Morton Feldman - For Samuel Beckett (1992)

Tracklist:
1. For Samuel Beckett
2. For Samuel Beckett

Ensemble Modern conducted by Arturo Tamayo

Liner notes written by Art Lang, 1992:
"The quality of language is more important than any system of ethics or esthetics… Form is the concretion of content, the revelation of a world." Substitute "music" for "language" and one might think this is a quote from Morton Feldman, but it's Samuel Beckett, from an early essay on the prose of Marcel Proust. To his mind, form, then – the revelation of a (note, not our) world – is the most pressing, personal, question any of us must face, and it's one of the constants in Beckett's writing; that is, the difficulty (yet necessity) of forming a life out of the conditions we find ourselves in, among. It's not a matter of acceptance, but self-awareness. Ultimately, confirmation arrives through the arduous (if absurd) task of coming to an agreement with existence, when it's impossible to tell what's real and what is not.
To do so, Beckett created a series of situations in which characters were dispossessed, disenfranchised, powerless, bearing the burden of pain, alienation, incomprehension. The degree to which this was a response to specific incidents in his lifetime or a metaphysical dilemma is open to interpretation. But it's true that, whatever his motivation or state of mind, he chose to create Art to counteract the Void. This, along with his outsider status and his willingness to embrace ambiguity in the face of fascism and/or chaos, could be why Feldman felt an affinity to him, and so titled this music.
Beckett's Art, like all great Art regardless of rhetoric, is a confrontation with existence, perception, understanding. In rejecting the artificial in the world he needed to focus on the extremes, divorcing his characters from our device of Time, for example, and other comfortable aspects of realism (convention, recognizable images, commonality of behavior). His work sought to be "neither life nor art, but something in between" (as Feldman once wrote of Robert Rauschenberg). In his own words, he wanted it to be both "perfectly intelligible" and "perfectly inexplicable" at the same time. This required unorthodox structures, unfamiliar events, passages of unusual (bordering on incoherent) insight, and a persistence (if not metamorphosis) of activity for the survival of an identity.
As with Feldman. For Samuel Beckett is a late (1987) work, rich in detail and lush in sound (especially in relation to so many of his more "austere" pieces, early and late), but troubling, obsessed, claustrophobic in spite of its scope. Given their shared attraction to shadow (Feldman's music uses chiaroscuro in the way Beckett meticulously exploited darkness and light and the moods in between on the stage and on the page), it's perhaps surprising that Feldman's dedication didn't involve the starker textures of solo piano – and individual surrounded by… nothing. In any case, this is not dazzling, but muted, orchestration; instrumental timbres and tonal colors emerge as if by chance and quickly disappear.
In the beginning… there is no warning. We just are in the music, a self-contained environment (whether real or a state of mind we don't yet know) that forces us to find our position within what seems to be an eternal present. The sounds proceed with a deceptive monotony – deceptive in their simplicity and lack of development (progress), since what is seductive might eventually become oppressive. The repetition seems a Beckett-like punishment, but it shouldn't be heard literally, as the details differ even as the effect remains the same. With no beginning, middle, or end, no goals, no intent in evidence, it could be one of Beckett's static dramas; since continuity, unasked for, is inevitable, there's no need to invent anything. Everything simply is, and continues to be. Our role has to do with the nature of perception: we experience a music that seems not to change, but is constantly changing; we don't know what it means, but it is insistent in its message. Though the Art of Feldman and Beckett understands and incorporates aspects of silence, in its ultimate condition silence equals Death. What comes after doesn't matter. The music continues, until it stops.