Marc Sabat, Rohan de Saram, Aki Takahashi

Compositional mnemonic techniques provide the thematic material for Morton Feldman’s Trio for violin, cello and piano (1980). Feldman shows, how a piece is shaped by musical memory in a direct, non-self-censoring reproduction of day-to-day writing.

Over the years, Feldman has stayed true to his maxim of “releasing the sounds” going back to the 1950s; it even seems to have been particularly cultivated in his astonishing works of recent years, which in their duration throw the demanding challenge of unwavering concentration at the audience. These recent works develop a musical memory devoted to the world of sounds, they create an unheard-of range of differentiation.

Trio revolves around the acutest possible auditory exploration of the chosen instruments. Notation becomes the means of a most subtle control of the progress of time. Past flies.

The object of all this is the neutralization of musical progression, a capturing of the moment that endows Feldman’s music with the character of a sound object, a “time screen” as he himself calls it.

from: Walter Zimmermann, Morton Feldman – der Ikonoklast.
in: Morton Feldman, Essays, ed. by Walter Zimmermann. Kerpen 1985