Feldman: The O'Hara Songs

“I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” What the American painter Franz Kline said about his paintings, can be applied equally to Morton Feldman’s compositions. For Morton Feldman, composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the "black" of the notes as with the "white" silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman’s music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early – non-figurative – paintings of his friend Philip Guston: “the complete absence of gravity” of a painting that is “not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves,” as Feldman once wrote.

Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts.