Morton Feldman, the great mid-twentieth-century American (Brooklyn-born, Russian Jewish) composer whose music is as lush, spare, and quiet as his person was large, brash, and obnoxious, liked to tell a story about what he learned from the transplanted French composer Edgard Varèse. I take this story from a transcription of a seminar Feldman gave in Frankfurt in 1984:
I had one lesson on the street with Varèse, one lesson on the street, it lasted half a minute, it made me an orchestrator. He said, “What are you writing now, Morton?” I told him. He says, “Make sure you think about the time it takes from the stage to go out there into the audience. Let me know when you get a performance, I’d like to hear it.” And he walked away. That was my one lesson, it took an instant, one lesson and I started out, I was about seventeen when I knew him, and from then on, I started to listen.1
I would like to end my study with a little reading of this story so that I can sketch, quickly and with a few broad strokes, several key aspects of the poetics that I have called transferential. I might just as well have called these poetics out there since the work of all the thinkers, writers, and artists I have discussed can be characterized as out there or, more simply, out. I am using this term primarily in a musical rather than a sexual sense. I first encountered this musical meaning about fifteen years ago in a New York record store that used the term out to name a kind of music that was otherwise difficult or impossible to classify. Unlike the categories of experimental, avant-garde, or contemporary, which it closely resembles, the idea of out music comes (as far as I can tell) from jazz improvisation and the practice of playing out: playing outside the melody or rhythm, and ultimately playing out at the very edge of the performer’s abilities to make musical sense. Even when it owes little or nothing to jazz sounds or idioms (as in Feldman’s work), out music gets way out there in its expressive means and commitments. These are the meanings of out that I want meditate on briefly by way of conclusion.
In the story that Feldman tells, Varèse directs the younger composer to pay attention not primarily to a composition’s structure or musical form but to “the time it takes from the stage to go out there into the audience.” This is not the conventional emphasis on temporality in composition (time signature) or even performance (tempo) but something else: the temporality of audience reception. What could this mean? One clue lies in Feldman’s statement that Varèse’s lesson made him into “an orchestrator,” that is, the person responsible for instrumentation and musical arrangement. An orchestrator knows the distinctive characteristics of musical instruments and, often, performers and deals in dynamics, tonal registers, timbres, how notes vary depending on acoustic source and performance technique. Composition-as-orchestration, Feldman’s story suggests, should include thinking about the pragmatics of instrumentation and arrangement, not only musical form but also force: the physical properties of instruments, the specific qualities of the players, those elements that somehow affect listeners most directly. Here is one important aspect of the work of the writers and thinkers that I have studied in this book: an attention, in aesthetic composition, to the idiosyncrasies of materials in performance as it conditions the movement out there from composition to audience and back again.
Feldman tends to compose with a few notes spaced out over great (sometimes extreme) lengths of time. As Alex Ross describes it, “In confining himself to so little material, Feldman releases the expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the surrounding silence.”2 Feldman’s use of expressive silences in his compositions brings me to another and related aspect of out there poetics: the quality of listening or receptiveness. Both heroes in his story, Varèse the teacher (“I’d like to hear it”) and Feldman the student (“I started to listen”), take up the role of careful and interested listener. Feldman’s work tries to induce this attitude of receptiveness in performers as well as audiences. In a set of liner notes for the album New Directions in Music 2 (1959) the poet Frank O’Hara described the role of unpredictability in Feldman’s early piano works, written using a graphic notation that required a performer to choose which specific notes to play (within given ranges) during a performance. “In Feldman’s work unpredictability involves the performer and audience much in the same way it does the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and intensity,” O’Hara writes. “What Feldman is assuming, and it is a courageous assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and inspired musician who has the best interests of the work at heart.”3 In Feldman’s musical compositions receptiveness involves listening in a way that is potentially contagious: if the performer listens to the demands of the composition, then the audience may find itself doing something similar. This is another aspect of out there poetics: reception, or the act of listening, can re-create the space of composition.
Such receptiveness can have dramatic consequences. In Feldman’s story young Morton is, in an “instant,” transformed and launched into lifelong listening and composing habits. The drama of receptiveness and sudden change can take place anywhere, anytime, in a concert hall audience paying to listen to contemporary music or as a result of a chance encounter on the street. The high theatricality of this drama is communicated through Feldman’s rhythmic, repetitive style: “one lesson on the street with Varèse, one lesson on the street, it lasted half a minute.” About half a minute is as long as this story takes to tell. One way that Feldman transfers his exchange from street to seminar room is by reproducing the temporal frame of the experience, with its dramatic structure of endings (“And he walked away”) leading to new beginnings (“I started out”). Street theater can become pedagogy because Feldman’s style reflexively insists on the performativity of everyday conversation in which verbal instruction takes instant effect as an act of almost magical transformation.
These are some of the key characteristics of the out there or transferential poetics that I have discussed in this book: a close attention to the materialities of compositional force, a commitment to listening as it re-creates the space of composition, and a keen interest in the transforming possibilities of theatricality and the theatricalization of writing. My work in this book has banked on a nervy commitment to paying attention to affective responses as they can make us acquainted with what motivates composition. In an earlier, twentieth-century moment indebted to classical Freudian theory, this kind of inquiry into motivation would have been characterized as trying to go deep. But the works of Poe, James, Klein, Stein, Tomkins, Bion, Warhol, Feldman, and others invite critics to describe and understand the phenomena of feeling and thinking as they go out and across.