Patterns in a Chromatic Field
Morton Feldman
Patterns in a Chromatic Field
For me sound was the hero, and it still is. I feel that I am subservient. I feel that I listen to my sounds, and I do what they tell me, not what I tell them. Because I owe my life to these sounds. They gave me a life.
Morton Feldman
The echoing fabric of nature.
Towards an aesthetic of the new sensitivity.
From the perspective of today's looming climate mutation, Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field sounds like an entrancing illuminating musical treatise on the fundamental building blocks of nature. With slow swaying repetitive sound patterns, the music offers a poetic contemplation on the subtle beauty of nature's ubiquitous mathematical patterns and form principles. Patterns as generated by physical and chemical forces such as fractals in snowflakes, branching trees and ferns; spiral patterns in sunflowers, pine cones and shells; Voronoi patterns such as dots, stripes and tessellations in the skin of zebras, leaf structures or honeycombs.
Pythagoras already explained patterns in nature like the harmonies of music as arising from number, which he took to be the basic constituent of existence.
Feldman's obsession with patterns was partly inspired by what he called " crippled symmetry", striking simultaneous symmetry and asymmetry, which he observed in the abstract patterns of the art of ancient hand-woven nomad rugs from the Zagros Mountains in Iran. John Cage's adage of seeing art as "imitation of nature in its manner of operation" also influenced the formation of Feldman's unique ontology of sound.
In doing so, Feldman focused on a new way of ‘non-anthropocentric’ listening that sensitises the listener to the undisturbed appearance of sound in time, its tendency to form patterns, its natural decay and the subsequent necessity of reiteration.
As an abstract parable on the fabric of patterns of nature, Patterns in a Chromatic Field brings a poetic evocation of nature's mesmerizing grammar. How patterns fold and unfold as an ode to the vibrating earth.
Arne Deforce
One might call them time canvasses in which
I more or less prime the canvass with
an overall hue of music.
Morton Feldman
The videos below shows several excerpts of the 90’ live performance of Morton Feldman’s unparalleled masterpiece ‘Patterns in a Chromatic Field’ (1981). Yutaka Oya and myself recorded the piece in 2007 for the label AEON Outhere at Concertgebouw Bruges. For the concert performances Visual Kitchen projects a live processed video footage based on abstract patterns from nature. The images themselves are slowly built up (or broken down) line by line, as if woven thread by thread, alluding to Feldman's idea of weaving patterns of sound inspired by his fascination for Middle Eastern nomadic rugs.
WATCH & LISTEN TEASER 01
WATCH & LISTEN TEASER 02
Take an object.
Do something to it.
Do something else to it.
Do something else to it
Jasper Johns
Sketchbook notes, interviews, New York, 1996
ABCDE
CBADE
CBEAE
DCBCD
EBADC
EBABE
CCAED
Patterns in a Chromatic Field, Order of patterns, page 1
A pattern relies on three characteristics:
a motif or unity, repetition and
a system of organization.
We always say Gertrude Stein – she said, ‘In the beginning was the word. Then they put two words together, then they made a sentence, then they made a paragraph and they forgot the word’.
For before let it before to be before spell to be before to be before to have to be to be for before to be tell to be to having held to be to be for before to call to be for to be before to till until to be till before to be for before to be until to be for before to for to be for before will for before to be shall to be to be for to be for to be before still to be will before to be before for to be to be.
Gertrude Stein, Patriarchal Poetry 1927
That’s what it’s all about.
What it is. How it is.
Patterns in a Chromatic Field.
Do it one way and do it another.
Spell it one way, then spell it another way.
Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street