Memory Unwrapped: GBSR Duo - For Philip Guston

“We do not hear what we hear… only what we remember” Morton Feldman.   A valedictory masterpiece, a study of memory and a transcendental concert experience: Morton Feldman’s 4-hour tribute to his estranged friend Philip Guston is one of the most extraordinary and moving musical memorials ever composed.

GBSR begin their year as Artists in Residence by celebrating Morton Feldman, one of the great explorers of memory in music, in his centenary birthday week, in a concert that also launches their new box set of Morton Feldman trios with Taylor MacLennan, on Another Timbre.

The close friendship between Morton Feldman and the painter Philip Guston collapsed in 1970, an estrangement that would endure until the painter’s death in 1980. Four years later Feldman would dedicate this contemplative epic to his late friend and to their lost friendship; a work that conjures an emotionally complex world of hazy perceptions and hazier reflections.

As the hushed tones of piano, flutes, celeste and metallic percussion cluster in complex soft-focus rhythms, at some points cohering around snatches of melody, at others scattering to explore seemingly unrelated ideas, Feldman explores the limits of memory and half-recollection – traversing and re-traversing the same terrain, but with deceptively sure tread leading the listener towards a poignant, perhaps devastating, conclusion.

This event will last approximately 4½ hours.
NB – There is no scheduled interval for this concert.