There are hours in the day that don’t quite announce themselves. They drift in, unlabelled, between the structure of purpose. A time that can only be invited when the body slackens, the air flattens, and something unnames itself inside you. A kind of weightlessness. Pleasant and unhurried. As if the day itself is unsure of what to do next. Not heroic, nor productive, faintly comic like the family cat.
It is tempting to fill these hours with activity: a nap, a novel, a virtuous walk. But there’s a shelter in sitting with life and allowing it to happen. It is not quite leisure, not quite ritual. Simply meeting the day where it is, without asking it to be different.
Music begins to behave differently. As something quieter, more honest. Music that does not mark time but slips into it. The kind that enters a room already filled with sighs and settling. That finds you when you are no longer trying to be found.
My house holds these hours. Built to service workers at a nearby silk mill that has long since been demolished and replaced by hostas and reeds of grass. The sense of industry has gone, in a town aging and adrift from commerce.
Originally constructed as a solitary cottage it’s now positioned within a row of terraces. What was once on its own site is now in a between place. The house has tumbled through the centuries. The stone is tired and the bricks have stilled under their own weight. The slate roof sunken.
Light turns soft in the afternoon, and just beyond it, a garden left to grow long. What began in support of No Mow May, a campaign in the UK, a gesture toward pollinators and biodiversity, has, by late July, risen in uneven tufts, seedheads leaning together in unspoken consciousness. Dandelions appear like hyphens. The wind passes through unresisted. And in its own loose way, the garden has begun to resemble music, untamed, unguided, but somehow more present.
I used to see that overgrowth as an absence of energy. A sign I hadn’t been keeping up. But now, maybe there’s a softness to letting things be. An invitation in low intervention. A form that comes not from acting, but from noticing. Music thrives in this space. It doesn’t ask to be mastered nor held in place. It rewards receptivity.
This isn’t music for work. That belongs to the morning’s tight rhythms and radio alarms, caffeine for the inbox. Nor the velvet backdrop to evening rituals like sex or hearts. This is the music for when you are not quite one thing or another. When the day has let go of its grip, and you, too, are beginning to unspool.
With music the house changes. The walls drape. The garden breathes. Time tilts slightly. And a true forgiving sound finds its way in.
Afternoons are sacred in the same way that everything is sacred, like Sundays, cows, the solar system, or a birthday cake. They offer a moment of hearing that allows you to be exactly as you are, unedited, unguarded, slightly slumped. A moment where you are not doing anything but something is happening.
Along the slow path of the afternoon comes Morton Feldman’s Violin and String Quartet (recently performed beautifully by Apartment House). It is a piece spoken of in terms of duration: one hundred and thirty-five minutes, unbroken, swaying without destination. But duration isn’t quite the right word. Feldman’s genius lies not in how long his music lasts, but in how it alters your sense of what lasting even means.
In Violin and String Quartet time does not pass, it holds like dust suspended in sunlit spills. There are no movements, no climaxes, no formal development in the traditional Western sense. Instead, there is repetition with infinitesimal variation. A short, diatonic figure gently repeats while the string quartet floats behind it in long, glassy tones, slightly detuned from one another. These are not harmonies in the functional sense. They shimmer at the edge of coherence. The strings offer a trembling veil of intonation, swelling and receding like breath.
Feldman was influenced by the visual arts and spoke of his music as “time canvases.” Paintings of formless detail hang. Books with blurred titles float. Their permanence in drift. Over time, the slightest change a shifted interval, a sustained note held a bit longer, a moment of unexpected silence.
Perception doesn’t sharpen so much as it dilates. Feldman’s music teaches you how to attend differently. It discourages anticipation. It asks nothing of you but presence, long and open and soft.
In its structure, Violin and String Quartet plays with memory. Each fragment reappears just after it’s been forgotten. The logic is perceptual: Feldman is composing how it feels to experience music, not how it should function on the page. It’s music that lingers in the ear, suspended in working memory, always just out of reach.
Ambient sounds of the space mix with it. The creak of the floor. The tick of a radiator. The occasional gust from the garden, moving through the French doors, lifting the curtains just slightly. The piece is porous, absorbing the acoustics of wherever it is played.
Where traditional quartet writing often foregrounds conversation. Violins exchanging melodic material, the cello calms the proceedings. Feldman reduces all roles to texture. Each instrument becomes a shade, a gesture, a brushstroke on a sonic canvas. It is the chamber ensemble as atmosphere, the piano as pulse, the listener as participant in a shared meditation on time.
To speak of Feldman’s work as “afternoon music” might, to some, sound too casual, like how we call a churchyard a resting place. But afternoon is not always light. It is a serious hour, unadorned, when the day is too far in to begin again, and yet too incomplete to call it done. It is when you most feel the weight of being alive and briefly at rest within that fact.
When it ends, if your mind was present when it does, you are left with an atmosphere that lingers in the room. It is not that time has passed, but that you have been submerged in it, steeped in its grain. Not duration, but density. Not structure, but sensation.
By the mid-1980s, Morton Feldman had grown acquainted with silence. His days in Buffalo, once a pragmatic move, had become a kind of cloistered vow. The city, with its post-industrial hush and long winters, did not press upon him the way his time by the East River had. Here, the hours extended. Afternoons moved like weather fronts. Feldman, always alert to the way time could stretch, would listen with depth.
He had arrived at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 and remained there for the rest of his life. In that time, his music became less about composition and more about duration, not as endurance, but as texture, as an environment the listener inhabits. In Buffalo, he stopped asking what music could do, and began to ask how it could be.
Feldman’s time canvases do not unfold in time so much as hold it. Violin and String Quartet does this with a peculiar gentleness: it repeats figures, but never exactly; it allows for the listener to wander, then softly reorients them. You are not following a narrative. You are standing in the middle of a texture, letting it change you.
He was no longer interested in progression. “I am interested in how time goes by… not what happens,” he said. That distinction between time as structure and time as atmosphere is crucial. In Feldman’s hands, duration becomes perceptual. The longer you listen, the more acutely you hear. The piece is not building towards an end. It is building inward.
The culmination of this thinking came in 1987, in this, his final completed work. It unfolds with such restraint that it often seems to hover just outside the threshold of memory. The violin, solitary and plainspoken, moves through the ensemble like a thread being pulled slowly through cloth. The quartet offers fragments of support, mirrored lines, quiet stasis, but the relationship never congeals. There is no climax, no synthesis. Only adjacency.
Violin and String Quartet feels, in some way, like a farewell. It does not mourn. It doesn’t even conclude. It just stops. And in that stillness, something is left behind, not resolution but residue. You feel not that something has ended, but that something has been held, briefly and without demand.
I imagine Feldman, retreated from the city, away from a sense of event or arrival. A man who was once a nocturnal composer now emerges in daylight, attends to his students, writes liminal sounds in a soft pencil. The rustle of ideas before a great sleep.
It is the kind of music that rejects completion. Even the silence that follows feels like part of it, as if the piece has diffused into the room and refuses to be gathered again. What Feldman found in Buffalo was not just quiet, it was the permission to remain. To resist momentum. To listen as though time, for once, was enough.
Home 