How To Justify Spending $350 On Headphones

Morton Feldman
Composition: Rothko Chapel

Once upon a time, I was a new grad student at the University of Victoria.  Given that "new" and "dumb" are practically synonymous when it comes to grad students, it follows that once upon a time I was a dumb grad student at the University of Victoria.  Those were heady days, hanging out with other smart "dumb" grad students, spending hours, days, weeks listening obsessively to one composer or another, attending seminars with world-renowned musicologists.  An excellent adventure, to be sure.  Being dumb, however, I still hadn't found academic focus, and I spent many sleepless nights contemplating my thesis topic.  Eventually I pared my choices to two: one based on a relatively obscure type of wind-band music that I seemed to hear in the symphonic repertoire of various Classical composers, and the other on the music of  Morton Feldman.  I chose the former, partly because my thesis adviser's specialty was the music of the Classical period, partly because this seemed to be a relatively unexplored and therefore potentially academically beneficial field, partly because as a bassoonist I might have special insight into the topic, but mostly because at the time the UVic musicology faculty couldn't care less about Morton Feldman.  Stupid UVic Department of Musicology (circa 1998).

At any rate, I spent a lot of time listening very carefully to Feldman`s music in the late 90s, and grew to love it deeply.  Feldman is an American minimalist - a true minimalist, not a maximal minimalist a la Reich, Adams et al - with a profound interest in the nature of sound.  Listen to his music closely and you begin to enter the sound itself, a sort of three-dimensional space that shimmers and vibrates, disintegrates and coalesces with the slight gradations of timbre and subtle combinations of harmonic partials.  Some argue that Rothko Chapel* is his masterpiece, and I agree. I tend to hear it in terms of sound "spaces," with layers of rounded tones mingling with more angular ones, creating ephemeral, constantly morphing tonal landscapes.

Tonight, after parents or siblings or significant others have gone to bed, after the TV has been turned off and the books and magazines have been set aside, turn off the lights, close your eyes, and listen.

Preferably with these headphones.  Bought them a week ago.  Jealous?  You should be.

Oh, and next blog post I promise to get back to all things pop/rock/jazz/blues/noise/folk/punk related. Some days you just can't ignore Morton Feldman, I'm afraid.



* Written in celebration of the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Houston and dedicated to the work of Mark Rothko, a close friend of Feldman`s and one of the great American abstract expressionist painters.