 C’est sa rencontre avec John Cage (1912-1992) au New York Philharmonic, un soir de 1950 à l’occasion de la représentation de la Symphonie op. 21 d'Anton Webern (1883-1945), qui pousse le jeune pianiste Morton Feldman à se libérer des systèmes compositionnels contraignants. Il emménage dans la Bozza’s Mansion, sur Grand Street, où vit Cage ; sous son influence, il donne au hasard une place dans son écriture, expérimente des notations graphiques inédites (qu’il délaisse bientôt au profit d’une précision plus grande bridant l’improvisation), intègre, autour de Cage, l’informelle New York School, avec Earle Brown (1926-2002) ou Christian Wolff (1934-) - le plus jeune et le premier à bâtir son propre langage musical, au travers de pièces minimalistes axées sur un nombre limité de hauteurs dans différents contextes rythmiques. Quand, en 1985, Feldman compose For Bunita Marcus (Bunita est l’étudiante en qui il place le plus d’espoir, source d’inspiration et amie intime jusqu’à sa mort), il a déjà livré bataille au format traditionnel des 20 ou 25 minutes : For Philip Guston (1984) ou String Quartet II (1983) durent respectivement près de 4 et 6 heures. Au-delà d’une heure et demie, c’est une autre affaire, explique-t-il, les choses deviennent plus complexes, plus intriquées et nécessitent une concentration accrue. De cette musique étale, au contraste minimal mais aux ombres riches, où le temps fait du surplace et s’englue dans le présent, se dégage une sérénité et une quiétude tout à l’opposé du monumental qu’évoque sa longueur. Là où rien ne semble se passer, tout s’attend, sans impatience et avec un plaisir intense. (Bernard Vincken) For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II). These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to sustain a single movement, a single journey, and we inevitably have this in mind as we take the first step: so this is how it starts. For Bunita Marcus, like all the late Feldman works, is an adventure that takes a relatively long time to play out, but which is remarkably lacking in heaviness. We may expect an epic, but we get something much subtler. Indeed, what we get is the present moment, in all its beauty, over and over again. If we surrender to the musical image that is right in front of us, a piece like For Bunita Marcus is an easy world to enter into and to explore with Feldman. We step into the silence after that first six-note motto, and we wonder: What comes next? The next hour and a quarter is spent doing nothing more than discovering what comes next— and the next thing after that, and the next after that. For Bunita Marcus is performed here by Aki Takahashi, one of the greatest Feldman intrepreters. After Triadic Memories, Feldman composed all his piano music for Aki Takahashi. In remarks made before the U.S. premiere of Triadic Memories, he described Takahashi as “absolutely still,” “undisturbed, unperturbed, as if in a concentrated prayer.” He found that her concentration was transmitted to the audience; a performance by her was “like a séance.” Ms. Takahashi premiered the work in Middleburg, The Netherlands in 1985. Through her performance, the journey of For Bunita Marcus is rich is color, pacing and poetry.
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