Morton Feldman

Listening to Morton Feldman is like having pneumonia: you either get with the long program early on or struggle upstream for a seeming eternity. As I write this, I'm wracked with double pneumonia and have been spending the last week listening to this new five-CD set of Feldman's epic String Quartet No. 2 strapped to an IV unit at St. Vincent's. You can always turn off the Feldman, but the IV never lets up its steady drip. Written toward the end of Feldman's life, this six-hour beast, which had its first full performance a couple of years ago at Cooper Union, has finally found its way to CD featuring the now-defunct Flux Quartet, a gang of twentysomethings led by violinist Tom Chiu.

As the legend has it, the Kronos were supposed to premiere the piece at a Lincoln Center Festival a few years ago but bagged out, acknowledging that they were too damn old to take on such a feat. Enter the mighty Flux. I had them on my radio show a few days before the Cooper Union event. They used the three-hour show as a warm-up for the real thing. They played their asses off on WFMU and left the studio like they'd just finished a sprint: slightly winded but hungry for blood.

The Cooper Union show was, like all Feldman marathons, as much about the audience as it was about the music. It's a macho sport to see who could be the last man standing in the room. I lasted an hour or so, took a breather, came and went a few more times before going to get some dinner to return for the "finale" (well, there is no "finale" or "climax" to Feldman's work: it simply stops). I remember walking away with great admiration for the Flux: they pulled it off. But their onstage presence was less than professional. An hour or so into it, they were slumping in their chairs and much later on, they looked bored, exchanging winks, smiles and nods with audience members. Hey, who could blame them?

On CD, all of the theatrics drop out. No macho audience, no restless performers, no stuffy Great Hall: it's just music. It's an important point. Now instead of a "feast of patience" the six hours turns ambient, in the best sense of the word. Feldman quietly fills a space as his restless landscape melds with the sonic landscape surrounding you. Or inside you, as the case may be.

I've had staggeringly high fevers over the past week and have pretty much kept the Feldman on for as much time as I've been able. As my disease has shifted, so has my relationship to the music. At times, when I've been on the 104 degree verge, I've literally had a synesthetic response to the music, with big blocks of shape and color slowly shifting to the music. Feldman's work always had a strong connection with the New York Ab Ex school (his LP covers were often adorned with Rothkos and Klines), and in my state, this connection became apparent. Like there's a wind blowing across a Calder sculpture, I could literally see parts of the Feldman moving.

One misconception of Feldman's work is that it's mind-numbingly repetitive, a claim absolutely debunked by this set. Instead, I'd almost call it restless. Chunks of repeated, shimmering harmonics are frequently interrupted, splaying and shattering notes all over the field, only to reform into entirely new configurations. There's so much surface and texture here that I daresay there's not a dead moment in all six hours. It's a textbook of creativity.

Feldman often insisted that recordings of his be played at the lowest volume possible. He wanted his music to become part of the environment in which it's being heard, no more or less. This recording strikes me as extraordinarily low. Granted I'm listening to it on my laptop in a hospital room, but I've got the volume cranked and it's still barely audible. There's no choice but to listen to it quietly. The piece is like hospital time itself, with its long stretches of endless non-narrative time (I think this might be a great thing to take on a long airplane trip as well). It's doing weird things in conjunction with the IV drip, the whir of the air ventilation system and random, staticky intercom bursts from the nurse's station nearby. It's also intersecting strangely with my internal workings, which I happen to be keenly aware of at the moment: my rapid shallow breathing, the rumbling of my stomach, the grinding of my teeth. I think Feldman would be delighted in the way his music has ingratiated itself into every aspect of my environment.