Morton Feldman
Triadic Memories

The extreme awe I feel when attempting to desecrate the work in question compels me to procrastinate as much as possible. Therefore, I will start by talking a little about myself, beginning with the stars (provoking general laughter, which I gladly join), since the description of my astrological chart coincides quite a bit with many traits of my character.
The stars tell me I was born under Virgo, with a Virgo rising; Mercury is also in Virgo, while the Moon is in Scorpio.
I am a practical person, with my feet on the ground. Too much so. The obsession with order and cleanliness, my detestable perfectionism, and excessive tendency toward (self-)criticism often prove dysfunctional, making life slightly complicated: mental hypertrophy is not good, insecurity and nervousness are always lurking around the corner. Therefore, I plan everything in detail, even my bathroom breaks; and before making a decision, even a trivial one, I wrack my brain considering all possible options, even though I already know from the start that nothing will be as I want it to be.
At first glance, my personality might reveal seemingly snobbish and aloof manners, but once I get going, I become affable and calm, without ever dulling the edges of my sarcasm. Those who know me well also consider me an excellent confidant, as I don't like to limit myself to organizing just household objects.
More than once, however, someone has said to me: "I care about you and everything else, but you give off the vague impression of being annoyed, perhaps lost in thought, as if you wanted to be elsewhere".

This is not so much because I'm lost in some mythical world but rather due to my urgent need for control, both of myself and others. It’s a flaw I'm learning to manage over time and through mistakes, but my intransigence can be ruthlessly incomprehensible even to me. Adding to the woes is a marked underground sensitivity that predisposes me to quickly intuit the weaknesses of those around me, so I might manipulate them, perhaps use them against them as soon as I sense they are slipping from my egocentrism. And so, the list of burned bridges lengthens ad infinitum, without particular remorse.
I don't know how accurate the above quotation can be, but it has certainly pinpointed a crucial aspect: regardless of extroversion, I fail to be adequately and synchronously emotional.

It is in music (but also in books, movies) that I seek what I cannot afford myself in everyday life: the music that moves me, that excites me, that scares me, destroys me, perplexes me, assaults me, caresses me, cheers me; I really seek everything, at least here I don’t set those bloody limits! Even though, needless to say, coldness retains an almost exclusive allure. I believe I've listened to an indeterminate number of albums, artists making music that can be called icy: in rock as in metal, then industrial, IDM, ambient... all possible shades of coldness; but always associated with some purely vicarious emotion. A combined effort principally of the artist, and secondly of the listener, to evoke or recreate feelings. Music might have been created for this since the dawn of humanity (if you think about it, perhaps primordial percussion echoed the beats of our hearts!), and today more than ever remains the most widespread and abused artistic expression to stir spirits, giving us the illusion of delving deep within ourselves, in a world where the narcissism of emotions reigns.
Yet I wonder: is it possible to delve deep through music, renouncing the dogma of emotionality?

Even in my lack of expertise in modern classical, I believe I found an answer in the uniquely daunting repertoire of New York’s Morton Feldman. Particularly Triadic Memories, composed in his later period (1981) and dedicated to the prodigious pianist Aki Takahashi, remains a great starting point, as well as one of the best examples of his personal conception of serialism: a language devoid of form and symmetry, entirely subordinate to the inconsistency of memory.
The duration of the piece, solely for piano, varies significantly according to interpretations: the tempo is not specified in the score and thus is at the discretion of the performer. Marilyn Nonken’s version (93 minutes) is, for example, much appreciated, but Takahashi’s, although faster (60 minutes), seems to better align with Feldman’s desire to deprive the piano of its attack, making it an instrument of pure resonance. An impossible feat, but the pianist’s delicate and antiseptic touch, with the help of the resonance pedal and especially a ritualistic devotion, slowly immerses us in this dark, flat, phantasmagoric ocean, made of chords succeeding without following any scheme, thus violating the perception of time. Takahashi exercises an almost medium-like control over the absence of patterns (Why Patterns?, indeed). And it’s no wonder that much of Feldman’s works reach inaccessible durations; think of the String Quartet no.2 monument with its indecipherable six hours: the sensation is always that of being before a carpet as large as the solar system, whose irregular patterns can be grasped only in small part. In short, they last so long, so very long, too long, and never enough.

Technical details aside (I’m neither an essayist nor an expert musician, let’s meet halfway), the most extraordinary aspect of it remains, unsurprisingly, inside me. The silences, the pauses between chords; the charade of notes suspended in nothingness; the indefinite repetitions; the arbitrary transition from one melody to another; the denial of any sentiment: this piece does something incredibly strange to my brain. I could call it unsettling, terrifying, but paradoxically (it’s really hard to explain, forgive the abstruseness) it has nothing to do with the musical aspect per se. Nor do I associate it with situations where I happened to listen to it (we all get emotional with some record because we listened to it in the past, perhaps in a particular or outstanding moment of our life).
Listening to Triadic Memories, for me, is like raising my eyes to the night sky, and observing a starless celestial vault that tells me nothing about who I am or who I might be. And everything resolves in the mnemonic triad of the title. Me, my past regurgitated from the unconscious, and the inscrutable work of music: the enormous opaque mirror in which I strive to recognize my reflection.