Toronto, April 17, 1982
Composer Morton Feldman was invited to the Mercer Union Gallery by Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, to give a lecture and play some tape recordings of Triadic Memories (1981), one of his latest works for solo piano.
During the conference, Feldman talked at length about Cy Twombly, who he knew personally, and how one of his works influenced the composition of the piece.
In 1977 the composer had visited the artist in Rome and had been struck by a series of paintings that he would see on exhibition in New York the following year. According to the few elements provided by Feldman during the conference, it is thought that the Cy Twombly cycle to which the composer refers is Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978 (work in 10 parts), inspired by Homer’s Iliad and now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In particular, Feldman had attentively observed what he defines as “very thin gesso”, probably wax crayon, and the way in which Twombly had managed to modulate the color tones, obtaining almost imperceptible shades and changes in tone between one painting and the other.
Those delicate and changing ‘gesso’ tones are rendered in Feldman’s Triadic Memories through the use of the piano’s damper pedal, held during the entire performance of the piece “half down”, as the composer explained.
[...]
The 90-minute composition imposes on the composer and the performer absolute control of the piece, as "it requires a heightened kind of concentration. Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they are like evolving things" [I].
In that delated time, we are asked to slow down and at the same time activate our ability as listeners, following in a state of alert unconsciousness the cadenced rhythm and the reverberating notes of the piano, which in their overlapping and repetition resemble resonances of the memory.