GOD 50
Morton Feldman
String Quartet II
6xLP, box set
!BLACK AND WHITE EDITION!
Morton Feldman
String Quartet II
6xLP, box set
!BLACK AND WHITE EDITION!
Morton Feldman, composition
Pellegrini Quartet:
Antonio Pellegrini, Violin
Thomas Hofer, Violin
Fabio Marano, Viola
Helmut Menzler, Violoncello
!LIVE RECORDING!
320 minutes of music
320 minutes of music
When Morton Feldman wrote his second string quartet – or String Quartet (II),
as he titled it in the score – in 1983, he found himself at the height of his career:
prior
to this, his long form compositions,
of which the majority lasted around one and a half hours,
had not isolated him or let him disappear from concert and festival programming, as he had expected, but were on the contrary celebrated as a major “breakthrough”
and a big “step forward”.
...Like the long pieces that preceded it,
Feldman's String Quartet (II) consists of repeated patterns,
which usually surface at a certain point in the composition without preparation,
are maintained over a given
period,
and then abruptly abort to possibly return later.
In this context, Feldman has always emphasized the interplay of
“reiteration” and “change” in his music -
two aspects that in his mind
had been decisive criteria of the music of the twentieth century as
“repetition” and “variation” (Stravinsky and Schoenberg).
He even claimed Schoenberg's concept of “developing variation”
for his composition technique...
Exceprt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren
