Bunita Marcus entered the State University of New York at Buffalo in the mid-1970s to study with Morton Feldman. She became, in the words of one of his chroniclers, Feldman's “most important student,” one whom he was particularly keen to encourage. Eventually, he fell in love and asked her to marry him. Marcus declined Feldman's proposal and, after earning her doctorate in 1981, moved to New York, “remaining however his inspiration and intimate companion throughout the last decade of his life.” She gave the principal address at Feldman's funeral in 1987.Footnote ¹

Knowing this background, one might wish to know further whether For Bunita Marcus (1985), Feldman's penultimate solo piano work and one of his last in any medium, is also to be understood as a tribute to a person for whom he felt great affection as well as artistic kinship, despite the disappointment she had dealt him—a kind of An die ferne Geliebte without words, if you like. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this reviewer has no revelations to offer along such lines; if there are any allusions, coded or otherwise, to Bunita Marcus or her own music in this piece of slightly over an hour's duration, they remain unintelligible to me. What I can report is that it is extraordinarily beautiful—enough in itself, one should think, to qualify it as a loving gesture.

For Bunita Marcus is in the style adopted by Feldman during the last dozen years or so of his career, a style that, unlike that of his earlier work, featured overt patterning conveyed by means of subtly distorted repetition over long—sometimes extremely long—periods of time. Feldman termed this approach “crippled symmetry” in one notable essay, tracing its origins to his developing fascination with the not-quite-regular qualities of handwoven carpets from Central Asia and the possibilities they suggested of analogous realization in musical terms.Footnote ² However, even by the standards of this late style, For Bunita Marcus is remarkably austere. For instance, most if not all of Feldman's works from this period take an explicitly restricted set of pitches (or pitch classes) as a point of departure—a set into which changes are gradually introduced. In For Bunita Marcus, not only is this initial set quite small (pitch classes C-sharp, D, and E-flat), but also only very gradually indeed does any change emerge in this dimension: not until 2′18″ into the recording under review here does a fourth pitch class (E) make its appearance. The sudden appearance, a short time later, of several new pitch classes does not lead to a permanently expanded collection in general use; what we hear instead are successive passages, widely varying in length, each governed by its own collection of three or four notes, with transitions between them ranging from slow metamorphoses to abrupt shifts. Compensating, one might say, for this restricted palette is the notably unpatterned registration: any note may appear in any of three or four (eventually more) octaves.

As for the rhythmic domain, at first glance the score might suggest great variety, with time signatures changing every bar (with few exceptions) and with many durational combinations available to fill them. Chances are, however, that the actual listening experience will provide instead the impression of an intriguingly irregular pulse set in motion across a field defined as much by the complete lack of expressive nuance and utter sameness of dynamic (very soft, the uniformity promoted further by the fact that the sustain pedal is depressed continuously throughout, with only two brief hiatuses) as by the restricted makeup of pitch collections. Every so often, among the unpredictable successions of (mainly) 3/8 and 5/16 (the repertoire of signatures is somewhat expanded late in the piece), a bar of 2/2 is interjected, empty of all but resonance from the preceding bars, reflecting Feldman's insistence that one does not truly hear musical sound except in its decay.

Such remarks are not to be taken as in any sense adequate to analysis; they do, however, give some idea of the formidable challenges awaiting the performer.Footnote ³ First of all, the demands placed on the pianist's concentration are special, and especially exacting—all the more so, paradoxically, because these demands are not bound up with virtuosity in the usual sense of other repertoires for the instrument. Second, the work requires the pianist to adhere strictly to those aspects of the score that cannot, by definition, provide any “relief” of even the most fleeting kind while still somehow managing to pace and shape the sounding result, keeping the audience's attention engaged.

How does Louis Goldstein do?

For the most part, splendidly well. The uniformity of dynamic level is nearly perfectly realized, the consistency of touch under complete control. Overall, in this recording the piece does sound louder than I would somehow expect it to, at a dynamic of ppp; ironically, this may well be owing to the close miking that was evidently done to enhance the effect of intimacy, always crucial to a successful performance of any Feldman work. Also beautifully achieved is the “frozen, yet . . . vibrating”Footnote ⁴ stasis, in Feldman's words, projected by the distorted pulse. Goldstein is right on top of things even at the most confusing junctures, where literal repeats anywhere from two to a dozen bars in extent are framed by other material similar to what is being repeated. I find his playing particularly riveting in passages such as the first 2′45″ of Track 2, riddled with such repeats and limited to four notes that remain fixed in specific registers, their articulation uninterrupted by any 2/2 resonance bars. As for overall pacing, Goldstein's conception of the whole is effective, hewing very close, in my judgment, to its ideal form. He may have “cheated” a bit with some of the bars of resonance, cutting them just a hair short; but the total duration of his performance is the closest to the duration specified by the score of any that I know of in commercial release.Footnote ⁵

The recording itself is of good quality, though quite noticeably not state-of-the-art: a slight fuzziness is evident from time to time at points of attack, especially when two or more notes are struck simultaneously. The insertion of track divisions is gratuitous and acts as an unfortunate encouragement to just the sort of listening that would have displeased Feldman. Like all of his late works, this one is meant to be heard whole, over one long, unbroken stretch of time, not sampled for “favorite” passages. Such defects, however, do not detract significantly from the pleasure of hearing this work rendered in such accomplished fashion.

Over the 25 years that have now passed since Feldman's death, it is the long late works that seem especially to have caught the attention of performers and audiences. The multiple recordings of For Bunita Marcus are but one example; many of Feldman's works from the late 1970s and 1980s have been recorded at least twice—and although it is unlikely that a work like the six-hour-long Second String Quartet will ever be recorded as often as, say, the Grosse Fuge, it is amazing enough that it has been done even once. Just as the appointment to a permanent teaching position finally gave Feldman the time he needed to concentrate on his composing—a change that may have helped encourage him to write long pieces—so has the advent of the CD made the widespread appreciation of these pieces feasible in recorded form.