Musical, rhetorical, and visual material in the work of Feldman

Abstract

In his article "Musical, Rhetorical, and Visual Material in the Work of Feldman" Kurt Ozment compares early and late scores by Morton Feldman and argues that Feldman's interest in the visuality of the score was not limited to his experiments with graphic notation. More specifically, Projection 3 (1951) and String Quartet II (1983) suggest that Feldman experimented with notation from beginning to end. Up until the early 1980s, one of Feldman's main strategies for commenting on his music was to refer to painting. In his essay "Crippled Symmetry" and in an interview with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman also turns to rugs, linking the patterns in his scores to the materiality of certain rugs. Feldman's emphasis on the materiality of paintings, rugs, and notation stands in sharp contrast to the materiality of the spoken and written comments themselves, which tend to cross media.