HELEN WHITAKER, FLUTE

Project Details

Broken Line Trio present For Philip Guston by Morton Feldman. It is amongst the most involved and demanding of his extended-duration works, and Broken Line Trio have crafted an intimate performance of this epic 4.5 hour work.

Broken Line is a trio consisting of Adam Swayne (piano/keyboards), Helen Whitaker (flutes) and Adam Bushell (percussion).

They came together in 2016 to play Morton Feldman’s Crippled Symmetry - a beautiful and austere work lasting for 90 unbroken minutes. Debuting in Brighton festival Fringe, the trio developed a way of presenting the concert, with an pre-concert talks and a short interval before the performance, which gave the audience a friedly way into the piece and helped make the concert easily accessible to a wide audience.

Since then, they have expanded their repertoire to include pieces by Christian Wolff and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and commissioned works from an international roster of composers including Jean Martin and Helgi Ingvarson.

In 2024, they returned to Morton Feldman’s epically long compositions with a performance of the 4-hour For Philip Guston. Following the outline of their earlier Feldman concerts with a brief pre-concert talk, they managed to make this huge monolithic piece feel approachable – you can see the response in the audience comments.

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For Philip Guston is a wonderful, austere and unique piece of music. It’s 4 ½ hour length is extreme, even by Morton Feldman’s standards – only his Second String Quartet is longer. It was written in the mid-1980s, when Feldman was increasingly writing very quiet and very long music. But despite the duration, the piece is remarkably approachable. Notes, motifs and chords recur and repeat throughout the piece, and help to build a recognisable musical landscape – you never feel lost as a listener, and there is always something to help you orient yourself.

Unlike some of Feldman’s earlier music, the whole piece is fully and precisely notated. There is no improvisation and no room for interpretation on the part of the musicians, and playing the minutely detailed rhythms and constantly changing time-signatures requires incredible concentration and focus – despite the airy and spacious effect it has on the listener!

Philip Guston, for whom this piece is named, found fame as an abstract expression painter in New York in the 1950s alongside colleagues including Jackson Pollock & Mark Rothko. He was also a close friends with Morton Feldman, and there is some similarity of style between them, with Guston’s finely detailed brushwork creating atmospheric, nebulous structures.

Later in life, however, Guston returned to representational art. This proved controversial with his audience, but also led to him falling out with Feldman. When Guston died in 1980, the two hadn’t spoken for years.

This piece one of Feldman’s most engrossing and most beautiful compositions, and can be seen not just as an elegy for Guston, but as a way of reconnecting with a great artists and a lost friend.

QUOTES

    “… beautiful and brilliant…. It was a complete privilege to be part of it”

    “Thanks for making it happen! ..no distractions, just those shifting chords and notes.”

    “Thanks! Was a real privilege to hear it, and very rare to get something like this on your doorstep”

    “Never have I heard regret expressed so clearly in music… the work lives with me for days afterwards” - Tim Rutherford-Johnson – VAN online magazine - 5th Dec 2024

    “Thanks Helen Whitaker, Adam Swayne, and Adam Bushell for the excellent performance today, it was like a spa for the brain!”

    “An incredible experience”

    “...very beautiful… Considerable stamina from Adam Swayne on piano, Helen Whitaker on flutes and Adam Bushell on percussion to perform this very long piece.”

CLICK HERE to read blog posts from the rehearsal period during 2023-24.

Photos courtesy of Agata Urbaniak