AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The experimental American composer Morton Feldman would have turned 100 years old this week. He was known for pieces that were quiet, spare, unsettling and sometimes hourslong. As The New York Times wrote in his obituary in 1987, quote, "his music bored and offended many," but, quote, "it enraptured others." And enraptured is how you could describe the collective of pianists and other musicians who gathered this week in Los Angeles to celebrate the composer's centennial. The collective is called Piano Spheres, and they celebrated in a way that might have pleased Morton Feldman himself - with two marathon free concerts, each more than six hours long.
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TOM WELSH: My name is Tom Welsh. I'm the executive director of Piano Spheres here in Los Angeles. One of the magics of music is this - the illusion of movement in time and in space. And Feldman managed to stop all of that and create some music that is very still, almost like a glacier, where time is suspended.
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WELSH: He has his own sound world. And that sensibility, plus the great duration of the late masterworks, creates this body of work that is unlike anything else, really. And it's very beautiful. It can be deeply immersive.
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VICKI RAY: I think for some people that have certain expectations about the narrative flow of a piece of music, they may find this music challenging or difficult. It might drive them a little crazy. But the music does change and it does have surprises, just maybe not the ones you were expecting, which is wonderful. It's what I love about it.
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RAY: My name is Vicki Ray, and I'm a pianist here in Los Angeles and one of the founding members of Piano Spheres. I think one of the things many people don't realize about Feldman's music is that it's incredibly complex rhythmically. So while what you're hearing may sound very floaty and very free, we're actually counting like crazy in our heads. Oftentimes in this music, the meter will change from measure to measure. So if you're hearing a waltz, you might be feeling one, two, three, one, two, three, for the whole piece. But in this music, when I'm playing it, I might be thinking, one, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four. One, two, three. One, two. One, two, three, four, five. So it sounds like this. One, two, three, four, five.
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RAY: One, two, three, four. One, two, three. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, five.
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RAY: Like that (laughter).
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RAY: It might sound rather exhausting, but to be honest, it keeps your brain so completely engaged that the time flies by.
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ERIKA DUKE-KIRKPATRICK: People have said to me, oh, I imagine Feldman as being tall and very thin and very quiet. It's like, that's exactly the opposite of what he was (laughter). He was like your uncle at Thanksgiving - always had funny stories, always was a bit loud. You just hung on to his every word.
My name is Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, and I am a cellist.
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DUKE-KIRKPATRICK: We're looking at the first page of the score. And he would compose with his nose just about an inch or two from the paper. I mean, that's really great handwriting for someone who can't see very well. And he was a great collector of Persian rugs. He loved rugs. But kind of the joke was he could never just look at an entire rug because he couldn't see that far. So what he would do is he would hold the rug up and look at the tiny details inside of each tiny design. A lot of people have said there's a correlation between that and the music - that you're seeing little, tiny bits - beautiful bits of a much larger whole that you almost can't take in at once. It's very magic when you're just experiencing it, I think.
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CONOR HANICK: Often, when we are celebrating centennial years of artists, it's the opportunity to see how that art affects us now.
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HANICK: My name is Conor Hanick, and I am a classical pianist. I think there's a value in looking at Feldman's music now and realizing that he was engaged with a much different musical project than we are used to in 2026. He was asking us, and he continues to ask us, to slow down and listen more deeply, to feel things more deeply. And, you know, what a gift that he gave us that we can kind of return to year after year, and especially on this hundredth birthday.
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CHANG: That was Conor Hanick, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, Vicki Ray and Tom Welsh, speaking with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED editor Christopher Intagliata. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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