MORTON FELDMAN : For Bunita Marcus (Hildegard Kleeb) (1994) Hat NOW Series | Two Version | APE + FLAC (image+.tracks+.cue), lossless

This piano work, composed near the end of Feldman's life, is perhaps his signature composition for the instrument, and reveals his truly original method of opening up time and space by restricting the movement of sound within them. As Feldman grew older and his compositions became longer (for example, the 4 CD-long "For Philip Guston"), his obsession with the space between sounds (how long it took to hear one before another was introduced) became a driving force in his work. It moved him to constrain the palette he wrote from, in this case to contain only two pitches (C sharp and D), and within these two pitches, an equally restrictive and systematic sequence of meters (alternating 3/8, 5/16). Add to this his direction to the pianist to push the keys just enough to make the slightest sound (ppp), and directions to the listener to playback at very low volume, and you have a very small world to peer into.

The paradox is what emerges from this tiny space, played out over an hour. Time and space drop away. Inside the intervals where notes are played, and chords are built in miniature, is the role that silence itself plays, where it becomes the biggest presence in the work. Pianist Hildegard Kleeb understands these methods instinctually; there isn't so much as an extra nuance here. Her ability to exercise the tension and restraint in performing such a lengthy work creates for the listener an endless expanse. For Bunita Marcus reveals Feldman thinking not only of musical forms, but also of memory forms, in which memory is formed as a relationship, not of the fragment to the whole, but rather, from fragment remembered as fragment to the next, unto the entire work. While Feldman would make time "disappear" into his works, his intent here is not so much putting weight on time itself, but on time as a visual analogy of structure and duration. With For Bunita Marcus, he has created a memory system in which lapses are freely accepted, because resolution doesn't happen within a structured piece of music, but in the memory of silence itself. 
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MORTON FELDMAN (1926-1987)
1-3.    For Bunita Marcus (1985)    (1:11:41)
Piano – Hildegard Kleeb