When it came to the nature of his late compositions, Morton Feldman liked to talk about "landscapes in time. At a lecture in Middelburg in the late 1980s, he said of this, "My pieces are not long, in fact most of them are too short. Analytically, my pieces may be long, but if you listen to them, they seem to belong to the landscape of time I bring.' This quote certainly holds true for Feldman's most
… recently completed composition Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello (1987). Compared to earlier pieces such as the Second String Quartet (1983) and For Philip Guston (1984), both of which last more than three hours, this atypical piano quartet of nearly eighty minutes is a relatively short work. In this piece, Feldman came to a final refinement of his compositional method, which lies between repetition and variation. It is music without contrasts; there are no climaxes, no melodies and no polyphony. Moreover, everything takes place within a relatively small tonal range. But precisely within these confines, Feldman's music evokes a tremendous sense of serenity and timelessness. 'Feldman's pieces do not really begin and end,' says an apt characterization by pianist Steffen Schleiermacher in the CD booklet. 'Instead, they appear briefly from eternity [...] to return to the silence from which they came.' (JWvR)more
