Morton Feldman: Bass Clarinet and Percussion

Performed by Zeitgeist in 2016 during Early Music Festival: The Music of Morton Feldman. Heather Barringer & Patti Cudd, percussion; Pat O’Keefe, woodwinds.

Zeitgeist’s 2016 Early Music Festival explored the powerful contributions of our musical pioneers with a celebration of composer Morton Feldman. One of the 20th century’s great visionaries, Feldman’s innovations in music notation and his free-flowing indeterminate music embraced new artistic possibilities and made a lasting impact that continues to shape new music today. 

As a group of musicians dedicated to the music of our time, Zeitgeist knows the most meaningful expressions of today are informed by the musical contributions of yesterday. The annual Early Music Festival honors that artistic debt with performances of influential and rarely-heard works by 20th century masters.

A major figure in 20th-century music, Morton Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, 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.