Claudia Brunsvold will sing Morton Feldmans Only at our concerts this weekend—and she sings it beautifully! Youll hear Only this weekend, but I thought Id post this song by John Cage—The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs—for comparison. In both songs, the composers achieve remarkable results using extremely limited resources: Cage, using only three sung pitches (with rapping on the wood of a piano as accompaniment), creates a haunting, incantatory mood. Feldman, using only eight pitches, sung in only four (or five, depending on how one hears them) distinct melodic gestures (with no accompaniment), captures both the earth-bound and the soaring qualities evoked in Rilkes Sonnet. Cage and Feldman were friends. According to James Pritchetts article in Grove Music Online: At a performance given by the New York PO, Webern’s Concerto op. 24 made such an impression on [Cage] that he felt unable to stay and hear the rest of the concert; as he walked out, he met Morton Feldman doing exactly the same. Aesthetically sympathetic to one another, Cage and Feldman intensively shared ideas and music for the next four years. Cages Widow of Eighteen Springs was composed in 1942 on texts extracted from James Joces Finnegans Wake. Feldmans Only, from 1976, a setting of one of Rilkes Sonnets to Orpheus. https://youtube/watch?v=su3DRrTDbrM
Posted on: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 15:51:27 +0000
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