Morton Feldman

condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (minimal ring wear)

Rothko Chapel (1971) is one of Morton Feldman's most celebrated and most immediately accessible works - a score for viola, cello, chorus, soprano, and percussion, written for the non-denominational chapel in Houston that Mark Rothko designed and decorated with fourteen large-scale paintings in the years before his death. The connection between Feldman's music and Rothko's painting was deep and longstanding: both artists were interested in the possibility of art that exists without reference, without narrative, without anything other than its own sensory presence. Rothko Chapel enacts this through its characteristic extreme quietness, its refusal of development or climax, its suspension of musical time into something approaching stasis. For Frank O'Hara, written the same year in memory of the poet who had been Feldman's close friend, shares the same atmosphere of restrained mourning. Issued on Columbia Odyssey, making these works available to a wider audience than most of Feldman's output reached in his lifetime. Available in three copies.