Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel (1971)

Just two posts after I wrote about Nono’s A Carlo Scarpa, here’s another piece inspired by architecture — specifically a non-denominational chapel in Houston built in tribute to and designed in collaboration with color-field painter Mark Rothko.  I bet it would be fun to dig up more architecture-inspired music — off the top of my head all I can think of is Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores (1436) and, more loosely, Debussy’s Pagodes (1903), but I’m sure there’s a lot of it — and see how various composers handle the representation of buildings.  Certainly Feldman’s approach is very different from Nono’s:  while both pieces are spare and spacious, Feldman’s is more intuitive, more sensuous, more timbrally distinctive, less violently formalist (the pitch limitations Nono imposes on himself in that piece are downright perverse), and as far as I’m concerned, a lot more musically compelling.

The piece is in five sections that are played without pause.  The first introduces the basic material, floating as if suspended in a room full of water:   single celesta chords, wordless choral harmonies, slow abstract viola lines, bass drum and timpani rolls.  Almost everything is quiet, understated, eerie, and mutedly dissonant.  At one point Feldman shifts away from chromaticism:   suddenly the celesta is playing F minor triads with added seconds, and the mood becomes less eerie and more mournful, almost Pärt-like.  In the second section, a two-note ostinato appears in the timpani, creating tension even as the music gets quieter.  In the third, the dynamics drop to “ppppp” and “barely audible,” as the high voices of the piece’s two choirs trade notes, sustaining a single shimmering harmony for almost three minutes.  In the fourth, the texture is reduced to solo viola, solo soprano and timpani;  the viola’s lines are atonal and lyrical, while the soprano’s are modal, repetitive and chant-like.  The overall impression is one of things slowly disappearing.

All of the above is very beautiful.  I’ll admit that it’s sometimes hard for me to focus on such spare music, but I can find a lot to appreciate in Feldman’s use of timbre, space and harmony, and I can imagine how powerful the music would be if I were hearing it while actually sitting in the Rothko Chapel.  Still, the first four movements pale in comparison to what Feldman does in the fifth.  If things are slowly disappearing, what happens when everything is gone?  Something unexpected:  a vibraphone playing a simple, childlike, diatonic four-note figure over and over again, and on top of that is suspended an E-minor melody that sounds like something out of the slow movement of a Dvořák string quartet.  It’s a melody that Feldman wrote as a teenager, and it shifts the tone of the piece from contemplative to nostalgic.  And then those dissonant choral chords reappear, now superimposed on the vibraphone ostinato, which never stops.  The effect is haunting — especially if you consider that Rothko, a good friend of Feldman’s, had killed himself a year earlier.

 

 

 

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