Chris: Short film by Antony Berrios

Faith by Antony Berrios

FADE IN:

INT. APARTMENT/HALLWAY DOOR - MORNING

The face of DARIUSH, a young Iranian boy of ten with brown
short hair, fair skin and big brown eyes stare at us through
a 1/2 open door.

The muted sound of Iranian music plays from somewhere
within the apartment.

Obscured a bit by the door frame Dariush watches his father
ALI, late forties, dark beard and brown eyes. As he moves
back and forth from dresser to his suitcase as he packs his
belongings. His clothes are casual, black slacks and a dark
blue polo shirt. His mother DORRI, forties, brown hair
pinned up. A few strands hang in her face. She holds a
tissue up to her face. She sits on the bed next to the
suitcase. She looks as though she has been crying.

Assorted family pictures are on display on the top of the
dark oak dresser. Clothes are strewn about upon the bed.
Ali picks up one of the pictures that rest on the dresser
and puts it in the suitcase. Ali sits on the bed next to
Dorri. Ali touches her hand then kisses her cheek he moves
back the few stands of hair that were in her face.

Dariush accidentally scrapes the door.

Dorri looks up to the door.

Dariush's eyes begin to well up as he watches his father
and mother.

DORRI
Whose there?

Suddenly Dariush turns and runs away from the door.

Ali walks to the door and opens it. He catches a glimpse
of Dariush running down the hallway.

INT. ALI'S APARTMENT - CONTINUOUS

Dariush runs down the hallway past the kitchen.

Dariush flings open the front door and runs out of the
apartment slamming the door shut behind him.

EXT. ALI'S APARTMENT - CONTINUOUS

Dariush almost runs into Fariba (40's) and Shaheen (40's)
who are walking up to the front door of his family's
apartment.

FARIBA
Dariush!

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2.


Dariush screams past ELIZABETH a woman who lives in the
apartment building who has her arms full of shopping bags.
She moves off the sidewalk onto the grass to avoid crashing
into Dariush and drops a few packages to the ground.

FARIBA (CONT'D)
What is he doing?

Dariush disappears into the distance.

INT. FRONT DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

Dorri wearing a green apron that reads "Kiss the Cook" now
stands at the front door with her sister Fariba and her
husband Shaheen.

FARIBA is a short woman in her mid forties. Her hair is
pulled back tight into a small bun onto the top of her head.
SHAHEEN her husband is slightly balding and has a thick
mustache. He appears to be in his late forties.

Dorri holds three year old LILLY in her arms. Lilly has a
small little yellow matching outfit on. Yellow small shorts
yellow shirt. The shirt reads "Kiss me Too"

FARIBA greets Dorri, kisses both her cheeks. Dorri grabs a
small bag of groceries from Fariba with her right hand while
still carrying Lilly in her left.

DORRI
Here, let me help.

SHAHEEN
Hello.

Shaheen moves in and kisses Dorri and both cheeks.

FARIBA
Get Ali to help you with the other
things in the car. Dariush past us
as he ran out.

Dorri shakes her head.

DORRI
Let's bring all this into the
kitchen.

INT. KITCHEN - AFTERNOON

They put all the groceries down. Fariba starts to take
things out of the bags.

Dorri walks over to the hallway and yells for Ali.

DORRI
Ali! Ali! Come help.

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3.


Dorri walks back into the kitchen. Shaheen walks out the
front door to the car.

EXT. APT. COMPLEX - AFTERNOON

Shaheen walks up to the trunk of his dark blue CRV. He
opens up the trunk. He pauses and lights up a cigarette as
some children run by him chasing each other and laughing.

Ali walks out of the front door toward him. Shaheen walks
up to him. They shake hands and kiss on both cheeks.

ALI
Hi.

Shaheen starts to grab some groceries, his cigarette in his
mouth dangling. Ali moves around to the other side of the
car to take some bags when Shaheen hands an envelope to Ali.

ALI (CONT'D)
What's this?

SHAHEEN
For you.

Ali puts the bags back down and opens up the envelope.
Inside the envelope Ali finds a thick stack of US $100.00
bills. He thumbs through the hundred dollar bills. Then
closes the envelope back up and hands it back to Shaheen.

ALI
Thank you very much, but I can't
accept this.

SHAHEEN
Please.

ALI
No I can't.

SHAHEEN
You must.

ALI
You embarrass me. I can't take
your money. Please. I don't know
what to do?

SHAHEEN
This is all a big mistake you'll
see. You'll be back before you know
it.

ALI
Mistake.

Ali shakes his head.

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4.


Shaheen reaches into his jacket and hands Ali a piece of
paper.

SHAHEEN
Take my sister's address.

Ali puts the paper with the address into his back pocket.
They grab the rest of the bags. Shaheen closes the back of
the car and they both head toward the front door.

EXT. A LARGE FIELD - DAY

Dariush runs in a large field. We follow beside him as he
jumps over tree limbs and weaves around bushes. He runs
faster and faster not slowing down. Then suddenly he trips.
He takes a nasty fall onto the ground. He picks himself up.
His palms are slightly bleeding. His chin is scraped up.
He walks over to a tree and sits under it.

A stray cat wanders near him. The cat looks beat up and
old. It pants hard.

DARIUSH
Hello. Come here.

The cat moves slowly, crawling on the ground. Dariush
moves over to it. As Dariush takes a closer look at the
cat, he can see that the cat looks as though it has been
injured. The car looks up to Dariush. Their eyes meet. He
lightly pets the cat's forehead. Dariush moves down to eye
level with the cat leaning his head to the ground using his
arm as a pillow. He watches the cat as it tries to breathe.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. APARTMENT/DARIUSH'S BEDROOM - MORNING

Dariush sleeps soundly in his bed. The early morning sun
pushes into the room from some half open blinds over
Dariush's bed.

Ali slowly walks into Dariush's room he sits down on the
corner of his bed. He looks down to his son who is sound
asleep entwined with sheets. Dariush awakens, rubs his eyes
a bit then looks up to his father.

Dariush sits up straight in bed startled.

ALI
Get dressed and join me in the
workroom.

Ali gets up and walks out of the room.

Dariush looks as if he has done something wrong. He pulls
back the covers on his bed, he wears Captain America Pj's.
He slowly walks out of his bedroom.

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5.


INT. HALLWAY -- CONTINUOUS

Dariush walks into the bathroom shutting the door behind
him.

INT. ALI'S BEDROOM -- MORNING

Dariush slowly enters Dorri and Ali's bedroom, the sound of
someone sanding can be heard. The sound getting louder and
louder as he nears a halfway open door.

INT. WORKROOM - MORNING

The room which once was a walk in closet as been remolded
to act as Ali's workroom. We have stepped back into Iran.
A huge mural covers the far wall. The mural is of an open
window. The window looks out over lush field where large
tree stands next to a small house.

