Feldman studies has been slow to coalesce as a distinct subfield within experimental and modernist music research. Building on the early theoretical work of Thomas DeLio from the 1980s and 1990s, scholars in the twenty-first century have been drawn increasingly to the musician and his milieu.Footnote ¹ Work has largely fallen into three broad types: the social-historical, the interdisciplinary-hermeneutic, and the music analytical. Of the first type, Amy Beal and Renée Levine Packer's writings stand out for their success at situating Feldman within two of his overlapping communities – the transnational Cold War avant-garde and the Creative Associates at the University of Buffalo.Footnote ² Brett Boutwell, Jonathan Bernard, and Catherine Laws have provided compelling examples of the second type.Footnote ³ Of the last, Dora Hanninen, Catherine Costello Hirata, and Steven Johnson have offered us powerful models with which to make sense of our still-often strange experiences of listening to Feldman's music.Footnote ⁴ More generally, these scholars – among others – have amply demonstrated the musicological potential of thinking with and through Feldman's life and work.

Alistair Noble's Composing Ambiguity and David Cline's The Graph Music of Morton Feldman are robust additions to the extant scholarship. Both strike a balance between the music analytical and interdisciplinary-hermeneutic modes of research. Each takes up understudied portions of Feldman's oeuvre (the early piano music and the graph scores, respectively). Both make extensive use of primary source materials to get at fundamental questions regarding Feldman's compositional process in the 1950s and beyond.

Composing Ambiguity was first published in 2013 by Ashgate and has more recently been reissued in paperback under Routledge's Ashgate imprint. Noble calls for a research programme that takes seriously the metaphysical and conceptual grounding of Feldman's music in the modernist painting of his day and its conditions of possibility. He positions his work in opposition to familiar tropes applied to Feldman's music – it is supposedly resistant to analysis, Feldman was an anti-intellectual intuitionist, and the works are without process or structure. Noble sets out to refute these claims as well as to contradict Feldman himself. The composer often reiterated his opposition to pre-existing compositional processes and was adamant about his need for a desubjectifying compositional practice. To pose alternatives to these commonplaces, Noble reasserts the need for formalist analysis to crack codes of Feldman's music in the early 1950s while also asserting his analyses’ grounding in lived musical experience: ‘I always came away with an overpowering feeling of the music as carefully planned, designed and constructed. I could not sense chance-derived material or structure, any randomness, not even much in the way of meditative quietness’ (1). The five analyses that follow go to great lengths to prove the reality of the composer's ‘organised structuring of both pitch and time’ (3). Noble makes this goal explicit late in the book when he ‘stress[es] the importance of formal analysis for the contemporary study of music. Without this, we can only speak of surfaces’ (169).

But what's wrong with surfaces? ‘Surface’ is perhaps the most important concept in Feldman's music – one he spent the better part of the 1960s developing in conversation with Brian O'Doherty, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, and others. Taking surfaces seriously is the crucial lesson of Feldman's art. Noble's formalist retrenchment is surprising given his initial response to the music was one of fascination with its phenomenological richness. This is not to say that the insights arising from the analyses are trivial – far from it. Yet the project is realized through the hermeneutics of suspicion. More problematically, Noble's protestations are responses to straw men – Feldman never claimed his notated music of the early 1950s used chance-derived material, nor did he make any claims of randomness in his notated music (or any of his music for that matter).

The paucity of documentary material on Feldman's music in the 1950s makes it hard to get a sense of what exactly he was thinking in these early works; intentions in this decade have to be discerned by way of a handful of published statements and sketchbook writings, read in dialogue with writings by John Cage, Stefan Wolpe, and Frank O'Hara, who did much to set the terms of Feldman's early reception. Despite my concerns, Noble does excellent work drawing upon primary sources for his analyses and gleans numerous insights from them about Feldman's compositional practice and certain consistencies pertaining to his musical practice as a whole.

