Abstract

With pieces of music at 6 hours in length, Morton Feldman’s late music explores duration, memory, and remembrance. His music presents the listener with a musical landscape to contemplate along with an extreme duration to challenge the listener’s ability to listen to music itself. Feldman’s late music also decontextualizes or sections off time, similar to the Husserlian epoché, by way of its Minimalist tendencies. I take Heidegger’s terms, Dasein and Gestell and apply them to durational music in order to shed light on how durational music affects memory. I explore how the dedicatory titling of his late pieces gives way to thinking of them as pieces of absence, memory, and mourning