Family pictures are tacked to the wall in front of his work
bench. Next to the mural is a black and white picture of
the same image on the wall. The workbench is small and
rests lengthwise against the wall of the closet. Other
tools hang on hooks on the wall in front of the bench. A
dozen raw WOODEN TOPS are all perched on a shelf over the
work bench.

Dariush peeks his head into the workroom. Ali turns and
catches his son peeking in.

ALI
Sandpaper.

DARIUSH
Huh?

Ali points to a small bin of sandpaper under the workbench.

ALI
There.

Dariush walks into the room and grabs some sandpaper under
the work bench. Ali snaps his fingers.

ALI (CONT'D)
Wake up. Sand those. Come on!

Dariush picks up one of the tops and starts to sand it. He
watches his father who is sanding. Dariush starts to mimic
his father. Flakes of color from the sanding rain down like
snow onto their feet.

They both work in silence except for the sound of sanding.
Ali watches his son from the corner of his eye.

ALI (CONT'D)
Good. Good.

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6.


Ali observes his son. Dariush has moved closer to his
father. Ali puts his cigarette down and looks as though
he's about to tell Dariush something but hesitates. Dariush
coughs from his father's smoke. He tries to hold his breath
but can't.

Ali grabs the top from his son showing him how to do it.

ALI (CONT'D)
Be strong with it. Don't do this.

He mimics what his son was doing. Dariush watches his
father. Ali hands the top back to his son.

Dariush puts more pressure on the top this time. His
father reaches on a shelf above his head and grabs a top.
He avoids his son's gaze as he sets the top down on the
table next to Dariush.

Ali touches his son's head while nodding to him that he's
doing it right. Dariush stops for a moment and picks up the
top his father set on the table. Ali's sanding becomes fast
and furious.

Dariush touches the top. He runs his fingers over all the
crease and imperfections. The top is painted with bright
gold and reds with a blue line going all round the top. As
Dariush turns the top around he notices that his name is
carved into it. Dariush looks up to his father smiling.
Ali puts down his tools and puts is arm around his son
hugging him tight.

Dariush takes the top and spins it.

CLOSE UP:

The top spins furiously until it begins to wobble and
eventually falls over.

EXT. OPEN FIELD - EVENING

Dariush sits alone under a tree. He brushes himself off
and walks down a dirt embankment towards his apartment
building.

INT. KITCHEN - EVENING

Dorri and Fariba are cooking dinner together. Lilly helps
Fariba with cleaning the vegetables in a in the kitchen
sink. Shaheen walks in from down the hall.

FARIBA
Oh there you are. Here are some
plates.

Shaheen takes the plates. They exchange a look. Dariush
comes into the house.

Dorri sees him walk in.

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7.


DORRI
There you are. Help us set the
table.

DARIUSH
Gotta wash up first.

He shows his mother his hands, dirty and a bit bloody.

DORRI
What did you do?

DARIUSH
I fell.

DORRI
Go wash up.

INT. LIVING ROOM - EVENING

Place settings are set out for everyone. Serving bowels are
on the table brimming with hot food. Lamb, beef, eggplant,
fried spinach with yogurt, tomatoes, cauliflower. The food
itself is colorful.

Ali walks in and sits at the head of the table.

Dariush sits next to him. Dorri sits on the other side of
Ali. Lilly sits next to her mother and across from Dariush.
Shaheen and Fariba join the family at the table.

Dorri and Fariba start serving the food. Good portions for
everyone.

A large window frames the table facing out toward the front
of the complex. White sheer curtains diffuse the descending
sun. They each start eating in silence.

Dariush looks up to his father.

Ali taps on a glass getting everyone's attention.

ALI
I want to thank you. Thank you
Fariba and Shaheen for being her
tonight. Let's not dwell on the bad
but focus on the good. Thank you
Dorri and Fariba for this wonderful
food.

Ali toasts and they all take a drink.

Food passes back and fourth.

Through the white sheer curtains of the dinning room window
the silhouette of a van on the street parking outside the
apartment building can be faintly made out. The family
continues to eat.

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8.


Two silhouetted figures walk from the van up the walkway to
the front door.

Suddenly there is a knock on the door.

The family all stops eating and talking. Ali looks over to
Dorri.

As Ali turns his head, Dariush sneaks a taste of his
father's wine.

Dariush watches as Ali stands up from the table. Dorri
stands with him picking up Lilly into her arms. They both
go to the door and open it.

Fariba and Shaheen stand up as well and walk over to the
door.

From a distance and a bit obstructed by the corner of a
wall Dariush observes his father opening the front door.
His father invites two men into the apartment.

Dariush sees the two men.

One man appears to be Persian the other looks to be Asian.
They both wear dark blue wind breakers with the letters INS
in yellow on the back and smaller on the front next to each
man's name: Andy Yen and Hamid Golbahari.

ANDY YEN
Ali Shiraz?

Dariush watches Ali nod. Dariush goes back and forth from
looking at his dinner plate and observing his reflection in
the plate and back up to his father.

HAMID GOLBAHARI
I'm sorry. We have to go.

Dariush looks back up and watches his father pick up his
bags that sit next to the front door waiting. Ali turns and
looks over to his Dariush. Dariush immediately looks back
down to his reflection.

Dorri starts to fix Ali's shirt collar.

DORRI
I'm trying not to cry. It's hard.

Dariush looks back up and sees his mother moving in and
hugging his father while holding Lilly. Dorri starts to
cry.

Fariba and Shaheen move over to console Dorri.

Dariush looks back down to his plate holding back his tears
as he hears his father speaking to his mother.

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9.


ALI
(collecting himself)
No tears. It will be okay.

Dariush looks back up at Fariba as she tries to move Dorri
off of Ali.

Dorri jerks and pulls away.

DORRI
No! Please!

FARIBA
Dorri.

ALI
It's going to be okay. You'll see.

FARIBA
Come on.

Dorri and Fariba embrace. Lilly starts to cry in Dorri's
arms.

Dariush looks out the big window at the van parked on the
street. He then turns back and meets his father's eyes.

Ali puts his bags down and walks over to his son who keeps
looking back to his plate. Ali bends down to his son's
level. Dariush looks at him and stares for a moment. He
reaches out and hugs his father tight. He starts to cry.

ALI
Take care of your mother and sister.

Dariush shakes his head "yes" while hugging his father.

Ali walks over to Lilly who holds her mother's hand. Ali
bends down and kisses her forehead.

Ali grabs his bags as the INS agents escort him out of the
apartment.

Dariush stands up from the table and walks over the window.
As Dariush pulls back the curtains he watches his father
being taken to the van. The van door slides open. They put
his suitcase and duffel in after him. He pauses for a
moment before and looks back at Dariush. Ali ducks down and
enters the van.

