Daniel's Staff Pick: February 17, 2025

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel / For Frank O'Hara LP (Columbia Odyssey, 1976)

In his last few staff picks, Dominic has been telling you about the big collection we bought a few weeks ago. Last week, after we picked at it for several weeks, it was finally time to box up the less exciting stuff and move it to storage so it wouldn’t be in our way at the warehouse. As I was getting everything together and making a last sweep for good stuff for the store, I unboxed the 4 or 5 boxes of classical records that no one had really paid any attention to. While most of the collection was works by classical and early 20th century composers, I found a couple of minimalist bangers I couldn’t help bringing home. I’m always on the hunt for pleasant, relaxing music to play at home in the evening, so these records have gotten quite a lot of play.

Morton Feldman first came on my radar when I read an excellent book about John Cage a decade ago. Reading a book about John Cage is probably the best way for someone like me to appreciate him, as so many of his innovations were conceptual rather than strictly musical. Cage did for music what painters like Picasso did for visual art, questioning the medium’s fundamental assumptions in order to create something genuinely new. Cage’s contributions to music included his pieces for “prepared piano” (he would stick various items on and between the strings inside a piano to disrupt its normal ways of making sound, decades before Sonic Youth did similar things with their electric guitars) and his embrace of the idea of randomness in composition. Rather than viewing the composer’s intention as the soul of music, Cage relied on the I Ching to generate musical ideas, questioning the notion that the composer’s mind was the source of musical beauty. Morton Feldman was a frequently recurring character in the John Cage book, as the two were close friends who frequently bounced ideas off one another. I remember learning in the book that the two men initially bonded over their love for turn-of-the-20th-century French pianist and composer Erik Satie. Satie’s stark, slow-moving, and meditative compositions clearly pointed the way toward 20th-century minimalism. If you like slow, meditative music, do yourself a favor and pick up the next Satie record you see in a classical dollar bin. His “Gymnopédies” are particularly lovely.

“Rothko Chapel,” the piece that takes up the entire a-side of this LP, is a piece of music Feldman composed for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. I’ve never been to the Rothko Chapel (though I’d very much like to), but I’ve spent a good amount of time in a similar space, the Rothko room at the Tate Modern in London. You might be familiar with Rothko’s most famous paintings, which are large canvases featuring fuzzy-edged squares of color, sometimes contrasting, sometimes closely complementary. It’s the kind of thing someone allergic to modern art would look at and say, “I could have painted these sloppy-ass squares,” but I love his work, particularly the darker, earthier pieces he did later in his life (Rothko died by suicide in 1970). When I visited the Rothko room at the Tate, the experience was powerful partially because it was so different from the usual museum experience. Usually galleries are big, open spaces with white walls and crisp lighting meant to reveal the subtleties in the works on display. This can make being in a museum an anxious experience, because it can sometimes feel like you’re on display yourself, being silently judged by the other people in the space. In contrast, the Rothko room is so dim that it allows you to disappear into anonymity, to let go of that self-consciousness and lose yourself in the painting. The paintings themselves invite that with their saturated fields of violet, crimson, and black. You can hardly see them until your eyes adjust to the light; if you want to get the full experience, you need to put in the time to let your body physically acclimate to the space. When that finally happens, you notice your heart rate is slower, the world is quieter, and your experience of the paintings is more intense. From what I understand, the Rothko Chapel in Houston cultivates a similar experience. While it’s called a chapel, the space is non-denominational and not affiliated with any religion. The Chapel is a space meant to foster empathy and understanding, and is sometimes used for conferences devoted to weighty subjects like peace, justice, and human rights that can be highly charged.

Even without the accompaniment of Rothko’s paintings, Feldman’s piece evokes that same feeling. The slow-moving piano figures recall Satie’s work, but as the piece develops, a chorus joins in. While the choral melodies are as earthy as the colors in Rothko’s paintings, the human voices singing in close harmony get me in the feels, evoking the same choked-up feeling I get from a massive church choir, but it’s not ecstatic feeling… it’s deliberate, measured, even cerebral. It makes you feel like if we can just slow down and really listen, we can make the world a better place. Like many of you, lately I’ve been beset by the feeling that the world is crumbling around me, so brief moments of hope like this are even more valuable.