Chapter 2 presents an analysis of the piano piece Intermission 5 and imagines it as the product of a frustrated composer bored by his job in the family business, composing in snatches when he can grab a free moment. Noble does not make the connection, but his image of Feldman resonates powerfully with his friend O'Hara, whose Lunch Poems similarly were written on breaks from his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Noble then convincingly arrives at his central insight: Feldman's early music can be interpreted as a process of unfolding presentations of aggregates, creating chromatic fields. Noble's discernment of Feldman's manipulation of the total chromatic is perhaps the most convincing evidence for the impact of Wolpe's pedagogy and the musical bond between teacher and student. Noble extends this insight further to note how Feldman deploys chromatic aggregates through a proportional structuring of musical time. Intermission 5’s four chromatic fields are partitioned through particular events (loud chords) that divide the work into a sort of cantilevered form. Feldman uses the completion of the chromatic field as a formal device, delaying it until the arrival of a ‘repetition field’ that prefigures the vast repetitions of Feldman's late works (49).

Chapter 3 turns to Piano Piece 1952 and the extant sketch material. Noble continues to develop his argument about Feldman's manipulation of aggregates and he again notes the alignment of proportional structures and chromatic fields in the work. Noble's study of the sources reveals that Piano Piece 1952 was originally part of a dialectical pair of compositions (a formal strategy he links to Wolpe's pedagogy). Yet, the first half (quicker and more violent) of this pair was destroyed by Feldman: ‘The piece is haunted not only by the ghosts of structures, shapes and figures, but also by that of its murdered twin, heavily crossed out in the sketch manuscript and literally dismembered page by page’ (105). This evocative description is quickly mobilized in the service of more speculative hermeneutics: ‘Feldman's ghostly figures are not necessarily friendly, angelic guides to some future utopia, but perhaps the reproachful, anxious ghosts of the holocaust’ (105). Noble's turn towards the Holocaust was perhaps prompted by his sense of a homology between Feldman's aural flatness (a two-dimensional musical space governed by a timbre structure and a time structure) and the flatness of the work of his painterly contemporaries, especially Guston. It was the art critic Dore Ashton who identified a post-Holocaust anxiety in the claustrophobic canvases of Guston, based on the painter's own comments;Footnote ⁵ Noble makes similar claims for Feldman's music, despite the absence of evidence (102–4). It is an uncharacteristically weak moment in Noble's analysis and ultimately feels unearned and overblown.

Chapter 4 provides an excellent overview of the varied and contradictory source materials for Intermission 6. From this survey, Noble gives us a sense of Feldman's process of selection as he took extant material and worked it towards a published version. (This is a point Cline makes in his discussion of Feldman's Ixion.) He also dates the piece to 1952, making Intermission 6 an early example of an open form work contemporaneous with (if not preceding) Earle Brown's early experiments. The flexibility of Noble's argument about chromatic field manipulation is made clear when he applies it to the versions of Intermission 6. In tracing the piece's revisions, he argues that the final published version was reworked so that the complete 12-tone chromatic is presented in performance – if all the modules are played. In another curious application of speculative hermeneutics, Noble intuits numerological meanings to aggregate completion. Of the addition of an E to the final version of Intermission 6 (the note that completes the aggregate), he suggests, ‘Perhaps this E carries some special, literally occult significance?’ (123). It is another odd moment, suggesting undergirding metaphysical assumptions about Feldman's practice that Noble does not make explicit.

Chapter 5 tests the viability of Noble's aggregate analysis for Feldman's actual indeterminate music – the graph score Intersection 3 composed for David Tudor in 1953. Here he translates the notion of aggregates from pitch to density. He writes that ‘Feldman composes with densities rather than pitch classes, engaging in a re-territorialisation of the musical material’ (161). Noble's hearing of this re-territorialization as explicitly violent leads to another round of Holocaust hermeneutics in which the grid score itself becomes metaphorically reimagined as the fence surrounding a concentration camp. This evinces my larger difficulty with Noble's reliance on formal analysis – his movement from the micro level of musical structure to the macro level of cultural meaning. He continually bypasses the specifics of performance and situated histories of these works within Feldman's community. I am not saying such interpretations are impossible, but that the mediation of the work in performance and reception is an important factor in building up these interpretations. Formalist analysis alone cannot do that work.

