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Morton Feldman, "Triadic Memories"
Although a similar CD was released by Sub Rosa 20 years ago, this is not a reissue but a re-recording, an amendment to that 1990 release. Here, Jean-Luc Fafchamps revisits one of Morton Feldman's most popular pieces and casts a new light on it. The themes, which Feldman had developed throughout his life as a composer, are all consolidated into one perfect piece of music. He picks up the delicate beauty of the piece in a different way to his previous recording, a truer rendition of the score but by no means negating the original release.
 
Especially towards the end of his life, Feldman had a keen interest in rugs made by nomadic groups from around the world. Recently, I had the chance to view some of his collection as part of a larger exhibition on Feldman and his personal and creative relationship with modern art. The design of these rugs, much like the paintings he loved so much, informed his own composition techniques. Feldman is well known for his graphic notation in place of traditional music notation and the rugs also influenced the way he conveyed music on paper; the score of Flute and Orchestra is directly comparable to a 19th century prayer rug from Turkey.
However, there are other relationships between his music and these rugs and Triadic Memories highlights at least one of these relationships. In many of the rugs Feldman collected (or at least those on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art), the repetitive patterns that made up the designs seemed to warp and stretch (a "crippled symmetry" in Feldman's own words). In the same way, Triadic Memories is built up around repetitions of notes which change over time. The second or third notes in a three-note motif begin to elongate in comparison to the first or second appearance of the motif much like the designs on the rugs showed distortions in comparison to each other.
Repetitions are not just the main hallmark of this piece but the reason for this new recording entirely. Fafchamps originally released a version of Triadic Memories on Sub Rosa in 1990 which was based on a 1987 publication of the score. In that particular edition, there were directions over the notes to be repeated but they did not specify how many times the notes were to be repeated in each case so Fafchamps repeated the measures once and moved on to the next one. He later learned that the different measures had different numbers of repetitions associated with them (clarified on a later publication of the score which he works from here) and felt the need to re-record the piece.
This is a wonderful thing as this current recording is a beautiful (if rather fast in comparison to some of the other recordings by other pianists) version of Triadic Memories. The subtle shifts in the length of the notes and their exact pitch (what sounds like a repetition of an earlier measure is actually a semitone higher later on) give the impression of patterns reflected on water, the ripples breaking up the image while retaining its character perfectly. With this stretching of the music, Feldman's piece plays with the sensation of time. This is typical of Feldman's approach throughout his career as he used pauses and silences like his contemporaries in the visual arts used blank canvas and monochrome spaces to fix the various elements of their painting in to a composition. The notes and chords of Triadic Memories are suspended in the air like the forms of one of Franz Kline's black and white paintings or indeed any of Mark Rothko's later works. In particular, the bleeding of Rothko's colors into each other is directly comparable to Feldman’s stretching of the notes. Fafchamps masterfully conveys these ideas through his playing; his fingers brushing the keys rather than pressing them.
As aforementioned, the presence of this "corrected" recording of Triadic Memories does not replace a "faulty" version (Fafchamps himself recognizes this in the liner notes). Instead, this is purely an alternative view of the piece much like the longer renditions also out there (such as Marilyn Nonken's which pushes the piece to over 90 minutes). Like most modern composers, Feldman allowed for variation in a way that contemporary interpretations of classical music have usually stifled. This stretching of the composition, let alone the notes, again comes back to the Oriental rugs and their own wear and tear from use.
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