Why This Piece Is Six Hours Long: An Introduction to Morton Feldman, his String Quartet No. 2, and the Painters who Shaped how he Thought about Time.

Morton Feldman spent most of his working life inside his family’s coat business in Manhattan’s Garment District, composing on the side, largely self-taught, until he was 47. He didn’t take a teaching post until 1973, when the University at Buffalo made him the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music, a job he held until his death in 1987. That’s not the resume you’d expect from a composer who went on to write a four-hour piano piece, an even longer tribute to a dead friend, and, longest of all, a string quartet that can run past six hours depending on who’s playing it.

That quartet, his String Quartet No. 2, is the one we’re performing on Election Day. Feldman wrote it in 1983 for the Kronos Quartet. Its premiere that December, in Toronto, was already a compromise: he cut the repeats to fit a 4.5-hour broadcast slot. The unabridged version wouldn’t get played complete until more than a decade later. Recordings of the full score run anywhere from about five hours to just past six, because Feldman’s tempo marking barely moves the whole way through, quarter note equals 63 to 66, while the four instruments are constantly shifting meter against each other. No two ensembles land on quite the same total.

Why So Long

Feldman had an answer for this, and it wasn’t about endurance for its own sake. He talked about it as a difference between form and scale:

“My whole generation was hung up on the 20 to 25 minute piece. It was our clock. We all got to know it, and how to handle it… Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale. Form is easy, just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.”

Most concert music, including most of Feldman’s own earlier work, is built out of parts: a theme, a development, a return. That’s form, and it works at a scale we’re used to, half an hour, an evening. Feldman’s late pieces aren’t doing that. Past a certain length, dividing the piece into parts stops being the point, and what’s left is closer to standing inside something than following it.

What You’ll Actually Hear

There’s no melody to track and no destination. The score is 124 pages of continuous music, no movements, no breaks. It’s built from roughly seventy small figures, patterns, single chords, short gestures, that return again and again in combinations almost identical to each other but never quite. Most of it sits at the quietest dynamic marking Feldman used, and past a certain point in the score itnever gets louder than that again. The strings are muted for most of the piece. There’s no climax to wait for, because Feldman wasn’t building toward one.

What that leaves you with is closer to weather than narrative. Small variations. A held tension that doesn’t resolve, because it was never trying to.

Painters in the Room

Feldman’s closest friends for most of his life were painters, not composers. He met John Cage in 1950, the two of them having independently walked out of the same performance of Webern, and through Cage he fell in with a circle that included Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. He described that circle’s influence on his music directly, most fully in a 1981 essay called “Crippled Symmetry:”

“Stasis, as it is utilised in painting, is not traditionally part of the apparatus of music… The degrees of stasis, found in a Rothko or a Guston, were perhaps the most significant elements that I brought to my music from painting.”

Guston was the closest of those friendships, and it eventually produced one of Feldman’s longest works, a four-hour piece written after Guston’s death called For Philip Guston. The friendship itself had ruptured years earlier, when Guston abandoned abstraction for the cartoonish figurative paintings that made him famous later in life. Feldman recalled the moment it happened: he was looking at one of the new paintings, Guston asked what he thought, and Feldman asked for another minute to look. “And with that,” he said, “our friendship was over.” They reconciled enough that Guston asked Feldman to recite Kaddish for him near the end of his life.

The other habit Feldman picked up from the art world had nothing to do with painters directly. He collected handmade rugs and became fascinated with a specific flaw in them: weavers working from a symmetrical pattern who introduce small, unplanned irregularities as they go, a color repeated slightly differently, a motif shifted a few threads over. He named the 1981 essay after it. It's a good description of what happens across six hours of this quartet, too: a pattern, repeated by hand, close enough to itself to feel stable, and off enough to keep you listening.

Playing It

None of the notes in this piece are hard. Hand any of us this music the way you’d hand a violinist etudes, and we’d get through it fine. What’s hard is everything around the notes. The textures are so transparent and so spare that every small imprecision is audible, a rhythm a hair off, a balance where one voice sits a shade too loud. In six hours of that, there’s nowhere to hide.

We’ve played a lot of demanding music between us. This isn’t like any of it, and it won’t be again. Most pieces give you an arc to lean on, something building toward something, and you can ride that through the hard stretches. This one doesn’t. It asks you to stay present for six hours with nothing pulling youforward, to go with the flow of it without losing consciousness. That’s a different kind of endurance than difficulty. It’s probably close to what it takes to sit with this piece as a listener, too. We just have to do it while staying exactly in tune and in time with three other people.

Sonic Sanctuary, House of Scordatura’s performance of the complete quartet, runs from noon to roughly six on November 3 at The Old Church. The next post in this series looks at the piece’s performance history, and why a work this stubborn took over a decade to get played in full.