Morton Feldman
Spring of Chosroes (1977)
Biography:
Program Notes:
Spring of Chosroes—commissioned by the McKim Fund of the Library of Congress—is dedicated to the American violinist Paul Zukofsky. According to legend, during the reign of the Sassanid prince Chosroes I (531—579 A.D), “a marvelous carpet representing a garden was woven. The garden carpet was sixty yards square and made of the finest materials…[and represented] streams and paths, trees and beautiful spring flowers”. It is helpful to keep the image and the dimensions of the Persian carpet in mind while experiencing Feldman’s composition, for in this work and others, Feldman challenges traditional notions of pacing in such ways as to valorize the spatial dimension of music. What is more, Feldman was a close friend of Jackson Pollock, and Pollock’s massive canvases and abstract paintings find their analogue here.
Although Spring of Chosroes features gradual change among its various pitch clusters, for the effect to work Feldman requires absolute rhythmic precision. Consider the violin motive at the head of the piece: it comprises few pitches, each presented in a single register. As the work proceeds, the ordering of the notes, and their rhythmic placement is at once familiar, and yet ever new. Against such a backdrop, “change” is pronounced, be it in the addition of new pitches, in the registral displacement of a recognized event, or in the move to a multiple stop where single successive pitches had predominated.
Spring of Chosroes projects a barren sonic landscape; and in the process of giving oneself over to the experience of the piece, a hypnotic effect takes hold. One of the means by which the hypnosis is controlled centers about the inclusion of pitch events at the upper extremes of what is possible for either the violin, or the piano. A case in point relates to three separate moments in the piano’s line, where its highest note, C8, recurs nine times in a row, separated each time by silence. What might not be so readily apparent is the fact that the pattern of note presentation plus silence is strictly ordered: in the first instance, three Cs are struck, followed, respectively, by silence four, six, and eight times the length of the struck note. Another three Cs occur, this time separated by six, eight, and four units of silence; and finally, three additional Cs are sounded, separated by silence of eight, four and six durational units. A similar ordered triple pattern obtains somewhat later in the piece. But the “theme” returns another time, and in a slightly altered fashion, for C8 is joined by a second note, B7, and the nine presentations of the dyad are separated by progressively shorter time-spans: initially 13 units of silence, is followed by 12, 11, and so on.
In its careful control of the dialogue between the two instruments, Spring of Chosroes is programmatic, sonically projecting the rich tapestry of Chosroes’s sumptuous carpet.
Program Notes by Gregory Marion
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
The University of Saskatchewan
