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FifePsy
FifePsy
540 posts

Re: Feldman
Jun 17, 2011, 21:56
IanB wrote:
Agreed. Her ARP music is superior to almost anything else of that kind. I toyed with putting in Trilogie or Vice Versa. Oliveros' Deep Listening is in the same league but more like a rock record. I might have had that too but figure that alone on a desert island you want to hear humans doing stuff.

I am a Feldman latecomer. I had previously filed him away as one of those academic American composers that are good to know about but rubbish to listen to but a couple of Seb recommendations (the Rothko and Beckett pieces) completely turned my head.


There is the standing joke that Feldman is like Cage but you can listen to him, although, by almost all the later works, Feldman had reverted to standard notation.

Definitely not academic. His personality was the antithesis of his music and for many years he used to run the family baby clothes factory. Have a bash at his collected writings 'Give My Regards to Eighth Street' which I may now want to substitute for my book. Some examples:

"My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.

" For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."
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