This fall, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation celebrates the centennial of Morton Feldman, one of the most visionary and influential composers associated with the New York School. Feldman lived and worked on the Lower East Side as part of the same close-knit artistic community as many Abstract Expressionist painters. His friendships, conversations, and artistic exchanges with these figures profoundly shaped the way he thought about gesture, sound, time, and memory.
For the first concert in this centennial series, acclaimed composer-pianist Jared Redmond will perform two works for solo piano by Feldman: the concise, unsettled Intersection 3 (1953), written in graphic notation, and the expansive, meditative Triadic Memories (1981)—traditional in notation, yet radical in experience.
Both works emerged from Feldman’s sustained engagement with painting. As he famously stated, “I learned more from painters than I learned from composers.” In Intersection 3, Feldman employs a graphic score composed of boxes of numbers and patterns, leaving considerable freedom to the pianist. His approach parallels Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” method, which Feldman translated into music through his concept of the “time-canvas.” Nearly three decades later, at a conference held the year after he composed Triadic Memories, Feldman revealed that the use of the sustaining pedal in the piece had been inspired by Cy Twombly’s application of gesso.
Heard together, these two works trace Feldman’s journey from the graphic experimentation of the 1950s to the suspended, labyrinthine sound world of his music in the 1980s. Although Triadic Memories may appear more “measured” through its use of traditional notation, Feldman’s inquiry has shifted from the explicitly visual experimentation of his early scores toward a more gestural, and perhaps more abstract exploration of granularity, in which the smallest variations of sound, duration, resonance, and touch acquire expressive significance.