INT. VAN - CONTINUOUS

The van door is pulled shut. Ali watches Dariush through a
small tinted van window.

Ali's hands are pulled back and handcuffed.

FADE TO BLACK.

A Conversation between Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage

The following conversation took place at Anthology Film Archives, in New York, on November 3rd 2000. It was originally recorded for Vogue Magazine, only a small portion of the conversation was actually published in the magazine. We present here a more substantive extract from a conversation between two of the most eminent figures in avant garde cinema.



Jonas Mekas: Here you are, Stan Brakhage, whom not only for me, but for most of those who write serious film criticism, or make movies, considered as possibly the number-one living filmmaker, both in the importance of the body of your work and in your influence on other filmmakers.

Stan Brakhage: And here is what you are to me: in addition to being a great filmmaker who has forged ahead in an area where you are practically unique, that is, the diary, journal film, you are the only one who has created a believable, meaningful, extended journal across most of your adult life. In addition to this, you have found a way to sponsor films that you love and to create cooperatives through which they can be distributed; to create Anthology Film Archives so that they could be preserved and shown in a repertoire and continue today to be certainly the only place for what we want to call Poetic Film. So, you have not only done these two things, but you also have this rich life as a poet. Not knowing Lithuanian, I can just read the English translations of your work, which are very moving to me. I don’t know how you keep all this going.

JM: We both have been in it all for fifty years now. You have been making films since 1953. And me, in the Spring of 1953 I moved to the Lower East Side of New York and opened my first showcase for the avant garde films at the Gallery East. I showed Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Maya Deren, and Sidney Peterson. So you see, I didn’t move very far.

SB: Well, the man who really gets something done is the one who can stay at home. Of course, ironically, you are an exile, exiled from your home [Jonas Mekas was born in Lithuania and emigrated to the United States shortly after World War Two].

JM: We lived in a century where for maybe half the world it was made impossible to remain at home. So now, I often say that cinema is my home. I used to say culture was my home. But it got a little bit confused. Nobody knows what culture is anymore. So I stick to cinema.

SB: That’s where you and I first got into trouble, with what culture was, and art. I was so frightened the social concerns of the sixties would overwhelm the long-range aesthetic possibilities, as I viewed them. As I look back on it now, I think that you were largely right, that I needn’t have been afraid for the arts in the ways in which I was. Let’s say, many of the films that came out were very stupid from a standpoint of art, or aesthetics or even craftsmanship. Still, they were crucial to the moment.

JM: When we celebrated Anthology Film Archives 30th anniversary, I got together with Ken Kelman and P. Adams Sitney and we talked about the creation of the Essential Cinema Repertory, which consisted of some 330 titles of very carefully selected films that we felt indicated the perimeters of the art of cinema. We came to the conclusion that we did not make any bad mistakes in our choices. I discovered that what I showed, what I promoted, all ended up in the Essential Cinema Repertory, the films that are now considered the classics of the sixties. There were, of course, some that did not become classics. Important works are always surrounded by some that are not that important, but as time goes they fall off. In a sense, it’s like Darwin’s law applied to the arts. Not the biggest, but the most essential survive.

SB: I was afraid the lesser works would sink the ship.

JM: They just evaporate. Your work, or that of Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, and Michael Snow, they just keep growing.

SB: But I also wonder if that doesn’t have more to do with what you provided.

JM: What came up during my conversation with P. Adams Sitney, was that what’s lacking today is serious or passionate writing on the contemporary avant garde film. That, of course, was my function in the Village Voice, via my column Movie Journal.

SB: I don’t know any. Is there any aesthetician or critic or any kind that regularly deals with the Poetic Cinema in the entire North American continent?

JM: There are many alternative newspapers and monthlies, but none of them cover the Poetic Cinema, They are all writing about Hollywood-kind of the film.

SB: That’s also pretty much true now for poetry, architecture, or some of the performance arts: there is no regularity of coverage.

JM: You walk into a newspaper store and you see twenty, thirty magazines on art, but inside you see nothing but advertisements.

SB: In defense of myself, one of the ways I got most laughed at, in the sixties and seventies, was when I tried to defend the word art. I finally had to give it up because it was taken away by everybody and applied to every kind of consideration. It ceased to be a meaningful word.

JM: I read a survey conducted by Peter Moore, who had a column in Popular Photography magazine in the mid-60s, where people were asked whether they felt they were artists. Six million people said they felt they were artists. Of course, when you have six million artists in one country, then you give up using the word art.

SB: Pretty soon, someone said, half the American nation will be teaching art to the other half.

JM: Some terms get so overused that you have to forget about them for a while until time cleans them up.

SB: We have other words that have suffered from this, words like “love,” “God,” “evil.” So I would say that it isn’t just film that suffered from these difficulties. All the arts, what we traditionally call the arts, have suffered from this breakdown of terminology, this lack of serious critique. Here is a discipline far older than any other we know of human beings, but when it’s taught in public schools, in fact in colleges, it’s taught as a playground for finger painting and for expressing yourself.

JM: I would like to bring something else up. When you began making films in the early fifties, and when I turned to cinema, around the same time, there were several other very important developments in the arts – action painting, the improvisational theater of Strasberg, the Happenings theatre, conceptual art, Fluxus, and video art – and it all somehow produced a thing called installation art, which has developed and grown. Now that installation art has swallowed video, film, sculpture, painting, and everything else, I meet more and more young people who are interested in returning to the very basis of their arts. At some point you have to go back to the very essence: what is really music, painting, cinema, poetry, etc.

SB: Remember, when we were choosing the name Anthology Film Archives, we thought that there should not be the article “the”, because we thought there will be other anthologies and that they would contradict our Essential Cinema list and that would set up a dialogue.

JM: No, that did not happen. We were the only ones who were crazy. Same as when Andy Warhol was making his film portraits. I thought and I wrote in the Village Voice, that the time will come when everybody will be making film portraits, because it’s so easy. Nobody imitated Andy. They cannot imitate Warhol, or Dreyer, or you. All those things happen only once, and that’s the beauty of it

SB: That’s also the great truth. I have come to an age when I mostly say “I don’t know.” That’s what passes for wisdom. Some few things I do know. One thing I know is that there’s no two people on Earth alike; all their cells are as unique as snowflakes.

JM: But the interesting thing is, that despite the fact that every snowflake has its own shape, beyond the shape there is water. Somewhere they all meet, somewhere we all meet. When people call me an independent, I usually say, no, I depend on many things, my friends, my past, what I read, all the poets.

SB: Gertrude Stein said there are those who are independent dependents, and those who dependent independents.

JM: Now I want to talk to you, dear readers. Nobody else will ever do what Stan Brakhage, or Ken Jacobs, or Kenneth Anger are doing. So we better love them, help them, and take care of them. These are such unique achievements of the human spirit, like fragments of paradise on earth.

