See, for example, Gagne and Caras, ‘Soundpieces Interview’, 91.

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76 See, for example, Cohen, interview with Brown, 24 May 1983.

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accompanied by other instruments. Evidently, this risk is also present in performances of

Implications for performers

79 Feldman, letter to Brown, 16 June 1967.

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81 Orton and Bryars, ‘Studio International Interview’, 65.

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