19:30, Concert Room, Department of Music
John Snijders, piano
A very special opportunity to hear one of American composer Morton Feldman’s extraordinary, mesmeric late works, performed by one of his most dedicated and insightful modern interpreters.
Triadic Memories is, at 90 minutes, Feldman’s longest composition for piano. It is dedicated to the pianists Aki Takahashi and Roger Woodward, and the ‘triad’ of pianists influences is completed by another who was vital for his musical development, David Tudor.
The piece could be said to be a meditation on the disorientation of memory. Feldman explains in his article ‘Crippled Symmetry’:
“The question of scale, for me, precludes any concept of symmetry or asymmetry from affecting the eventual length of my music. As a composer I am involved with the contradiction in not having the sum of the parts equal the whole. The scale of what is actually being represented, whether it be of the whole or of the part, is a phenomenon unto itself. The reciprocity inherent in scale, in fact, has made me realize that musical forms and related processes are essentially only methods of arranging material and serve no other function than to aid one’s memory.
“What Western musical forms have become is a paraphrase of memory. But memory could operate otherwise as well. In Triadic Memories, […], there is a section of different types of chords where each chord is slowly repeated. One chord might be repeated three times, another, seven or eight – depending on how long I felt it should go on. Quite soon into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it. I then reconstructed the entire section: rearranging its earlier progression and changing the number of times a particular chord was repeated. This way of working was a conscious attempt at “formalizing” a disorientation of memory. Chords are heard repeated without any discernible pattern. In this regularity [...] there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion; a bit like walking the streets of Berlin – where all the buildings look alike, even if they’re not.”