SB: This is really that side of you that could not stand to see what you cared for and loved and respected just scuffled aside; that you deeply felt you needed to speak for them and save and preserve them.

JM: I think it’s a very unfortunate mistake to think that what the avant garde filmmakers are doing is something very far out and not for the everyday. People seem to think that our lives, or the strangeness of our lives may be of some interest, but not our work. But I think the work is universal, because poetry is universal. There is no difference between reading a volume of Sylvia Plath and seeing a film by Stan Brakhage. I wonder where ideas that Poetic Cinema is more difficult to appreciate come from. In schools Faulkner and Olson are taught in the same classes. In literature the kind of separation that is made in cinema does not exist.

SB: There is a kind of professor that knows that is he or she books Hollywood movies only, that they will be popular. They will have huge classes and secure their tenure… Whatever it is, I still continue. I am mostly painting on film now and it takes time to make twenty-four individual frames for every second, but that is really all I can afford. I can afford only a few photographed films.

JM: My own diaristic style came very much from that fact that I had no time and money to make a scripted, “conventional” film. So instead of making films I just filmed. I sometimes joke, I say I am not really a filmmaker; I am only a filmer. I film real life. I never know what will come next. The shape of my films emerges from the accumulation of the material itself. I go through my life with my Bolex camera. Here is a question for you. Let’s take a film you did in Canada, The God of Day Looked Down Upon Him. Did you see its shape in your mind when you began it, or did that shape developed as you went along?

SB: I knew from the beginning it was the third part of a trilogy. The title comes from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. This was the first summer we went back to this place on Vancouver Island where my wife was raised. I still was hairless because of the chemotherapy; I had come very close to death. So I was in the mood to see that ocean in relationship to the end, or to the night, or to the darkness. My head was filled with things like Rothko’s old age paintings, like the Houston Chapel. That Chapel saved my sanity. Also Braque, the old age Braque, the real brown period, with the wooden plow. I felt old like that, I had expected to die, and I still expect to die any moment.


JM: I just wanted to know for myself, if you had any idea, feeling of the shape before you began filming it. To make a film, a filmmaker is one who already at the beginning sees its shape more or less. But I never have that. I am just a filmer, because it’s life. I don’t know what the next moment will bring, and when I will want to film.

SB: But you’re such a stylist. You know that it all hangs together. I called you the Samuel Pepys of film because you’re a stylist in that sense.

JM: Yes, but the style and the techniques come from the content, from this procedure. I am dealing with real life from moment to moment and instantaneously.

SB: Do you ever think about money?

JM: I never think about money.

SB: I knew you’d say that.

JM: There is a space next to Anthology Film Archives where we are going to build a library for the largest collection of written material on avant-garde/independent cinema. It will cost $3.5 million. I know the library will be built. All it takes is to believe in it, and work, work, work…

Logos 2.2 - spring 2003
© Logosonline 2005

Goodbye If You Call That Gone: BY GROVER LEWIS

History and legend bind us to the past, along with unquenchable memory.

In the spring of 1943, my parents—Grover Lewis, a truck driver, and Opal Bailey Lewis, a hotel waitress—shot each other to death with a pawnshop pistol. For most of a year, Big Grover had stalked my mother, my four-year-old sister, and me across backwater Texas, resisting Opal’s decision to divorce him. When she finally did, and when he finally cornered her and pulled the trigger as he’d promised to do, she seized the gun and killed him, too.

A next-door neighbor of Opal’s—called “Dad” North because of his advanced age—witnessed the mayhem shortly after dawn on a rainy Monday morning in May. Big Grover was twenty-seven years old, Opal twenty-six, and they’d been married for almost eleven years. My father survived for half a day without regaining consciousness, and died in the same charity hospital where I was born. Opal died where she fell, under a shadeless light bulb in the drafty old rooming house where she’d been living alone and struggling to keep Titter and me in a nearby nursery school. No charges were filed, and a formal inquest was considered unnecessary since the police and the coroner’s office declared the case solved by mid-morning. My uncle Dubya Cee, Opal’s older brother, talked to one of the detectives involved and found out some additional information, which he shared only with the Bailey elders. Such, anyway, were the bare bones of the story as passed along in family history that soon blurred off into murky family legend. It was the sum of what I was allowed to know, although there remained to be answered, of course, questions I had not yet learned to ask.

Grover and Opal were strong, attractive, hardworking people with no history of wrongdoing. They’d started out as Depression kids who’d eloped from the working-class district of Oak Cliff in Dallas, where they’d both been youthful friends of the notorious Southwestern desperadoes Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who’d died in a police fusillade six months before I was born. Like Clyde, my father was an unschooled country jake who fell—or jumped—into low ways in the big city. Big Grover and his two older, rakehell brothers, Lester and Cecil—“Leck” and “Cece”—had been coughed up by the dust storms of the 1930s and were among the first generation of Texas boys to grow up without the idea of the American West beckoning them to fortunes untold. By their time, America was “all took up.” Opal, like Bonnie, was a bright student who’d left school early to help support her family before meeting and running away with her first true sweetheart—a moral girl, everybody agreed, with high ideals. Like Bonnie’s, Opal’s main crime seems to have been picking the wrong man to love. In the end, she managed to save my father from everybody but himself.

The fatal events took place in my hometown of San Antonio when I was eight. By then, I had experienced at first hand such a numbing amount and so many varieties of violence that I was left with the choice between an invitation to death and the will to live. My sister, still only a toddler, was almost oblivious to the calamity and would forget our parents completely within a year or so, but complex guilt and mourning and survivor’s self-loathing gnawed at me without letup. In my foreshortened child’s perspective, I worried about my own culpability in the bloody strife that had descended on us, overcome with remorse that I might have been more watchful, that I ought to have tried even harder to protect Opal and stave off our fate. In the secret, nonverbal chamber of the heart where unquenchable memory takes root in childhood, I knew many things on a dim level—but I knew them well enough. In our year on the run and its desperate aftermath, I had stored up memories I couldn’t get rid of and memories I wouldn’t let go, including the awful knowledge that Opal had been betrayed by one of our own family circle—that news of our whereabouts had repeatedly been passed along in secret to Big Grover in his darkening rage by a man who had often sat at our table in happier times and pretended to love us all. In an icy flash, I understood the horrifying extent to which life is shaped by chance and happenstance, and how abruptly the unexpected can strike and obliterate everything you most cherish. Chaos, I sensed, lay hidden beneath the superficial order of the normal, where the solid rules of right and wrong were displaced by treachery, corrosive passion, and sudden death. I was, you must understand, just at the threshold of the age of reason, trying to sort out for the first time without Opal’s help the possibly true from the wildly improbable.

