Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
— Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing”
One of my favorite working photos of a poet is this portrait of Frank O’Hara on rotary phone.
Morton Feldman and Frank O’Hara talking about each other in text
MORTON: I suppose it would have been fitting if Frank and I had met on the train coming to New York, like in a Russian novel. Actually I'm not certain when my personal memories of him begin. Let's just say he was there, waiting for us all.
FRANK: He was not to become an American composer in the historical-reminiscence line, but to find himself free of the conceptualized and self-conscious modernity of the international movement. Paradoxically, it is precisely this freedom which places Feldman in the front rank of the advanced musical art of our time.
MORTON: What I remember is mostly what he said about myself or one of the others. He never talked about his own work; at least, not to me. If ever I complimented him on something he had done he would answer, all smiles, “well - thank you”. That was the end of it. As if he were saying, “Now, you don't have to congratulate me about a thing. Naturally, everything I do is first rate, but it's you who needs looking after.”
FRANK: Structures for String Quartet (1951) is a classical string quartet without sonata development, without serial development, in general without benefit of clergy. Like Emily Dickinson's best poems, it does not seem to be what it is until all questions of ‘seeming’ have disappeared in its own projection. Its form reveals itself after its meaning is revealed, as Dickinson's passion ignores her dazzling technique.
MORTON: He admired my music because its methodology was hidden. Yet he admired other music too, whose method was unashamedly exposed.
FRANK: But differentiation is not Feldman's point, even in the graph music: the structure of the piece is never the image, nor in eschewing precise notation of touch is Feldman leaving the field open for dramatic incident whereby the structure could become an image (as in Boulez). Notation is, then, not so much a rigid exclusion of chance, but the means of preventing the structure from becoming an image in these works, and an indication of the composer's personal preference for where, unpredictability should operate.
MORTON: Nobody I knew resented Frank's love for an irrelevant genius like Rachmaninoff. We all know it was not Rachmaninoff who was our enemy, but the second-rate artist who dictates what art should be.
FRANK: A key work in the development away from serial technique is the Intersection 3 for Piano (1953). A graph piece, it is totally abstract in its every dimension. Feldman here successfully avoids the symbolic aspect of sound which has so plagued the abstract works of his contemporaries by employing unpredictability reinforced by spontaneity - the score indicates "indeterminacy of pitch" as a direction for the performer. . . . Where a virtuoso work places technical demands upon the performer, a Feldman piece seeks to engage his improvisatory collaboration, with its call on musical creativity as well as interpretative understanding.
MORTON: It is interesting that a in circle that demanded partisanship above all, he was so totally accepted. I suppose we recognized that his wisdom came from his own “system” - the dialectic of the heart. This was his secret. That was what made it possible for him, without ever being merely eclectic, to write so beautifully about both Pollock and Pasternak, to dedicate a poem to Larry Rivers one day and to Philip Guston the next.
FRANK: Unpredictability is used in a different way still in the Piece for Four Pianos (1957). This work, scored in notation rather than graph, begins simultaneously for all four pianos, after which the following notes may be played to the end by each of the pianists at time intervals of their mutual or individual choice.
MORTON: The repeated notes are not musical pointillism, as in Webern, but they are where the mind rests on an image - the beginning of the piece is like a recognition, not a motif, and by virtue of the repetitions it conditions one to listen.
FRANK: As we proceed to experience the individual time-responses of the four pianists we are moving inexorably toward the final image where the mind can rest, which is the end of the piece. In this particular performance it is as if one were traversing an enormous plain at the opposite ends of which were two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses. . . . In all of Feldman's recent work the paramount image is that of touch.
MORTON: The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas.
FRANK: (Which brings us back to Rachmaninoff, Fournier and Tudor.) In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the performer must create the experience with an application of paint on canvas.
MORTON: Though he understood and appreciated my particular position in regard to virtuosity, he did not share it. Frank loved virtuosity, loved the pyrotechnics of it. He was, in fact, able to love and accept more difficult kinds of work than one would have thought possible.
FRANK: In Feldman's work unpredictability involves the performer and the audience much in the same way it does the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and intensity. But in much of the extreme vanguard music in America and Europe, particularly that utilizing tape and electronic devices along with elements of unpredictability, the statistical unpredictability has occurred in the traditional manner during the making of the piece; it has been employed preconceptually as a logical outgrowth of serial technique and it is dead by the time you hear it, though the music is alive in the traditional sense of hearing. What Feldman is assuming, and it is a courageous assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and inspired musician who has the best interests of the work at heart.
MORTON: His intense involvement with so many different levels of work, so many different kinds of artist, naturally created great demands on his personal loyalties. But it was part of O'Hara's genius to be oblivious to these demands, to treat the whole thing as if it were some big, frantic, glamorous movie set. To us he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem - a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers. Yet I know if Frank could give me one message from the grave as I write this remembrance he would say, “Don't tell them the kind of man I was, Morty. Did I do it. Never mind the rest.”
Morton Feldman, rocking his vertical planes.
[All quotes are sourced from the following: Morton Feldman, “After Modernism”; Frank O’Hara, “New Directions in Music—About the Early Work”;]