Pat O'Keefe on Feldman's "Clarinet and String Quartet"

I have been wanting to play Morton Feldman’s Clarinet and String Quartet ever since I first heard it performed when I was in graduate school. When Zeitgeist decided to do Feldman this year at the Early Music Festival, my first thoughts were about this piece. It has all of the elements that one expects to hear in his late works: soft dynamics throughout, an extended time scale, and a near obsessive focus on the minute changes of short, repeated chromatic figures. But it is also one of the most lush and beautiful works by Feldman that I’ve ever heard, and it was this quality that has stuck with me ever since that first encounter. Cellist Kirsten Whitson has put together a fantastic group of string players for the performance, and they have tackled the work with great amounts of sensitivity and attention to detail. I am honored to be performing this amazing work with such wonderful collaborators.

​--Pat O'Keefe, Zeitgeist clarinetist

O'Keefe will perform Clarinet and String Quartet on Saturday, April 2 at 4:30 p.m. as part of Zeitgeist's Early Music Festival celebrating the work of Morton Feldman. He will be joined by James Garlick, violin; Jill Olson-Moser, violin; David Auerbach, viola; Kirsten Whitson, cello.

Morton Feldman

ZEITGEIST EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL
​MORTON FELDMAN

March 31-April 3  •  Studio Z  •  Tickets/Details

Zeitgeist’s 6th Annual Early Music Festival explores the powerful contributions of our musical pioneers with a celebration of composer Morton Feldman. One of the 20th century’s great visionaries, Feldman’s innovations in music notation and his free-flowing indeterminate music embraced new artistic possibilities and made a lasting impact that continues to shape new music today.