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Morton Feldman's 80-minute late masterpiece, performed by Joseph Branciforte [the cellar and point] on piano and an all-star string quartet: Christopher Otto [JACK Quartet], Pauline Kim Harris [String Noise], John Pickford Richards [JACK Quartet], and Mariel Roberts [Mivos Quartet].
Written two years before his death in 1987, Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet is a shimmering, pristine musical event. Contrasting widely-spaced piano arpeggios with extended chords, Feldman allows lingering sounds from either the piano or the strings to haze over many of the piece's near-silences. By the time Feldman composed this piece, he was deeply committed to extended works--chamber pieces that could telescope motifs and worry their tonality so that it warbled between hauntingly atonal and familiarly tonal singing. This is a powerful, evening piece, one that can set an extravagantly crystalline musical mood.
Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was an American composer born in New York City. A major figure in 20th-century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration.
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LocationSpectrum NYC (View)
121 Ludlow St
Manhattan, NY 10002
United States
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