In a remarkable moment after WWII New York became the centre of the art world, simultaneously seeing the development of new ways of hearing music, and new ways of seeing art. It was here that the American experimental composer Morton Feldman said, “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened”. The composer Samuel Andreyev shows how composers and artists in New York in this period went about the difficult business of wrestling with a new abstract language, often at great cost to themselves, to produce some of the masterpieces of post war American art. Samuel focuses on the powerfully productive relationships that Feldman had with the abstract expressionists, Philip Guston, and Mark Rothko, who showed him by example how to set his sounds free, in the same way their paintings set colours free. Feldman even called his own compositions, ‘Time Canvasses’, where he said, he more or less primed the canvas with an overall hue of music. This is a clue to the unorthodox way Feldman’s music - which can be both very long, and almost always very quiet - remarkably blurs what we imagine to be the boundary between music and painting. A Soundscape Production, produced by Andrew Carter.
Canada 150: Geeking Glenn Gould
Sunday Feature: Monteverdi's Women
Breaking Free - Martin Luther's Revolution. Reformation 500
A Square Dance in Heaven
v. is for Tony
Sunday Feature: I Know an Island
The Radio 3 Documentary: Hitting the High Notes
Opera Across the Waves
Alice Coltrane: Her Sound and Spirit
Sunday Feature: Boulez and His Rumble in the Jungle
Music on the Brink of Destruction
Apocalypse How
Sunday Feature:Kandinsky - A Story of Revolution
Breaking Free: Freud versus Music
David Attenborough - World Music Collector
Sunday Feature: Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde?
SUNDAY FEATURE: NEW GENERATION THINKERS
New Generation Thinkers
The secrets of the Music Reading Panel
Sunday Feature: Philip French and the Critical Ear
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Modern West
Global News Podcast
Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4
The Infinite Monkey Cage
You’re Dead to Me
Elis James and John Robins