Sunday Feature: Time Canvasses - Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

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Sunday Feature: Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

How friendship with Philip Guston and Mark Rothko took American music in new directions.

Composer Samuel Andreyev discovers how friendship with Philip Guston and Mark Rothko took American music in new directions as they let the quiet man of music set his sounds free.

In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said,  “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened”.

The composer Samuel Andreyev  focuses on the powerfully productive relationships that Feldman had with the abstract expressionists, Philip Guston, and Mark Rothko, who showed him by example how to set his sounds free, in the same way their paintings set colours free. Feldman even called his own compositions, ‘Time Canvasses’, where he said, he more or less primed the canvas with an overall hue of music. This is a clue to the unorthodox way Feldman’s music - which can be both very long, and almost always very quiet - remarkably blurs what we imagine to be the clear line between music and painting.

His intense friendship with the American painter Philip Guston began in the 50s, and its dramatic ending twenty years later is the story of the rise and fall of postwar American Abstraction. The other key friendship in his life ended tragically, when Mark Rothko took his own life in New York in 1970. A year later Feldman composed a moving tribute to him called simply Rothko Chapel - arguably his best known piece. It’s named after the non-denominational space in Houston, Texas, that Rothko had painted his brooding dark hued murals for, but didn’t see completed in his lifetime.

Samuel looks at how the loss of these two towering figures in his life influenced him, and his music, and intriguingly perhaps challenged him to take his music in a new direction in the last decade of his life.

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Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

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