Morton Feldman - Flute and Orchestra, for flute and orchestra (1977/8) Dedicated to Edgard Varèse Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra Condcutor - Hans Zender Flute - Roswitha Staege Morton Feldman was commissioned to write Flute and Orchestra for the Saarland Radio in 1977-78. His works in the 1970s are at the point of consolidation the composer's mature style. It is during this decade that listeners can start hearing great works of art among his output. Like Rothko, Feldman came to a specific formal outlook and stuck with it for the remainder of his career. Among the mature pieces of both artists, each individual work presents a unique way of expressing the same, specific stance. With the end of World War II came an explosion of avant-garde art that was specifically indigenous of the United States, and Rothko was one of the brilliant émigrés to whom they looked for inspiration. Feldman was inspired by him and Mondrian, as well as older, North American artists such as Guston and Klein, translating their visual aesthetic into the world of sound. Since the beginning of the 1950s, Feldman worked towards a voice that suited his preference for the abstract expressionist art that inspired him so deeply. For the next twenty-plus years he would gradually move away from other compositional trends that were interesting to his musical peers, such as Cage, Brown, and Wolff. Feldman's style removed itself from chance operations and graphic notation in order to convey music exactly as he heard it. After returning to standard notation, upon which he made new demands, he next made his music reflect a perpetual present, as opposed to a developmental narrative, which had been the standard Western musical practice for many hundreds of years. Reflecting the abstract expressionist quest to convey an interior world that existed outside of time, Feldman wrote music made from a series of moments, each one relational to the previous moment, obliterating the memory of the previous one in favor of a continual now, so that the listener was not obliged to use memory in order to make sense of what is going on, which is not the point. The next step was to further the rhythmic side of the matter so that it took part in the process with the same degree of integrity as the tones. Just as the tones are properly heard for themselves, outside of their relationship to one another, rhythm was to become equally negating and malleable, enforcing the sense of variation with additional elasticity. It is at this point that Flute and Orchestra was written. Slightly over a half-hour in duration, it is a strikingly original and sublime work and dedicated to Varèse. Alert listeners might hear him quote his own opera, Neither, from the previous year. The work's language is assured and solid. Though the flute is highlighted, the spirit of Flute and Orchestra is not comparable to concerto form. The orchestra is a continually evolving river of new orchestration, while the solo instruments simply retain their timbre. While the material is continually elastic and changing, Feldman introduces new material into the mutating musical tissue along the way, which is gradually subsumed. The polyrhythmic relationship between the flute and the orchestra set them both far apart and yet the work coheres beautifully. Later, in the final step in his musical language, Feldman will pare down the scale of his ensembles, preferring small chamber groups. In this last phase in his development, the importance of the orchestration does not diminish but rather does more with less. Though the composer would be taking his language to this further extreme, his music had already achieved greatness. Flute and Orchestra will continue to edify listeners for many generations. Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs PATREON - Pay a small monthly fee and gain access to my online score library, full of rare scores that I have used in videos - https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower PAYPAL - Donations of any amount welcome! - https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/officialryan3?country.x=GB&locale.x=en_GB ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fXSIh9clxU

Gérard Grisey - Le Temps et l'Écume, for 4 percussionists, 2 synthesisers and orchestra (1988-89) WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln Condcutor - Emilio Pomàrico Percussionists - Ensemble S Synthesisers - Paulo Alvares, Benjamin Kobler Join the Score Video Creator Discord Server: https://discord.gg/QRbwTRs PATREON - Pay a small monthly fee and gain access to my online score library, full of rare scores that I have used in videos - https://www.patreon.com/ryanpower PAYPAL - Donations of any amount welcome! - https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/officialryan3?country.x=GB&locale.x=en_GB ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRfvdJPxLPw