Morton Feldman Crippled Symmetry

Morton Feldman Master of Music Meditation Crippled Symmetry for flute, piano and percussion (1983)

Trio concert composed by: Ewa Liebchen, Magdalena Kordylasińska-Pękala, Emilia Karolina Sitarz

It is the 60s in New York and music is just coming out of concert halls for the first time to sound in parks, urban spaces, art galleries or post-industrial halls and factories. Closer to people, closer to everyday life. Her motives are short, based on simple chords, tonal. Phrases are repeated many times, and their development is slow, suspended in time, sometimes even mesmerizing for the listener. It is the music of the eternal “now”, which simply continues, without a clear beginning and end. This trend is minimal music, and Morton Feldman is perhaps its most interesting representative.

In music as we know it, time is countable, subdued, we can nod to the beat of music or stomp our feet. Morton Feldman, in his work, wanted to discover how he himself said “how there is a time before we lay our hands on it”. It is a composition that develops from the outside, during which we learn to “not expect change”. When we get rid of this need, change will happen. All in its own time.

The music of Morton Feldman prompts us to take a completely innovative approach to the phenomenon of the concert as a performative activity and to create a new, friendly and close to the listener formula for receiving these often hours-long works.

We leave the closed concert halls to places more casual and conducive to contemplation: galleries, museums, from uncomfortable chairs we move to cushions, poufs and sun loungers, also under the open sky. His compositions were performed by us, among others, during the Night of Museums in Cricoteka, in the friary of the Dominican Monastery in Lublin during the KODY festival or in the courtyard of the Warsaw SWPS where Feldman's music (performed live for 3 hours) sounded Joanna Rajkowska's sculpture SORRY during its inauguration.

At the Kwadrofonik Festival we performed his longest composition for sleeping audiences in the headquarters of the Sinfonia Varsovia orchestra and in the Polin Museum — in the open main hall, where the audience used comfortable sun loungers and could watch the sunset through the huge glass walls of the museum.

Performances of Feldman's works, lasting several hours, are not concerts. Rather, they are the sound of exhibitions, a concert for sightseeing, contemplation, rest or concentration. Audiences have the opportunity to listen to the whole, the parts, they can leave and come back, just as they can return to the exhibition. Musicians are like sounding sculptures, lasting in focus for hours. Feldman's music creates unusual timbres, primarily thanks to unusual, rarely found instrumentation (e.g. alto flute, bells, celesta).

“I am not a watchmaker,” Feldman wrote. “I am interested in capturing time in its indivisible existence. I mean, I'm interested in how a wild beast lives in the jungle, not in a zoo. I'm interested in how Time exists before we put our paws on it, our minds, our imaginations. (for: Maciejewicz 2000:17).

“I don't push the sounds,” Feldman explained to Stockhausen. “Even a little bit? — replied the disappointed composer...