The Long Way to a Complete Performance

Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 was written in 1983. Nobody heard it played complete, in public, until 1999. Here’s what happened in between.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commissioned the piece and gave it its premiere: December 4, 1983, at Walter Hall on the University of Toronto campus, with the Kronos Quartet playing and the CBC broadcasting live. The network bumped an important football game to air it. But the broadcast had a fixed slot, so what went out that night wasn’t the piece Feldman had written. He cut repeats throughout the score to bring it down to roughly four and a half hours, and Kronos adjusted their tempo to help it fit. That shortened version is what audiences got for more than a decade.

Kronos carried it to Darmstadt in 1984, to London a few weeks later, to Los Angeles in 1985, to Miami in 1988. Feldman died in 1987. He never heard his own quartet played the way he wrote it.

The Quartet that Couldn’t Finish It

Kronos tried to fix that in 1996, going back to rehearse the unabridged score for the first time. They didn’t get there. Members of the group developed serious physical problems, back and shoulder pain severe enough that they abandoned the attempt. The quartet that had premiered the piece, that had played the shortened version more than anywhere else, couldn’t play the whole thing.

What replaced them, for a while, was a technicality. On February 3, 1996, the Auryn Quartet played the complete score, unedited, for a broadcast on Nord-Deutsche-Rundfunk in Hamburg, part of a series called Stille Musik. By any strict reading, that’s the first time the piece existed complete in front of anyone. It happened in a studio, for a radio audience, and it didn’t register as an event.

Cooper Union, 1999

The performance that actually changed the piece’s reputation came three and a half years later, and from a quartet that didn’t exist when Feldman wrote it. FLUX Quartet played the complete String Quartet No. 2 at the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York on October 9, 1999, starting at 7:30 in the evening and finishing around 1:30 the next morning. It was public, it was a concert, and it got covered. NPR ran a piece on it under the headline “Quartet Endurance.” Sixteen years after the premiere, this was the performance people meant when they said the piece had finally been played in full.

The violist that night was Kenji Bunch, a founding member of FLUX from 1996 to 2002. He’s a familiar name here: Bunch has spent the years since teaching viola at Reed College and directing Fear No Music, and he was in the group for the run of performances that made this piece FLUX’s signature.

“We’re trained to be in action. We’re not trained to be suspended.”

That’s violinist Tom Chiu, describing what six hours at Feldman’s quietest dynamic actually does to a player’s body. Holding the bow that softly for that long is its own kind of strain, closer to isometric exercise than to playing music as most training prepares you to play it. Chiu has said the group prepared for the piece the way an athlete prepares for a marathon. He’s also been direct about what happens to concentration over six hours : “We definitely space out, zone out. All these terms apply.” Past a certain point, staying present stops being about focus and starts being about giving up the kind of control that focus requires.

FLUX didn’t play the piece once and move on. They’ve returned to it for decades, well past a dozen performances by the mid-2010s, including a belated Boston premiere at MIT in 2016. No other ensemble has come close to that number. The quartet that happened to be free enough, and young enough, to take on the piece nobody else could finish ended up becoming its custodians.

On Record

Three studio recordings exist now. The Ives Ensemble made the first, released on Hat Hut in 2001, the recording we’ve been sending around in the run-up to our own performance. FLUX Quartet recorded their version for Mode in 2002. The Pellegrini Quartet released a six-LP vinyl set in 2018. Three different total run times, three different ways of getting through the same 124 pages, none of them wrong.

That range is what House of Scordatura is built around. Some seasons that means scoring a monster movie live, matching an ensemble to a city getting flattened on screen. This season it means six hours with no screen at all, no plot, just four musicians and a score that took sixteen years to be heard the way it was written. Different scale of ambition, same instinct: find the project that’s a little too much, and do it anyway. The next post in this series is about what preparing this one has actually looked like.

Hear it Live

Sonic Sanctuary

DATE
Tuesday, November 3, 2026 (Election Day)

TIME
Doors open at noon. The piece runs until somewhere between 5:30 and 6pm.

VENUE
The Old Church Concert Hall
1422 SW 11th Ave, Portland, Oregon

Come for ten minutes or stay the whole day. There's no intermission and no fixed seating. All proceeds go to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition.