Upon reading Mr. Harmony's above-quoted contribution, we have been inspired to present the third of an occasional series about the absurd antics of witless twentieth-century pseudo-composers. To-day's subject is M. Feldman (1926 to 1987); but first a word about his teacher!

Wallingford Riegger (a curious name is not it - as strange as that of Alonzo Church) lived from 1885 to 1961.


He wrote in all four symphonies and three string quartets (what was good enough for Brahms, you know . . .), as well as a piano quintet and much else. (We shall ignore something entitled "Quintuple Jazz" for orchestra, mercifully unpublished, with which he blotted his copybook rather.) He admired Schoenberg's later style and was jolly good (it is said) at counterpoint. What a pity it is that we have heard none of his works. Perhaps a Member or two can tell us more about him; overall he was it is evident a steady sensible sort of fellow. How disappointing for him it must then have been to see one of his pupils turning out so badly!

The pupil to whom we refer was the man Feldman; let us begin with his photograph. Here we see him capering tieless in the foreground, with two of his countrymen tittering behind. It does not augur well!


Next we pick up one of his pieces. It was put together in 1962 and is entitled, we have no idea why, The Straits of Magellan. Can any Member tell us what the title means? Anyway it already augurs even less well!

Now the job of a composer is to write music is it not? We imagine a composer sitting at his desk with a ream of music paper in front of him, and from dawn to dusk, if he is sufficiently enthusiastic about his task, he labours away writing crotchets and minims on that paper, designed for the use of his executants down the ages. Well! An undertaking like that was evidently too hard, or too good, for this Northern American charmer! Here is the first page of what he actually wrote for the work in question:


Each box here represents a unit of the basic tempo (mm. 88). An empty box stands for silence. The other boxes are to be realized by improvisation, except that the symbol in each box restricts what the performer can do:

Arabic numeral: Play that number of notes (any notes!) in succession, except in the case of the pianist who is to play them (anything he likes!) as a chord.
Roman numeral: Play that number of notes (anything at all!) as a chord.
F: Flutter-tongue one (any!) tone.
T: Double-tongue one (any!) tone.
Diamond: Play (anything!) as a harmonic.

The dynamics are specified as "very low throughout"; and "all sounds are to be played with a minimum of attack."

Do other Members get as we do the feeling that one or two essential elements are missing from this "score" (which must have taken all of two hours to put together even though there is neither rhyme nor reason to it)? The delineation between composer and executant has been absolutely destroyed; the composer is explicitly and shamelessly telling us "I cannot be bothered; you do something - anything - it hardly matters what." It is clear that Feldman had just a vague impression (as a child might have) of the surface sound of music and no conception at all of its nature or essence. It need hardly be added need it that we have never heard any of the wretched fellow's stuff and never willingly will. Was he actually insane? We leave that for Members to judge at their leisure - perhaps the question is worthy of an entirely new thread, even; and in the mean time let us learn all there is to know about the compositions - genuine ones his - of the evidently unjustly neglected Wallingford Riegger!

Now when Mozart did that, and performed his piano concertos with the ink still wet on the page blah blah, he was a genius self-immolating in the white heat of creativity blah blah blah blah. What is it that's actually wrong with writing a score in two hours, or for that matter two minutes?


Doesn't that comment belong in the thread devoted to the quartets of Sydney Grew?

Nor shall I cast the first stone! Though I think I can be excused for thinking that a composer such as Grew, being as he is so forthright, nay almost libellous, in his opinions of his colleagues, ought at some point to hold up his own no doubt infinitely superior works for scrutiny and comparison, as we and most of our fellow penpushing Members are at all times prepared to do notwithstanding our unpreparedness to make such inflated claims for ourselves as to suggest that Messrs Feldman and Stockhausen are respectively "witless" and "puerile" next to ourselves.

Is this the grewsome spelling of "Reger"?

After all the Chaicoffsskyy and Riphiscorsettsoff stuff, I have lost track of how anyone's name is spelt...

That's true, C-D!

Riegger's Study in Sonority reminded me a bit of Crawford Seeger's Andante for Strings. I've always been an admirer of Ruggles's music, ever since I heard that old recording of Sun-treader by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Yes, they both mean something for me too, Dishy. Although I have many American symphonists represented on the shelves, Riegger is an omission: not easy to find, at least at  sensible prices, as I've shown above. But, as martle has pointed out, MTT did sterling work for Ruggles, and Sun-treader is usually lurking in the DG catalogue somewhere. (Incidentally, I still feel that MTT has certain strengths - Stravinsky for example.) It's strange though that if Riegger's music is of such high quality, it's so little recorded, and that was has been consigned to disc is so old with no modern replacements, when so many other American composers have been revisited recently; though the comparative lack of works by Roger Sessions (whose music I've so far found unendearing) represented in the catalogue might be of the same order.

There used to be a double CD on CBS of Ruggles' complete works, whose extent made Webern and even Varèse look prolific. (He spent decades working on an opera based on Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell, getting about 80% of (presumably) its vocal score finished, and then destroyed it.) While Sun-Treader is definitely more striking than anything else there's another orchestral piece called Organum, and Portals for string orchestra, which are almost as impressive. I wonder why that's never played... or at least recorded. The liner notes recounted the story about the piano chord.

Sorry Bryn, I typed CD but meant LP.