Morton Feldman Rothko Chapel program
I was lucky enough to attend the sold-out performance of Rothko Chapel (among a few other, shorter works) that the Monday Evening Concert series put on tonight in honor of what would have been Morton Feldman’s 100th birthday (at least, earlier this year). It’s the second show celebrating Feldman I saw this week—last Friday, Oracle Egg had BlackBox Ensemble perform a similar event with different works.
Now, full disclosure, I knew nothing of Feldman before these concerts. While I listen to plenty of avant-garde music, it’s often in the shape of post-rock-adjacent bands or weird things I see at sparsely-attended local shows where someone has an array of objects they turn into something between a harmony and an unstructured wall of noise. The sort of high-brow, famous and studied crowd isn’t something I’m really familiar with.
That’s why I was particularly fond of hearing this performance tonight. I had no clue what to expect—it was honestly my love of Rothko more than anything that made me buy a ticket to begin with. But I left completely stirred by the music.
Performance set-up at Oracle Egg
This is the wonderful thing about experiencing art in general—there’s no telling how seeing Rothko Chapel will affect me or the work I make down the line, but it undoubtedly will, somehow, even if I am not fully aware of it. It feels almost stupid to write out—how taking in something creative can provoke inspiration—but we live in really stupid times when people are actively working against the idea that art made by humans has a place or purpose in life.
Beyond my ongoing laments about AI, though, seeing this made me both glad to be in Los Angeles but saddened by how capitalism all but ruins these types of performances for so many people by not allowing an avenue for them to be experienced at all. A ‘market’-based economy will always be cruel to the arts because it’s generally unpredictable what, if anything, will even break even with a financial investment (much less be any kind of success). Major cities generally have enough demand for a variety of cultural options that many forms of art can cultivate audiences; mid-sized cities are lucky to have one independent theater and a liberal arts college that offers annual concert series. Rural areas are basically fucked beyond anything that doesn’t play in a national, corporate movie theater chain.
Experiencing art helps develop abstract thought. When ten people see the same movie, even one that might be ‘philosophical’ in nature, they are all presented with the same basic concept in their heads because the plot of the film poses questions it seeks to answer. Perhaps it’ll make the people think about variations of that question, but all ten people will have fairly concentrated thought processes. Taking in an experimental concert, or looking at abstract paintings, makes the ten people come up with their own questions before trying to reach a conclusion. The experience itself provokes so much more than what entertainment provides for—it has the potential to spur on more conversations, develop greater ideas, and make people more open in general.
As ideas are being chiseled away at and culture that doesn’t embrace corporatism is stifled, it feels like we’re all losing out. Violence seems inevitable at this point, and I can’t help but think that’s partially due to the fact so much of what we see and hear and experience on screens of any sort keeps pointing in that direction. We all end up thinking in similar patterns of decay because that’s all we’re shown in the dominant forms of media. It’s all just so sad, and I guess the music was bringing all that up tonight.