Fortunately, Chapter 6 steps back to consider how such links between the micro and macro might play out in Feldman studies in the future and Noble reflects more generally on Feldman's production of ‘moment[s] of ambiguation’ (175). The book ends generously with a call for a wide-ranging research program for Feldman's music, one that would take full account of the links – personal, professional, aesthetic, and economic – between Feldman himself and the broader art world. Despite its moments of hermeneutical overreach, Noble's Composing Ambiguity offers a powerful set of analytical tools with which to understand the alluring uncertainty that accompanies experiences of Feldman's music.

David Cline's exhaustively detailed The Graph Music of Morton Feldman subsequently developed one strand of Noble's inquiry – the insistence upon the importance of the analysis of primary materials in the study of Feldman's music. His fine-grained empirical attention to Feldman's graph scores emerges from the same anxiety as Noble's regarding Feldman's claims that he used intuitive compositional methods – an anxiety that has beset numerous music theorists approaching Feldman's music. As Noble does, Cline restricts his study to only a portion of Feldman's compositional oeuvre: in this case, indeterminate works written on graph paper. They date from late 1950 to 1967 and represent about 25 per cent of Feldman's published output.

Cline opens his study with an astounding claim: ‘Morton Feldman's graphs merit attention because they altered the course of Western classical music’ (1). The evidence for this rests largely on John Cage's belated statement to Feldman in the mid-1960s, that once Feldman developed his graph notation ‘it was then that the musical world changed’ (viii). Cline's reliance upon this statement to authorize his study depends upon reading it as a synecdoche, taking Cage's part for Western classical music's whole. This statement also authorizes the unrelenting tone of advocacy suffusing the book. Cline's intentions are stated clearly at the outset: ‘This monograph aims not only to fill the gap in the literature, but also to encourage a positive reappraisal of this currently under-appreciated series’ (2). And he ends tautologically with the conclusion that Feldman's graph notation ‘was an innovative and viable, but currently underrated, contribution to the music of the second half of the twentieth century’ (333). That being said, the wealth of detail makes this book invaluable for scholars and performers of Feldman's music. Cline reconstructs Feldman's (often contradictory) ideas about the graphs and privileges the composer's words while also assessing the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ of the notation (6). Noting, as Noble does, Feldman's coyness with regards to his compositional methods, Cline notes that ‘this volume aims to reveal more than Feldman may have been comfortable disclosing’ (7).

The first two chapters give a broad overview of the graph music, from the beginnings in the Projection series of 1950–1 to the final graph score In Search of an Orchestration of 1967, and notes important precursors. Joseph Schillinger's ‘System of Musical Composition’ is one, though Cline notes that the graphs developed with the system were never meant as the final stage of score production (13–14).Footnote ⁶ He also reassesses Feldman's relationship to Cage and compellingly argues that they ‘affected one another more directly, not by formal prompting, as between teacher and student, or by slavish initiation, as between master and disciple, but by mutual inspiration through reciprocal example’ (43). Cline also suggests that Feldman's aesthetic trouble with his graph music was the result of his antipathy for a regular pulse and that he worked to overcome this in the later graphs to varying degrees of success.

Chapter 3 (‘Notation’) is laudable for its nuanced consideration of the materiality of Feldman's grids. Cline develops a pragmatic taxonomy of the components of the graphs: ‘grid frame’ references the set of cells in which musical events are prescribed. ‘Labels’ specify some aspect of sound production beyond a particular grid frame while ‘Symbols’ designate an aspect of a musical event represented by a grid frame (arco, pizz., etc.). This chapter will be an invaluable resource for performers and will demystify Feldman's often ambiguous notations.

