Much was made of the performance of Feldman’s Second String Quartet last Sunday. Feldman approximated the length of the piece as “three-and-a-half to five-and-a-half hours,” (performed by the Ne(x)tworks quartet, it lasts six) and it’s generally quiet throughout. Almost every measure repeats at least once—often between four and nine times—and most measures are almost exactly like the previous ones.
Naturally, the focus in many reviews was on endurance. Steve Smith, of the Times, referred to its “Brobdingnagian length,” while WNYC’s DJ for their classical Internet stream Q2 asked “the obvious question; how do you play for six hours?” But focusing on the matter of the endurance of the performers, and maybe of the audience, is terribly obvious and a little bit lazy. When we say “endurance,” there is the connotation of enduring through something, and most of all of making it to the end. We endure through things we do not like.
This is a little glib, because it’s probably very difficult to sit straight-backed and play delicate repeated figures for six hours. However, listen to violinist and Ne(x)tworks music director Cornelius Dufallo: “About half an hour after your back starts to kill—around four and a half hours in—you hit a gorgeous, new progression of music, and you just sort of forget about that pain…look, people do harder things than this every day.” This is the germ of Feldman’s piece—as Cornelius said to me after the performance, it’s really “a piece about life.” It is physically demanding but, moment-to-moment, it is beautiful if you’re engaged. If you tune out, or if you mentally abridge each fragment, it becomes trite and even a little boring. But if you pay attention, each moment is a sublimely orchestrated chord, or perfectly balanced timbre.
The sections are so massive that it seems as if there is nowhere to go until you arrive. Occasionally, themes from hours earlier reappear, fragmented, but most of the piece seems to be free of any themes whatsoever. The beauty of the length of the composition is that any evocation of a by now well-known theme—maybe two or three notes is all it takes well into the fifth hour—is enough to bring the brain back to associate past memories. And this is Feldman: forgetting and remembering. Yet, it is not a self-reflexive remembering on his part—Feldman does not really “talk” to us—but he causes us to be surprised by our own memories. Remembering requires forgetting; forgetting, if you want to be sure about it, requires a few hours.
One other thing to discuss is the ending of the piece. The second to the last page repeats each bar four times, then three times, then two times, until the final page, which contains no repeats at all. The players just dwindle a little, and the music seems to be evaporating. It reminds me of one of my favorite books of all time (by one of Feldman’s favorite authors, Samuel Beckett), Malone Dies. The book begins as if it will tell a story, but can’t seem to keep a narrative thread going. The story told is largely a distraction from the speaker’s normal life, as he “shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all.” But as the speaker becomes less lucid, and begins to blend his own life with that of the story he’s telling, the alternations between fiction and the speaker become less defined and less lucid. The things in his room becomes the things in the story, and it all seems to blend together. I won’t say how it ends.
