Listening to Feldman means making time

A long concert does not automatically promise deeper listening. It can just as easily be tiring, provoke impatience or exclude people who have neither half an evening to spare nor the necessary freedom of movement. Yet Morton Feldman’s music poses a question rarely asked these days: what if, rather than the work fitting the time available, listening were allowed to take the time it needs?

The Munich festival marking Feldman’s centenary places this question at the heart of its programme. Following ‘Triadic Memories’ at Museum Brandhorst, it continues on 6 and 7 November at Schwere Reiter. The programme includes ‘For Bunita Marcus’, early piano pieces, ‘Piano’ and ‘Palais de Mari’; conversations will complement the evenings. The invitation is thus not merely musical. It also concerns the social conditions of listening: who can stay that long, and who decides when a concert should end?

Not waiting for the end

Feldman, born in New York in 1926, who died in 1987, belongs to the New York School, whose circle included composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. His late piano pieces give sound space without forcing it into a familiar dramaturgy of tension, climax and resolution. In ‘Triadic Memories’, notes can sit alongside one another like individual traces of colour; repetition is not simply a return, but an opportunity to perceive a small change. Museum Brandhorst draws a connection with the paintings of Cy Twombly, which Feldman had seen in Rome.

It is easy to attach labels such as ‘meditation’ or ‘slowing down’ to this music. They capture something, but also obscure something: listening here is no wellness exercise. Attention is not guided by a narrative, but must repeatedly gather itself. One sound fades, the next arrives, and memory feels its way towards connections. Often, after a while, one listens less to individual notes than to differences that previously seemed too slight.

In a conversation with the percussionist Jan Williams, Feldman himself discussed the length of his late works. With a piece such as the second string quartet, he said, its duration also depended on his own stamina. This is no set of instructions for the audience. But it is a reminder that duration is not merely a number in the programme: it is brought into being by performers and experienced by listeners.

Attention is not an admission ticket

Here lies the strength of the long format — and its blind spot. Those who stay may find their internal clock shifting: a seemingly uneventful passage becomes not empty, but differentiated. Yet this experience requires time, and time is unequally distributed. Working hours, caring responsibilities, travel, physical needs and ticket costs do not disappear simply because a work interrupts their routines. A concert that celebrates concentration can thus inadvertently presuppose an audience with time to spare and no demands on it.

The fair response is not to shorten long works, as though music must above all be manageable. Nor should duration be treated as a test of nerve that only the most enduring can pass. Organisers can offer guidance: reliable information about running times, accessible admission and interval arrangements, opportunities to leave the room briefly and return. This does not change the music, but it does change the conditions in which we encounter it.

Listening to Feldman, then, does not mean withdrawing from every other responsibility and being ‘wholly’ attentive. That expectation would be another barrier. Rather, it means allowing sound time without demanding the same degree of concentration in every minute. The Munich festival can make this tension visible: between the productive openness of sustained listening and the very concrete question of who can engage with it. The answer lies not in the work alone. It also lies in the concert format.