Chapter 4 is titled ‘Ideology’ and critiques (as Noble does) Feldman's characterization of his practice as intuitive and devoted to sound as an autonomous agent. Whether such values as intuition and sound itself amount to ideology in any strict sense remains an open question. Cline does not specify what he means by ideology – though false consciousness (without its materialist implications) perhaps comes closest. Cline first critiques Feldman's valorization of sound and his desubjectifying aims. Cline finds this attitude ‘difficult to swallow’ and opines that, ‘It is better to see these elements of his view, instead, as a convenient fiction – an artistic credo – that enabled him to incorporate influences into his thinking about music in a way that he found useful as a source of inspiration’ (110). One might rather ask (as I do), why such a view was important to Feldman and what it did for him and his friends. As Emile Gomart and Antoine Hennion have noted, structure and intuition are not polar opposites and we, as humans, frequently invent elaborate scenarios that allow us to give up agency – to step aside so other forces can be in control.Footnote ⁷

The most valuable aspect of this chapter is its genealogical work. By looking at the correspondence between George Antheil and Feldman, Cline finds another important precursor for Feldman's conception of flat musical space (and one that Noble does not mention) – Antheil's principle of time-space which he also likened to the flat space of painting. Indeed, Cline notes that the idea of a time canvas first appears in the elder composer's writings before it becomes a foundational concept for Feldman. When taken together with Noble's insights on Feldman's indebtedness to Wolpe – as well as the more well-known connections to abstract expressionism – the complexity and uniqueness of Feldman's modernist synthesis is thrown into sharp relief.

Chapter 5 homes in on the aesthetic of Feldman's graphs and describes it as ‘holism’ (140). Cline attends to the balanced allocation of timbres and registers and suggests that these ‘homogeneities’ were intended by Feldman as unifying forces (141). The regularity of these homogeneities suggest that he worked on the graphs as wholes. Cline describes this as a personal reworking of the all-over method of abstract expressionist painting – particularly that of Jackson Pollock. Cline's exquisite attention to the extant source material for Marginal Intersection provides ample evidence for this and he finds evidence in the tape residue on the score that supports Christian Wolff's memory of Feldman composing his graphs by taping them to the wall (311).

Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Feldman's compositional method and Cline attempts to reconstruct them from traces of process that Feldman sought to burn behind him. Much in these chapters feels speculative – particularly the discussion of relationships between the structure of the graphs and Cage's macro–micro rhythmic structure – but they are compelling speculations given the intense nature of Feldman and Cage's friendship in the early 1950s. The discussion of Ixion – Feldman's score for Merce Cunnigham's dance Summerspace – is utterly fascinating and Cline virtuosically synthesizes the wealth of archival and sketch material related to the piece, its variants, and Feldman's eventual reworking of the material into a two-piano version. Cline's reconstruction of Ixion’s compositional process and realization for performance reveals a pragmatism and concern for the realities and constraints of dance. He also connects Ixion to a longer history of elastic-form dance music developed by Henry Cowell. Of the later graphs, such as In Search of an Orchestration, Cline argues that Feldman's method includes ‘functional collage’ and superimposition (240) – tactics Feldman would use in his later music as well.

Chapters 8 and 9 focus on performance, particularly Feldman's non-notated preferences (for non-vibrato tone and spontaneity) and David Tudor's performances. There is little new in the Tudor discussion, which relies heavily on John Holzaepfel's excellent work, and these chapters left me desiring a discussion of other performers of the graph scores that would have allowed a broader sense of performance practice beyond that prescribed by Feldman himself. Cline's discussion of Ixion comes closest to this and will serve as a terrific model of how such studies might proceed in the future.

Chapter 10 tracks the implications of the graph score for the rest of Feldman's music and notes, for instance, the use of the graph as an intermediate stage of composition for works such as Structures for string quartet and the solo piano Variations (another dance for Merce Cunningham). Overall, Cline makes a powerful case for considering Feldman's total oeuvre through the lens of his graph music and the volume is handsomely illustrated with a wealth of musical examples. Two appendices follow the main text and present valuable archival documents of idiosyncratic unpublished graphs. The second appendix is an oddly vehement rejoinder to Noble's interpretation of Intermission 3. In it, Cline seeks to discredit the correlation of aggregate completion and proportional subdivisions. It seems unnecessary in this context and ends an otherwise dazzling analytical performance on a sour note.

Despite my misgivings about some of their interpretive moves and methodologies, both Cline's and Noble's books are important additions to our knowledge of Feldman's compositional practice. Both give us powerful interpretive frameworks for coming to know Feldman's music and situate it within the longue durée of Euro-American modernism. But further still, they help us to know better the still-ambiguous singularity of Feldman's music.