I recently found myself listening to a wonderful piece of music that I’ve always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with: Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (1971). My old friend Tobias Fischer, a music writer known for his excellent Fifteen Questions series of interviews, was working on a book about the relationship between the painter Mark Rothko and music and had asked for my thoughts on the piece, which is Feldman’s only composition that directly addresses one of his most foundational influences.
Going back and listening to it again, I found myself struggling to understand why I was so hesitant about what is clearly a very beautiful and compelling composition. I said to Tobias:
I just feel like there’s a degree to which Feldman—in his music itself—never really fully addressed the influence of Rothko. Not like he did with, for example, Samuel Beckett, and his exhaustive engagement with his work. And that was the realization I had, going back and listening to Rothko Chapel again. It’s not For Mark Rothko! Whatever we might imagine that piece to be.
Think of it this way. Let’s travel to a different universe, an alternate timeline, another world. The year is 1993. Feldman never got pancreatic cancer, he’s still going. He’s working on a piece called For Mark Rothko. What does that sound like? It definitely doesn’t sound like Rothko Chapel! Whatever it is, it’s a completely different piece, a completely different relation to time and temporality, a totally different music. It’s maybe five hours long—totally disorienting, an infinite flat plane, dissonant and mystical. I’d love to hear it.
Late in life, Feldman had fallen into the habit of titling pieces with a dedication to a friend, teacher, or influence, starting with the word “For.” There’s a For John Cage, a For Bunita Marcus, a For Philip Guston. There’s a For Samuel Beckett, one of several major works that interrogate his relationship with his other great extra-musical influence. But he never wrote a For Mark Rothko.
Morton Feldman has always been closely associated with the Abstract Expressionists, who were his friends and fellow devotees of the Village’s Cedar Tavern, on University and Eighth. And while he may have been personally closer to others within the group, there is no painter whose work speaks more deeply to Feldman’s music than Mark Rothko. Rothko’s vast, flat canvasses reduce painting to its most basic elements of form, color, and texture, while projecting a simultaneous sense of both intense materiality and focused tranquility. They’re works of infinity and eternity expressed in the simplest possible terms, evoking feelings of stillness, stasis, and timelessness while nevertheless remaining profoundly, physically tactile. They seem like the closest possible visual analogue to what Feldman’s music would ultimately become as it expanded outward in the last decade of his life to encompass works of tremendous duration and tremendous stillness. These are the pieces—like Triadic Memories, Three Voices, String Quartet 2, and Piano and String Quartet, to name a few personal favorites—for which Feldman is best known and most widely appreciated. Ranging up to six hours in duration, the late period works stand like slices of frozen time stretched across eternity, hovering on the edge of silence, yet fractured into ever-shifting, endless complexities of pattern.
It would therefore seem like there should be no greater confluence of the Rothko-Feldman connection than Feldman’s most overt homage to the painter, Rothko Chapel. Yet there’s something oddly antithetical about it to the very aspects of Rothko’s work that so appealed to Feldman, and that so spectacularly came to dominate his large-scale, late period compositions.
Rothko Chapel, written in 1971, arrives a full decade before the great temporal expansion that would mark the start of Feldman’s late period. Commissioned for the Rothko Chapel—an octagonal space for contemplation in Houston, Texas structured around fourteen Rothko paintings—Feldman’s piece is scored for choir, viola, celesta, and percussion, and was written in the wake of Rothko’s death by suicide in 1970. Set against our expectations of late-period Feldman, Rothko Chapel is a different beast; it has a drama to it, a narrative and directionality, a sense of linearity, with distinct breaks in the score that are sometimes characterized as actual movements (a formal structure seen rarely if ever in his work). There’s timpani, and big, dramatic hits that sound like church bells ringing. A soprano line, written on the day of Igor Stravinsky’s funeral, almost feels like fragments of a song. But most striking of all is a beautiful and emotional “Hebraic melody” Feldman wrote at age fifteen as a student at what we now call LaGuardia High School, a melody that he picked up from his childhood draft and incorporated into Act V of the piece, closing the work’s dramatic structure with what can only be described as a dénouement.
Rothko Chapel is a gorgeous piece, and if I had never heard, or heard of, Feldman, I’d be desperately asking who this composer was and rushing out to find their music. But I always knew it was Feldman. And the dramatic arc of the piece sits uncomfortably with our sense, today, of both Feldman and his work’s unique relationship with Rothko’s. Of course, Rothko Chapel is a decidedly middle-period piece, and it’s unfair to judge it in reference to the late-period masterpieces that hadn’t yet been written. The more human-scale storytelling of a Rothko Chapel shouldn’t have to conform to the cosmic vistas of the late-period works, with their extremities of duration and their scrambling of our notions of temporality. Yet somehow the significance of Rothko’s influence on Feldman doesn’t seem satisfied by the piece we have as Rothko Chapel.