The Graph Music of Morton Feldman by David Cline (review)

Published analytical studies of Morton Feldman's music have been conspicuously sparse for decades. Outside of a handful of journal articles, for nearly two decades the main source was a collection of essays edited by Thomas DeLio (The Music of Morton Feldman [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996]). After a long wait, it seems that the proverbial dam is breaking, as David Cline's book follows closely on the heels of Alistair Noble's recent study, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). As the title indicates, Cline's book focuses almost entirely on Feldman's graph compositions, which have received little attention in the literature on Feldman's music.

In the introduction, Cline makes a compelling case for a thorough study of Feldman's graphs. Though they were not the first indeterminate works in the history of music, they were the first to explore pitch indeterminacy, and Feldman's innovations clearly influenced other composers in America and Europe. Most importantly, Cline makes the point that the graphs "represent approximately one-quarter of Feldman's published output from the 1950s and 1960s and one-eighth of his entire catalogue, meaning that an understanding of his music as a whole is impossible without recourse to them" (p. 1). Cline's book represents the first overview of Feldman's graph music, covering all seventeen published graphs and two unpublished graphs. In terms of structure, Feldman's graphs are approached "from several thematic perspectives," rather than covering each work individually (p. 4). One of the main aims of the book "is to reconstruct Feldman's own ideas about these works. … Feldman's own words—from published and unpublished sources—are therefore centre stage in what follows" (p. 6).

Following the introduction, Cline provides a chronological overview in two parts ("Early graphs, 1950–1953" and "Later graphs, 1958–1967"). In the first chapter, Cline effortlessly jumps between various published and unpublished accounts of Feldman's graph works, exploring a wide range of possible influences that may have inspired Feldman's notational innovations. The early graphs are comprised of the series of works titled Projections and Intersections, which are discussed in relation to the activities of Feldman's circle of composer friends (John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff) as well as concurrent trends in Abstract Expressionism. Each graph is also described from a listener's perspective, and Cline effectively uses his aural observations to make connections with other musical and artistic trends of the time. This is an excellent chapter and the first of many that include reproductions of Feldman's unpublished sketches.

In the second chapter, Cline addresses the absence of graphs in Feldman's music from 1953–58. Among several possible reasons Cline explores, the most intriguing is also the most mundane: Feldman may have resumed graph composition as a career move due to the "growing interest in indeterminacy and graphic notation in his circle and elsewhere" (p. 48). An excellent overview of the late graphs (1958–67) follows, with sections on Ixion (a work Feldman composed for Merce Cunningham's Summerspace) and Atlantis standing out as particularly exemplary. Cline concludes the chapter with an exploration of Feldman's late graphs that include some elements of conventional notation.

Unfortunately, following the extraordinary quality of the chronological overview, the chapter on "Notation" is tedious and overwrought. Cline was obliged to address this topic at some point in the book, given that Feldman did not always fully explain the alternative notation in his graphs. Some of the massive amount of information included in this chapter will certainly be useful for performers and conductors of Feldman's graph music. However, if this was Cline's intention, the material could have been condensed for easier use. More than anything, this chapter seems to break the flow of the book and perhaps would have been better suited as an appendix.

Thankfully, with the fourth chapter...