morton feldman's string quartet number ii

Performance in Boston on February 28th.
Unreasonably excited about this.

http://mta.mit.edu/events/morton-feldman-string-quartet-no-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejBC_fut2Es

watching more of this than I'd care to admit...

Ending up seeing that performance I mentioned above. Like many Feldman pieces, it was really something else. More than the piece lengths, I think, it's the ever - and almost imperceptibly - shifting repetition that makes time bend. Always great to catch live.

I listened to the first hour or so of this (Flux Quartet) a few years ago. I found it really enchanting and resolved to come back to it when I had the time and inclination to get through the whole thing in one sitting. Seeing that video posted spurred me to finally do it over the weekend.

Totally mind-altering, exhausting experience, and certain passages are among the most beautiful music I've ever heard (especially the long series of chords on Pages 89-93). I won't be doing the whole thing again anytime soon, but I'll be revisiting those most compelling parts a whole lot.

This analysis from the University of Copenhagen is really helpful for wrapping one's head around the structure of the quartet: https://www.cnvill.net/mfolsen_english.pdf

I was in school with Flux's violist. He is and was such an amazing player.

I have the score for this quartet. An aspect of it that fascinates/infuriates me is that Morton, without fail, notated it using the most frustrating enharmonic choices. Every G-natural is notated as an F-doublesharp. Every C-natural is notated as a B-sharp. I puzzled over this decision for some time. Because it's for strings, are the players meant to tune these pitches differently, according to how the note is spelled? (My ultimate conclusion was a combination of a. the confusing spelling was an attempt to keep the players on their toes, like visual caffeine pills for the long drive; and b. Morton Feldman was kind of an asshole.)