In 1976, between April and July, Morton Feldman wrote three works he regarded as a trilogy: Orchestra, Elemental Procedures and Routine Investigations. They were his preparation for Neither, the opera on a text by Samuel Beckett commissioned by the Rome Opera. All three contain what he called "Beckett material", which in the end he did not use in the opera. This disc gathers the trilogy, with Peter Rundel conducting.
Feldman was born in New York on 12 January 1926 and died in Buffalo on 3 September 1987. The performers are the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and the soprano Claudia Barainsky. Orchestra was recorded in the Philharmonie Köln on 10 February 2010, the other two works there on 5-6 February 2013. This is a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk, with Harry Vogt as executive producer and Stephan Hahn as recording supervisor.
The "Beckett material" begins as nine measures in which the chromatic neighbours C, D flat, D and E flat repeat in irregular order. Accelerated and slowed, and punctuated by chordal attacks, it produces seemingly endless pitch activity rather than a melody with phrases. It stands against the chordal writing at the base of Feldman's technique. Elemental Procedures, for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra, sets a Beckett text treated as abstract phonetic articulation. It was commissioned by the WDR for a programme called New Simplicity, and Feldman admitted he had written an unusually complex piece for it. He said the title refers to basic techniques such as retrograde, repetition and variation. Routine Investigations is scored for just six players: oboe, trumpet, piano, viola, cello and double bass.
Neither was first staged in Rome in 1977. Feldman later used the Beckett material in the long pattern-based works he wrote between 1977 and 1983, to create fast motion within his slow processes. Reviewing the disc in MusicWeb International, Dominy Clements noted that there seemed to be no other recordings of these pieces, so this release "fills a vital gap in Feldman's discography". Of Elemental Procedures he wrote that it "holds you in its grip from beginning to end".
CD, Wergo WER 7325 2, released in 2016.
