Time Canvasses - Morton Feldman and Abstract Expressionism

Published: Feb. 7, 2024, 4:52 p.m.

In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art.\nIt was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, \u201cWhat was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That\u2019s why it all happened\u201d.\nThe composer Samuel Andreyev shows how composers and artists in New York in this period went about the difficult business of wrestling with a new abstract language, often at great cost to themselves, to produce some of the masterpieces of post war American art.\nSamuel focuses on the powerfully productive relationships that Feldman had with the abstract expressionists, Philip Guston, and Mark Rothko, who showed him by example how to set his sounds free, in the same way their paintings set colours free. \nFeldman even called his own compositions, \u2018Time Canvasses\u2019, where he said, he more or less primed the canvas with an overall hue of music. This is a clue to the unorthodox way Feldman\u2019s music - which can be both very long, and almost always very quiet - remarkably blurs what we imagine to be the boundary between music and painting.\nA Soundscape Production, produced by Andrew Carter.