…a cornucopia of lamentations…

From Why Patterns? An Analysis of Morton Feldman’s “Piano and string quartet”:

In discussing his 1978 work Why Patterns? Morton Feldman said:
“The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on which pattern should be reiterated and for how long …” (Feldman, 129)
[…]
This impressive display of inversions is typical of Feldman’s late pieces. The aforementioned For Bunita Marcus is another exquisite example of such inventiveness. Feldman put it this way:
“Actually I just try to repeat the same chord. I’m reiterating the same chord in inversions.” (Feldman, 230)
“… there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion …” (Feldman, 127)
[…]
“… The reason my music is notated is I wanted to keep control of the silence … when you hear it, you have no idea rhythmically how complicated that is on paper. It’s floating. On paper it looks as though it’s rhythm. It’s not. It’s duration.” (Feldman, 232)
Indeed, PSQ is very ‘complicated’ when it comes to durations. Such complexity derives from Feldman’s attitude, in his late works, to keep notated music free and ‘floating’, rhythmically speaking, as if it were a written transcription of an improvisation. Cage remarked once that Feldman’s late works were Feldman playing his early graph pieces.

A strange anecdote from Kulturkenner’s Porträt:

Just as he remembers his childhood, so Trojahn remembers the essential things written before his time: Don Giovanni, Beethoven’s symphonies, the String Sextets by Brahms, the music of a Gustav Mahler or Hans Werner Henze. All this and more has left traces in Trojahn’s musical language. In 1978 his Second Symphony caused a scandal at the music festival in Donaueschingen, the holy of holies of contemporary music. Not point by point but large expressive lines were to be heard there; silver fanfares rang into it; the orchestra reveled in Bruckneresque colors, suffered as in Mahler, exploded as in Henze—an elephant in the porcelain shop of the avant-garde. When the work was to be exported to the festival in Metz, the sensitive neighbors protested and French newspapers wrote about “neo-Nazi music.”

Solidaritätslied, music by Hanns Eisler, lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.
From Hanns Eisler’s second HUAC testimony in September of 1947

This hearing is both sinister and ridiculous. This committee is not interested in any testimony I may give or in anything I can testify about. The only thing of any public importance about me is my standing as a composer. Although my reputation is international, I do not suppose that that fact makes my musical activities un-American. I would be delighted to spend as much time as this committee will allow to lecture on musical topics, the only matters which I am qualified to speak about. I could then discuss, for example, the development technique of Beethoven’s last sonatas and string quartets or analyze the art of the fugue. But I doubt that I have been called to further such cultural matters.

A humorous, Godowsky-like composition by Sciarrino. Marc-André Hamelin at the piano.

Interviewer Sue Cook and composer Michael Finnissy discussing his composition Red Earth, from a BBC Proms interview, 1988:

Michael Finnissy: […] when one calls a piece Red Earth, and it’s ostensibly just about a landscape, it could be confusing to people that they’re expecting to hear something which in some way sounds like that landscape looks, for me there are a lot of other things involved in it, feelings, emotions, which in some ways contradict that landscape…

Sue Cook: I personally listened to it, found it rather a menacing piece, I felt that I didn’t want to listen to it alone on a dark night. Is that the sort of reaction you’d expect?

Extract from his website:

On the process of his Quadraturen (“Squarings”):
(1)
The first step is always an acoustic photograph (“phonograph”).
This can be a recording of anything: speech, street noise, music.
(2)
Time and frequency of the chosen “phonograph” are dissolved into a grid of small “squares”
whose format may, for example, be 1 second (time) to 1 second (interval).
(3)
The resulting grid is the score, which is then to be reproduced in different media:
on traditional instruments, computer controlled piano, or in white noise.¹