It’s easy to compare any slow, extended composition to the work of Morton Feldman. The composer set about a revolution in the latter part of the last century with his delicately monolithic compositions, and yet nothing else is ever quite like him. In a century that contained both Erik Satie and Brian Eno, Morton Feldman remains unparalleled.
Composer and percussionist Tyshawn Sorey was born at the beginning of Feldman’s late period (the works for which Feldman is most remembered) and has been something of an acolyte, in at least some of his work. (The talented multi-instrumentalist is also a jazz drummer of some renown.) Sorey’s 2022 concert-length Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) mirrored Feldman’s Rothko Chapel in instrumentation and mood and he played drums against Conrad Tao’s piano in a gorgeous reading of Feldman’s Triadic Memories at the 2023 Bang on a Can Long Play festival in Brooklyn. To the extent that Feldman’s name has become an eponym, Sorey could certainly be called ‘Feldmanesque’, and in fact one of the better at the game.
There was much of what be called ‘Feldmanesque’ and of what reasonably might be expected from a piece of music in Sorey’s For Grachan Moncur III (dedicated to the jazz trombonist who was a key part of the 1960s ‘New Thing’ movement), which received its US premiere at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The single-movement piece for strings and percussion certainly has melodic statements, ripe with beauty and warmth (thanks indeed to the JACK Quartet’s always resplendent playing). There was a sense of place, or of being, and even something like thematic development. But what Sorey doesn’t allow is progression. The music follows a uniform beat through its duration of more than an hour, although not a beat set by the percussion. The music sat identical squares. It was like a quiet day in a sunny room. The air was still, shadows and colors changed as the sun moved across the sky, but nothing inside the room ever actually moved.
One might be tempted to say it was repetitious, although very little was actually repeated, at least after its strict, four-count initial iterations. The strings carried the piece, often with a stated phrase above extended harmonic tones, sometimes then mirrored in a dissonant variation. Sorey sat behind a sizeable percussion array, eyes closed, for quite some time as the quartet played through a series of interrelated statements. At length, he stood and seemed to spend a few seconds sizing up the vibraphone before playing soft intervals, barely audible, tidily segmenting the string lines. Sorey moved from cymbals to toms to timpani, quietly supporting the structures of the strings.
At about midpoint, the thematic iterations shifted to spectral fields, still keeping the same count, but in short order returned to lines and undercurrent. Even with the glacial tempo, For Grachan Moncur was, if we must, most ‘Feldmanesque’ in that it didn't go anywhere and didn't need to. The music progressed, quite beautifully, precisely at the speed of time.
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