With Big Grover commonly understood to be the wrongdoer and the case closed, the bereaved families assembled to pay their respects, some missing a day or two’s work and driving in from such distant points as Dallas, the Red River Valley, and rural Oklahoma. The mourners made over Titter and me with tears and smothering hugs, but their faces, normally stoic and set, were seized with grief, astonishment, and anger that soon turned to muted discord, at least on the part of my mother’s people. Some wounds of the heart never heal, but leave a shadow and a scar and a family stain that even crushing sorrow can’t ease.

Matthew Bailey, Opal’s hot-tempered father, caravaned into San Antonio at the head of a posse of Baileys, all armed and bristling. When Matthew was notified by the police about Opal’s death, no mention was made of Grover’s condition, so the old man rounded up his clan with the idea of hunting down Grover and evening the score in the old-fashioned frontier way. At joint services held for Opal and Grover at a neighborhood funeral parlor—caskets were open for viewing—Matthew and his band stalked outside when the Baptist minister began intoning the obsequies for my father. The few Lewises present shifted uncomfortably and looked abashed—crushed, in fact—but they were, I am certain, just as aggrieved by Opal’s loss as by Grover’s, and despite the tenuous connections between the two families, they must have realized that Matthew was hopping crazy even on his best behavior. Later—I felt like I remembered it, but maybe I was just told—it struck me that Matthew and some of his brothers and sisters were actually glad that Opal had dropped her killer, proud of her grit and nerve and sure aim. Big Grover had been shot just once, squarely in the eye.

Because of my age, I wasn’t supposed to know or even find out such things, but the details, usually meant to pass over my head, seeped into my consciousness and became part of the tangle of facts and fancy and immutable mystery that marked my parents’ deaths. From our year of “running the roads” in fear of Big Grover’s wrath, I’d been exposed to an atmosphere heavy with whispered accounts as Opal and her younger sisters talked strategies of escape. By then, my mind was like a racing engine, and there was a part of me that was already a spy with an instinct for grown-ups’ hidden purposes, for shadings and nuance and that knowing adult tone that promises to reveal forbidden knowledge. It set me considerably apart from other children, along with my thick, gold-rimmed eyeglasses and some other eccentricities, and gave me a prissy, “know-it-all” manner that rubbed some of my elders the wrong way, not least Big Grover at our final meetings, when even I could see that he was hell-bent for destruction—ours or his, whichever came first.

In those last days, he was a man dusted with a certain odd mixture of innocence and menace, the hint that at any instant he could swing wildly right or wrong. What drove him beyond all normal bounds and left him nothing to break the fall was the thought that somehow he’d let Opal best him—belittle him, really—and because of her selfish, twisted-up thinking, he was about to lose everything he’d ever held dear, including his self-respect. No man worth the powder to blow him away could let that happen without a fight to the finish. Hell, he’d raised Opal, put food in her mouth and clothes on her back for ten years. The way he’d been taught, the family was sacred with the daddy supreme, and he’d sired not only a smart-mouth, half-blind son who was bound to be a burden forever, but a curly-headed little baby girl, normal and sweet as pie. He loved us all was the only thing that mattered. Oh, he’d messed up a few times like most men do, but overall he’d toted fair. Then, right out of the blue, just over a couple of silly arguments, Opal took it in her crazy Bailey head to leave him for good, taking his kids away with a court paper. What kind of happy horseshit was that? No woman was fixing to divorce him, take away his own flesh-and-blood.

Big Grover’s plans for getting us back never took failure into account. On our last outing together, a street photographer snapped a candid shot of the four of us walking along Travis Street, and in the picture you can see the fury in my father’s stride, the hard set of his jaw, the storm of rising blood. If love means to close all distance, death can accomplish the same end. That afternoon in downtown San Antonio was approximately two weeks before the killings.

The touchiness and mistrust between the Baileys and Lewises at the mortuary underscored their essential likeness. Opal’s relatives were Appalachian hillbillies who’d cotton-picked their way in stages to Texas to get out of the Alabama minefields, while the Lewises had settled in Texas before the Republic when the place was still called Tejas. On both sides, they were simple, unassuming people of limited skills and ambitions—white, poor, Protestant, “salt of the earth,” streaked with sentimentality and dark superstition. But the two clans were perhaps most truly kindred in having a deep sense of themselves as being “common folks,” not created by a vast and conscienceless society, but by a small, homely one in which human character bloomed in stages and by precept. In an almost tribal way, we knew where we belonged and to whom we belonged, and that our allotted territory was very small, ranging from forty acres of played-out shinnery to three or four city blocks on the poor side of town. Work and endurance, fortitude and self-reliance had seen both families through the hardships of the Depression and would get everybody through anything else that came at them. The Baileys and Lewises alike were insular people who lived in a world defined more by the past than the present, more toward the country than the city, more Southern than Southwestern. Drama, in the form of extraordinary events, had never touched either line with the exception of occasional disgraces best ignored or blessedly forgotten. Vide Matthew, the outrageous wild man of the Bailey side, and the outlaw Lewis boys, Cece and Leck—bank robbers, it was whispered, or anyway failed bank robbers—and the special case of my lost and fallen father, who had been a good provider and family man like all decent Lewises until he turned strange and departed the firmament of sanity.

We believed we belonged to that old marginal world because we belonged nowhere else. Old-timey—that’s what everybody boasted about being, still clinging stubbornly to country principles. No one I knew, with the sole exception of Opal, looked at living as a matter of weighing alternatives and then picking the best choice. You simply took the pattern that awaited—marrying one of your own kind and multiplying until death did you part, serving in the armed services if called, working the land or some menial town job into premature age if the bosses left you alone. A dab of reading and ciphering was fine if you had the time and the knack, but talking or singing or even fancy whistling served just as well when work was endless and recreation rare, and the real things you had to know how to read were the heavens and the waters and the forests. Our old unsung grandsires—hillbillies and Texians, all hide and bone like the longhorns—had opened up the country, and even when I was small, there lingered among us a poignant and powerful longing for that unspoiled America the elders had seen before urbanization, when the world beyond the horizon was nothing but dust and rumor. But those times were gone, fenced in or padlocked or clear-cut or blacktopped over. The power of caste rarely being generous, history was something created by Them that happened to you.

One of the most basic ties linking the Baileys and the Lewises lay in the fact that both families had been ensnared in a web of peonage since the Civil War and Reconstruction days. The Lewises, originally colonists from England, had pledged their prosperous Texas holdings to the Lost Cause—and lost everything. The Baileys, always landless and also on the losing side, were forced off their mountain hunting grounds to work as hirelings wherever necessity drove them. Inflexible as slavery, the caste system of the South in defeat decreed the sizing down of the person, the whittling away of the individual to fit the prescribed social and fiscal molds. Born poor and despised, three or four generations of my Southern ancestors experienced the imprisoning realities of subsistence drudgery through the institution of cotton sharecropping—endless stooping and picking along wormy turn-rows, dragging twelve-foot-long cotton sacks by a harness over the shoulder. Women and children were expected to drag and fill those sacks, too. Big Grover had just missed that kind of labor by a hair, but Leck and Cece had both pulled bolls on the shares until, as young, almost destitute men in the late 1920s, they’d thrown off their harnesses and gone “on the scout”—“running them ol’ hard roads,” as the Barrow Gang put it, in search of adventure and easier money.

