Morton Feldman's early clarinet works: a study on temporality and audience perception

• Autor(a) principal: Susla, Martijn
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/20819
• topic: Feldman; Clarinet; Temporality; Kramer; Painting

Morton Feldman, a major composer of the 20th-century American avant-garde, composed four works for clarinet: Two Pieces for Clarinet and String Quartet (1961), Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (1971), Bass Clarinet and Percussion (1981) and Clarinet and String Quartet (1983). Today, these works are hardly performed and barely listened to. They present challenges to their audience that are connected to Feldman’s central concern with the music’s material, sound, and his wish to create a sense of timelessness in music: Time Undisturbed. By linking Morton Feldman’s aesthetics with Jonathan Kramer’s theory on temporality in music, particularly on nonlinear music, this dissertation has the aim of understanding why listening to Feldman’s music presents these challenges to their audience. By using Feldman’s two earlier clarinet works, Two Pieces for Clarinet and String Quartet (1961) and Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (1971), as a case study, this work aims at understanding how Feldman tries to reach his unique aesthetical ideal of timelessness through different notational approaches. In an attempt to bring the audience closer to his music and give them a more intense experience, an empirical study offers an alternative way of how a performer could approach Feldman’s works, by creating a performance of Two Pieces for Clarinet and String Quartet (1961) in which the audience has a more active role and in which traditional boundaries between listener, environment, performer, and work, established by the classical music concert conventions, are blurred.