In the world of modern music, there is an inclination to play with atonality and
compose without melody. Morton Feldman’s work, For Samuel Beckett (1986), is
a work toying successfully with atonality and non-melody. It begins suddenly
without any development of a theme, elapses at a similar pace, never rising or
falling. It is fleshed out by colorful tones, and ends just as it starts: abruptly. The
mood does not change, nor does it develop or map out a scene or character. It hits
us in the face, painfully absorbed into our skin without warning, even though the
score calls for pianissimo. There is not a character to be found in the work, nor a
story to be told. It is place of unmoored, incomplete persons in which no one
persona can be assembled: a place for a schizophrenic persona. Even in Feldman’s
opera, Neither (1977), the human voice cannot give us a character or story to move
with emotionally, only sudden flashes of repetitious notes entwined with silence.
