Anyone who’s gotten an e-mail from me in the past couple years has seen, down at the bottom, beneath the, “All best, Aleksei”,  my favorite Morton Feldman quote: “Down with the masterpiece, up with art.”

Composer Brad Lubman devotes a few minutes to the idea of the masterpiece as it relates to music in our time in a recent Sequenza 21 podcast. It’s a short interview with some nice ideas – well worth a listen.

The way I’ve come to understand Feldman’s remark, he’s not saying “down with incredible music”.  When he says, “Down with the masterpiece,” it seems to me he’s saying down with the institution of the masterpiece, the piece that fits a certain mold in its scale or its scope, or its reach, or its presentation; the piece that becomes part of The Canon, or that every student plays and studies.  Recent classical music is so multifarious – one man’s “Partch!” is another man’s “Partch…” (eyes rolling) – the scene doesn’t lend itself very well to a contemporary Messiah.  Not to mention that Messiah wasn’t even Messiah until the 20th century.  The Masterpiece may in fact be a relatively recent idea, one that supported the monolithic institutions of classical music presentation that themselves only came to dominance in the last 150 years.

PS: a note on this post’s title, and totally irrelevant to its content, I learned recently that “death to [blank]“, in Farsi, is often used very casually, or simply to mean “down with [blank]“.  So, while “death to America” might sound scary, keep in mind the same crowd might later be heard saying “death to potatoes“.