As time loses its meaning, the music of Morton Feldman gains new resonance

Time yawns before and drags behind me. It hangs in the air, as indifferent to the hour as a river is to its name. I measure its passage in coffee spoons, yes, but also in gallons of milk, trash days and haircuts, and the shadows that scale the walls in the morning and kneel in the corners at night. Sometimes it’s Monday. Sometimes it’s May. Sometimes it’s midnight.

This whole quarantine thing has me pretty screwed up, timewise. Maybe you can identify.

The dissolution months ago of our usual routines, modest and mundane as they may have been, has left many of us unmoored. The familiar beat of my day-today has degraded into something more like a circadian polyrhythm, and I wasn’t much of a dancer to begin with.

No wonder I’m listening to so much Morton Feldman.

Glacial, spectral, static yet constantly in motion, the sprawling works of the late mid-20th century composer have always been an acquired taste, despite their strange, luminous beauty and unparalleled scale. Feldman has always been a composer of shifting environments, an arranger of uncertainties. And in the disorienting stretch of this pandemic, I’m finding his most “difficult” works newly useful and uncannily accessible.

A contemporary of Christian Wolff, John Cage and Pierre Boulez, Feldman tends to get tagged as a formative minimalist - if not a father, then at least one of its weird uncles. But, to my ears, he’s a maximalist, limning vast expanses of pure sound - like his String Quartet No. 2, a colossus of color that takes up to six hours to unfold. (Mode Records’ recently released recording of it from New York City’s tenacious Flux Quartet is available on five CDs, or unbroken on a single DVD.)

It also misses the mark to try to understand Feldman in the context of other composers, as aware as he was of the traditions he bore and bucked. His approach feels more akin to an invisible mode of visual art, producing compositions too vast to perceive and too present to escape. His music doesn’t demand your attention so much as supply a condition.

You might get the feeling, somewhere in the midst of a piece like “Coptic Light” (1986) of standing before an endless Twombly canvas - illegible poetry and outbursts of color limning a new language entirely from scratch.

Or listening to “Rothko Chapel” (1971, for chorus, viola and percussion) you might feel present in the meditative octagonal sanctuary for which it was composed. When I lived down the block from it in Houston, I’d revisit Feldman’s piece through ear buds while sitting among the 14 looming, blooming, monolithic black paintings Rothko created for the space. The minutes and hours would melt together (and not from the Houston heat) and the limited light allowed in through the roof’s aperture would scatter my sense of the day outside.

Eventually, I came to treat this quality of Feldman’s music like a utility: I’d listen to Feldman in traffic to blur the lurching, stalling boredom into something more like beauty. I’d listen to him at the grocery store to make errands more dreamlike. I’d listen to him at the gym to feel myself move through space while running in place.

And now, as the days repeat with barely perceptible variations like one of Feldman’s figures, his music isn’t just lending form to time as it drifts by, it’s recalibrating my sense of scale. And I’m not alone.

Cellist Stephen Marotto recently recorded Feldman’s 80-minute “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” (1981) with the pianist Marilyn Nonken for a forthcoming release on Mode; but before he did, he put a piece of tape over the clock on his iPad.