In the Future

all exams will contain four Morton Feldman questions:

1) List from most accessible to least accessible all 181 of Feldman’s compositions
2) Name three people Feldman made love to
3) Hum Rothko Chapel
4) What does sound mean?

In the future,

• All corporate jingles will derive from Feldman’s music
• The beat of the human heart has been proven to be atonal
• Before dinner, it is customary to read a Morton Feldman essay or two
• The word “boredom” now means “a state of liminal ecstasy”, as in “This sex that we’re having on the edge of an Aegean cliff, Turkish heroin electrocuting our veins, is boring”
• To express excitement or approval for the home team at sporting events, the crowd goes silent
• Jazz has been declared “silly”
• The French are derided as hopelessly narrow-minded
• Density of conversation, as in talking too much when one is talking, and then making no sounds at all when one is not talking, is considered a hallmark of genius
• Anecdotes are traded on the stock exchange, where Feldman anecdotes remain the most valuable. Like this one,

Feldman was dying in the hospital in Buffalo. The cancer had spread too quickly. Barbara was with him, and he was ready, telling her he had lived a full life and had no regrets. Only one thing was bothering him, the beep of the EKG machine. “It sounds like something I would have written,” he said, “like hearing myself thinking.” He asked the nurse if she could turn it off. “That’s against the law,” she said. Could he could play a record over it? What if he called in a few friends and they hooked themselves up to one, too? By now snow was falling into the dusk, and the situation was hopeless. Feldman took Barbara’s hand and said, “I know how to stop the beeping.” And then he did.

A Famous Anecdote in Reverse

Jackson Pollack!
A man walking with his hands in his pockets
The intersection of 6th Ave & Fourteenth St.
Feldman turns and looks
Wolpe points toward the street
What about the common man?
I care about the sounds
It’s too esoteric
Feldman plays
Play it
I brought something new
Have a cup of tea
Wolpe!
Feldman!
The tea is boiling
Steps creak
The long subway ride
The sun rises
Strange, indecipherable dreams

Buffalo ‘86

The snow in Buffalo blows
to and fro
burying cars along the avenue home.

No
one’s inside to turn their radios on
so
silence plays silently to no one—

rows of sunken clouds
domes of metal, leather and snow.

I can’t open the window
so the television’s on—
news like a fog horn
an always-ringing phone

the fathers and husbands of Buffalo
emerging, at dawn, from their homes—

heavy-clothed
armed with brushes and shovels.

One by one
they scrape off the snow
the engines turn on

and I open the lid of my piano.