If times were bad, ran the old-timey wisdom about such things, then a man’s real worth might not always square with what he was reduced to doing in a “tight.” Besides, as Oak Cliff’s own Bonnie Parker and that Oklahoma fellow Pretty Boy Floyd had proved, some thieves from decent working families weren’t half as sorry as “the laws” sent out to chase them. As boys, Leck and Cece had unaccountably “gone to the bad,” chasing down raw country girls and drinking liquor on the sly by the time they were twelve or thirteen. To their credit, they always excluded their beloved “baby bud” from their openly criminal pursuits. During that attempted bank holdup—whenever, wherever it took place—Leck had escaped, and Cece had been caught in a cotton field and sentenced to a cotton field. So went the family legend as whispered by the Baileys, and I assumed that’s why Leck was present in the Lewis pew at the viewing of the bodies, trying to comfort his mother, and Cece’s absence was never even mentioned. It was part of the immutable mystery that I wouldn’t be able to puzzle out for some time to come.

The Baptist preacher, hired by the undertaker, paced between Opal’s and Grover’s biers, talking about “estranged souls” and how some were called to the light and others to darkness. Grandma Annie and Daddy Will Lewis, my father’s parents, wept in shame and grief, all the more humiliated, I knew, to be showing their feelings in front of a roomful of strangers who seemed to despise them. They’d ridden a Greyhound bus south from the little Hill Country town of Lampasas, packing a sack lunch and bringing along a cake for us children. Next to Opal and Grover, they were the people closest to me in the world, and I kept wanting to run to their sides, but I was firmly wedged between Bill and Millie Cox on the Bailey side of the aisle, and Millie wouldn’t let go of me. She was my mother’s next-youngest sister, a woman I’d known only a short time but had already begun to fear.

“Goodbye If You Call that Gone” was the beginnings of the memoir that Grover Lewis was working on when he died of lung cancer in 1995. It is part of the collection, Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, edited by Jan Reid and W.K. Stratton.

AMERICAN SUBLIME: Morton Feldman’s mysterious musical landscapes.

Morton Feldman was a big, brusque Jewish guy from Woodside, Queens—the son of a manufacturer of children’s coats. He worked in the family business until he was forty-four years old, and he later became a professor of music at the State University of New York a Buffalo. He died in 1987, at the age of sixty-one. To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound. He was also on of the greatest talkers in the recent history of New York City, and there is no better way to introduce him than to let him speak for himself
Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.
My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, “What about the man on the street?” At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street. The crazy artist of my generation was crossing the street at that moment.
If a man teaches composition in a university, how can he not be a composer? He has worked hard, learned his craft. Ergo, he is a composer. A professional. Like a doctor. But there is that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes you up—and you die. He failed to take the chance that might have saved you. Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.
Polyphony sucks.
Because I’m Jewish, I do not identify with, say, Western civilization music. In other words, when Bach gives us a diminished fourth, I cannot respond that the diminished fourth means, O God. . . . What are our morals in music? Our moral in music is nineteenth-century German music, isn’t it? I do think about that, and I do think about the fact that I want to be the first great composer that is Jewish.
These quotations are taken from three collections of Feldman’s writings, lectures, and interviews: “Morton Feldman Essays,” which was published in 1985; “Give My Regards to Eighth Street,” which appeared in 2000; and the new anthology “Morton Feldman Says,” edited by Chris Villars (Hyphen; $50). The books testify to the composer’s rich, compact, egotistical, playful, precise, poetic, and insidiously quotable way with language. The titles of his works make music on their own: “The Viola in My Life,” “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety,” “Routine Investigations,” “Coptic Light,” “The King of Denmark,” “I Met Heine on the Rue Fürstenberg.” A champion monologuist, Feldman had an uncanny ability to dominate the most illustrious company. Six feet tall, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was hard to miss. He attended meetings of the Eighth Street Artists’ Club, the headquarters of the Abstract Expressionists; he made his presence felt at gatherings of the New York School of poets, dancers, and painters, lavishing sometimes unwanted attention on the women in the room; he both amused and affronted other composers. John Adams told me that he once attended a new-music festival in Valencia, California, and stayed at a tacky motel called the Ranch House Inn. When Adams came down for breakfast, he found various leading personalities of late-twentieth-century music, including Steve Reich, Iannis Xenakis, and Milton Babbitt, sitting with Feldman, who proceeded to talk through the entire meal. “A lovable solipsist,” Adams called him.
The often noted paradox is that this immense, verbose man wrote music that seldom rose above a whisper. In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. Chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences. Harmonies hover in a no man’s land between consonance and dissonance, paradise and oblivion. Rhythms are irregular and overlapping, so that the music floats above the beat. Simple figures repeat for a long time, then disappear. There is no exposition or development of themes, no clear formal structure. Certain later works unfold over extraordinarily lengthy spans of time, straining the capabilities of performers to play them and audiences to hear them. More than a dozen pieces last between one and two hours, and “For Philip Guston” and “String Quartet (II)” go on for much longer. In its ritual stillness, this body of work abandons the syntax of Western music, and performers must set aside their training to do it justice. Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his Feldman barked, “It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.”
For a time, it appeared that Feldman would be remembered as one of several experimental composers who were gathered around John Cage. In the past two decades, however, his reputation has steadily ascended, even though his works remain rarities on American concert programs. There are well over a hundred CDs of his music, most of it on intrepid small labels such as Hat Art, New Albion, CRI, CPO, and the indispensable Mode Records, which is in the process of issuing parallel editions of Feldman and Cage. According to Villars’s meticulous online discography, all but a handful of Feldman’s hundred and forty published works can be found on CD, and some have been recorded many times; ten pianists have essayed the ninety-minute “Triadic Memories.” The music has found an audience not only among new-music connoisseurs but also among adventurous fans of rock and pop, who are quick to respond to its unearthly power. In a 1982 lecture that is reprinted in “Morton Feldman Says,” the composer asks, “Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” If we didn’t before, we do now.

