Morton Feldman - New Directions in Music

 

Morton Feldman's first album, "New Directions in Music 2", returns for the first time since Columbia Masterworks issued it in 1959 - eight early works for strings and pianos, recorded when almost none of this music had been committed to record. David Tudor at the piano, a drawing by Philip Guston on the sleeve, liner notes by Frank O'Hara. The original artwork and the original running order, both discarded by the only previous reissue. A foundational document of the New York School, back in the world in the year of Feldman's centenary.

Morton Feldman "New Directions in Music 2" (LP)

The number in the title has nothing to do with Feldman. It refers to Columbia Masterworks' short-lived series, whose first volume paired Stockhausen's Zeitmaße with Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître under Robert Craft in 1958. Volume two, issued the following year, was handed to a thirty-three-year-old American who had barely been recorded at all. Morton Feldman's debut album, and one of the earliest sustained documents of the music that would come to be called the New York School.

The eight works gathered here span 1951 to 1957, the years in which Feldman worked out the notational problems that shaped everything after. Extensions 1, Structures for String Quartet and Projection 4 all date from 1951, followed by Extensions 4 for three pianos, Intersection 3, Two Pieces for Two Pianos, Three Pieces for String Quartet, and Piece for Four Pianos. In the Projections and Intersections, the score is a grid: register, duration, density, and little else. Pitch is left to the player and rhythm is only loosely fixed. Sounds are placed rather than developed, and left to decay at their own speed.