Feldman, whose parents came to America from Kiev, grew up in the cosmopolitan New York of the nineteen-thirties and forties, when Fiorello LaGuardia championed high art for the working man and émigré European artists crowded the streets. Feldman studied piano wit Vera Maurina Press, a legendary pedagogue who had been a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni. (She is the “Madame Press” who “Died Las Week at Ninety.”) His first composition teacher was Wallingford Riegger, one of the earliest American followers of Arnold Schoenberg He went on to study with Stefan Wolpe, who, just a few years earlier, had been agitating against the Nazis in Berlin. Young Morty als had several long talks with the expatriate ultra-modernist Edgard Varèse. When you write, Varèse would tell him, think about how long it takes for the sound to travel to the back of the hall. Feldman’s student efforts, which are now showing up on recordings on the Mode an OgreOgress labels, emulate Schoenberg and Bartók, but there is already something unusual in the arrangement of events; as per Varèse’ instruction, Feldman lets loose a striking chord and then lets it reverberate in the listener’s mind
The crux of Feldman’s development came in 1950, when he entered the world of John Cage. The odd couple of the musical avant-garde—the gay, gaunt, Anglo-Saxon Californian and the straight, burly, Russian-Jewish New Yorker—met one night at Carnegie Hall, where they had both gone to hear Dimitri Mitropoulos conduct Anton Webern’s twelve-tone Symphony. Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” was next on the program, and both men walked out early, to avoid having their modernist spell disrupted by Rachmaninoff’s romanticism. As their paths intersected, Feldman asked, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” And a friendship was born. Feldman visited Cage in his tenement apartment at the corner of Monroe and Grand Streets, where the East River Houses are now. The kid from Queens gazed in wonder at Cage’s austere bohemian décor: the Lippold mobiles, the straw mat on the bare floor, the drafting table with the fluorescent lamp and Rapidograph pens. He soon moved in downstairs. By day, he worked at his father’s coat company in Queens and part time at his uncle’s dry-cleaning business. By night, he consorted with Cage’s remarkable network of artistic acquaintances, the painters and the poets and the artists without portfolio. The painters attracted Feldman the most, and the interest was mutual. Pollock asked him to write music for the famous Hans Namuth documentary about the drip-painting process. Philip Guston immortalized Feldman in a portrait that depicts him with a cigarette jutting from his mouth. “What was great about the fifties,” Feldman later said, “is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art.”
Cage, in 1950, was turning music upside down. He had written works using found-object percussion, “prepared” pianos, turntables, and other gizmos. Soon to come were tape and radio collages, compositions using chance procedures, multimedia happenings, and “4’ 33”,” the legendary silent piece. But it wasn’t the particulars of Cage’s innovations that affected Feldman; gizmos bored him, and he almost always composed for ordinary instruments, to be played in a more or less ordinary way. What floored Feldman was the unswerving unconventionality of Cage’s mind. He now had permission to drop all inherited habits—to become himself. “I owe him everything and I owe him nothing,” Feldman said. In later years, they had some strong disagreements; Cage would talk about Feldman’s sensuous appeal, which, in his mind, was a problem. In one of history’s more obtuse putdowns, he declared that Feldman’s music was closer “to what we know is beautiful” whereas his own was “closer to what we know is ugly.” Yet the two retained a fraternal bond.
Not long after meeting Cage, Feldman opened up his own compositional Pandora’s box, in the form of “graphic notation,” which did away with the routine of writing notes on staves. One day at Cage’s apartment, Feldman produced the first of a series of pieces titled “Projections,” whose score consisted of a grid of boxes. The player was invited to choose notes within the boxes, which represented high, middle, and low ranges. A subsequent series of works, which began appearing in 1957, specified pitches but allowed the performer to decide when and how long they should be played. These conceptual approaches quickly became part of international avant-garde practice, as did Feldman’s habit of using numbered abstractions as titles. Soon enough, composers were filling their scores with patterns, pictures, and verbal instructions, and matters progressed to the logical extreme of Cage’s “Theatre Piece” (1960), during which a piano was slapped with a dead fish. But Feldman had no taste for anarchy. When he realized that his notation could lead to a circus atmosphere—when Leonard Bernstein conducted his music with the New York Philharmonic in 1964, the orchestra joined the audience in hissing him—he turned in another direction. The idea was simply to free music from the machinery of process. Performed in the right spirit, the graphic works sound like the murmur of a crowd in a temple.
All the while, Feldman continued to write in traditional notation as well. In pieces entitled “Intermissions” and “Extensions,” he laid out the fundamentals of his aesthetic, which he once defined as vibrating stasis. The sound owed a great deal to the old atonal masters, the Viennese triumvirate of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, especially in their dreamier, eerier moods; Feldman’s music is inconceivable without the precedent of the “Colors” movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra, with its rotating transpositions of one muted chord, or the funeral march of Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, with its misty layers of winds and brass over drum rolls. What Feldman did was to slow the pace of events in the Schoenbergian universe. Schoenberg was, above all, an impatient man, who had to keep scurrying on to the next novel combination of sounds. Feldman was patient. He let each chord say what it had to say. He breathed. Then he moved on to the next. His textures were daringly spare. On one page of “Extensions 3,” he used a mere fifty-seven notes in forty bars, or fewer than two per bar. In confining himself to a minimum of material, Feldman discovered the expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the surrounding silence.
The example of the painters was crucial. Feldman’s scores were close in spirit to Rauschenberg’s all-white and all-black canvases, Barnett Newman’s gleaming lines, and, especially, Rothko’s glowing fog banks of color. His habit of presenting the same figure many times in succession invites you to hear music as a gallery visitor sees paintings; you can study the sound from various angles, stand back or move up close, go away and come back for a second look. Feldman said that New York painting led him to attempt a music “more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore.” Just as the Abstract Expressionists wanted viewers to focus on paint itself, on its texture and pigment, Feldman wanted listeners to absorb the basic facts of resonant sound. At a time when composers were frantically trying out new systems and languages, Feldman choseto follow his intuition. He had an amazing ear for harmony, for ambiguous collections of notes that tease the brain with never-to-be-fulfilled expectations. Wilfrid Mellers, in his book “Music in a New Found Land,” eloquently summed up Feldman’s early style: “Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman’s work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear.” In other words, we are in the region of Wallace Stevens’s “American Sublime,” of the “empty spirit / In vacant space.”

Working nine to five in the garment business, Feldman proudly maintained his independence from the professional herd. He mocked the university composers who tailored their work for fellow-analysts, the tonal composers who tried to please orchestra audiences, the inventor-composers who unveiled brand-new isms each summer at the state-funded European festivals. “Innovations be damned,” he snapped. “It’s a boring century.” In 1972, he obtained his post at SUNY Buffalo, but he continued to insist that composition could not be taught, that it should not be professionalized. He loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic. When I visited the small archive of Feldman papers at SUNY Buffalo, I came across an exam paper in which the composer asked his students to analyze Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony alongside Webern’s Concerto Opus 24. How the would-be revolutionaries of the day must have scratched their heads over that! Another assignment was to write a piece for soprano and string quartet, using a text from the Buffalo Evening News.
Feldman’s works of the seventies were less aggressively strange than those of the fifties and sixties. He sought out warmer, simpler chords, bewitching fragments of melody. Music of this period—the viola-and-ensemble cycle “The Viola in My Life”; a series of concerto like pieces for cello, piano, oboe, and flute; the choral masterwork “Rothko Chapel”—provides a good introduction to a sometimes forbidding sound-world. (“Rothko Chapel” has been recorded immaculately on the New Albion label; for “The Viola in My Life,” wait for an ECM CD next year.) In 1977, Feldman ventured to write an hour-long opera entitled “Neither,” which was destined never to make it to the Met. The libretto was by Samuel Beckett, who had identified Feldman as a kindred spirit, and it consisted of an eighty-seven-word poem that offered no setting, no characters, and no plot, but still the faint assurance of an “unspeakable home.”
In his last years, from 1979 until 1987, Feldman again swerved away from the mainstream. He inaugurated his compositions of long duration, those which went on for an hour or more. Even the most devoted fans may wish to admit that there was an element of runaway grandiosity in these Wagnerian demands on the listener’s time. Feldman plotted his immortality with some deliberation—this was the man who intended to become the first great Jewish composer, ruling out Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg—and he evidently saw this series of pieces as his tour de force, his run for home. (“I’m on third base,” he boasted in 1982.) Yet there was also a practical need for a drastic enlargement of scale. It allowed his quiet voice to be heard in the total isolation that it required. Feldman’s shorter works make an awkward effect on standard concert programs, particularly when the audience coughs and rustles its puzzlement aloud; they don’t play well with others. The long works create an overarching, protective space around a vulnerable huddle of sounds. The composer Kyle Gann, in his brilliant new book, “Music Downtown” (California; $19.95), describes how you end up living with Feldman’s music as you would with a painting on your wall.
Extreme length allowed Feldman to approach his ultimate goal of making music into an experience of life-changing force, a transcendent art form that wipes everything else away. To sit through performances of the two biggest works—I heard Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble play the five-hour-long “For Philip Guston” in 1995, with phenomenal purity of tone, and the Flux Quartet play the six-hour-long “String Quartet (II)” in 1999, with tireless focus—is to enter into a new way of listening, even a new consciousness. There are passages in each where Feldman seems to be testing the listener’s patience, seeing how long we can endure a repeated note or a dissonant minor second. Then, out of nowhere, some very pure, almost childlike idea materializes. Most of the closing section of “For Philip Guston” is in modal A minor, and it is music of surpassing gentleness and tenderness. But it inhabits a far-off, secret place that few travellers will stumble upon.
In his last years, Feldman became unexpectedly wealthy. He inherited some money from his family, and he received increasing royalties from Europe, where his music was always better understood. Most significantly, he made a small fortune by selling art. Back in the fifties, he had bought a Rauschenberg canvas for seventeen dollars, because that was what he had in his pocket at the time. Shortly before his death, he sold it for six hundred thousand dollars. He became a collector of antique Middle Eastern rugs, whose subtly varied patterns affected his late style. Curmudgeonly and generous by turns, he picked up dinner tabs for hungry young composers. His final works radiate an enormous, ominous serenity: “Piano and String Quartet” (which Aki Takahashi has recorded beautifully with the Kronos Quartet, on Nonesuch), “Palais de Mari,” for piano (played by Takahashi on her mesmerizing Mode CD of early and late piano music), and “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” (recorded with icy clarity by the Ives Ensemble, on Hat Art). That piece, the very last, makes repeated, wistful references to Debussy’s Prelude “Des Pas sur la Neige,” or “Steps in the Snow.” Pancreatic cancer took Feldman quickly. One day, he was unavoidably there, monopolizing the room; the next, he was gone.

There is no mistaking the lonely, lamenting tone that runs through Feldman’s music. From time to time, the composer hinted that the horrors of the twentieth century, and in particular the Holocaust, had made other, more ornate kinds of musical expression impossible for him. He explained that the title “The King of Denmark,” which he bestowed on a graphic piece for percussion, was inspired by Kin Christian X, who was occupying the Danish throne when the Germans invaded his country in 1940. Feldman proceeded to tell the story now considered apocryphal, of King Christian responding to German anti-Semitism by walking the streets with a yellow star pinned to hi chest. It was a “silent protest,” Feldman said. In a way, his music seemed to protest all of European civilization, which, in one way or another, had been complicit in Hitler’s crimes. The American composer Alvin Curran once saw Feldman at a German festival, and asked him, in light of the enthusiasm that he was inspiring there, why he didn’t move to Germany. Feldman stopped in the middle of the street pointed down at the cobblestones, and said, “Can’t you hear them? They’re screaming! Still screaming out from under the pavements!
If there is a Holocaust memorial in Feldman’s work, it is “Rothko Chapel,” which was written in 1971, for Rothko’s octagonal array of paintings in Houston. Rothko had committed suicide the previous year, and Feldman, who had become his close friend, responded with his most personal, affecting work. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices, but no words. As is so often the case in Feldman’s music, chords and melodic fragments hover like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distant, dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s final masterpiece, the “Requiem Canticles.” That passage was written on the day of Stravinsky’s funeral, in April, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern. But the emotional sphere of “Rothko Chapel” is too vast to be considered a memorial for an individual, whether it is Rothko or Stravinsky.
Shortly before the end, something astonishing happens. The viola begins to play a keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. Underneath it, celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which calls to mind a figure in Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.” The song unfurls twice, and the chorus answers with the chords of God. The allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to the somber spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera, and the luminous, iconic presence of Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman heard beneath the cobblestones of German towns. It might be the chant of millions in a single voice.
But I can almost hear Feldman speaking out against this too specific reading. At a seminar in Germany in 1972, he was asked whether his music had any relationship to the Holocaust, and he said no. He was a hard-core avant-gardist to the end, despite his sensualist tendencies, and he would not freely admit to any such sentimentality. It was probably in reaction to the communicative power of “Rothko Chapel” that he later dismissed it, unbelievably, as a minor work. But in that German seminar he did say, in sentences punctuated by long pauses, “There’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning. Say, for example, the death of art . . . something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.” He also admitted, “I must say, you did bring up something that I particularly don’t want to talk about publicly, but I do talk privately.”
Only this one time, in the last minutes of “Rothko Chapel,” did Feldman allow himself the consolation of an ordinary melody. Otherwise, he held the outside world at bay. Yet he always showed an awareness of other possibilities, a sympathy for all that he chose to reject. Listening to his music is like being in a room with the curtains drawn. You sense that with one quick gesture sunlight could fill the room, that life in all its richness could come flooding in. But the curtains stay closed. A shadow moves across the wall. And Feldman sits in his comfortable chair.

by ALEX ROSS
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