Rothko Chapel
A stillness that moves. A quiet disruption. A sanctuary for the seeker.
Mark Rothko died the year before Rothko Chapel opened in 1971 in Houston, Texas. Both Rothko and Morton Feldman, whose work of the same name concludes this performance, sought to find intimacy through the use of vast structures.
Our commitment to the commissioning of new music is at the heart of this performance. We invited musical responses to Rothko’s art from Katherine Balch, Edmund Finnis and Isobel Waller-Bridge to sit alongside Morton Feldman’s titular work. Friend and collaborator of Manchester Collective, Lewis Howell, was commissioned to create a lighting design. Our collaboration with vocal collective SANSARA feels organic, their mission to give voice to powerful human stories alongside our mission to create intimate and intense human experiences.
Speaking at the premiere of his composition, Feldman described Rothko’s ‘relentless confrontation with reality’. Our inspiration for this performance is to embody the principles of Rothko Chapel. To invite contemplation. To create a spiritual space, a place for solitude and gathering. To give the opportunity for a moment of respite and reflection in a chaotic world.
MANCHESTER COLLECTIVE
Arvo Pärt ‘Solfeggio’
Choir, 1963 (5’)
If there’s a piece that epitomises the cleansing idea of Feldman’s music, it’s Arvo Pärt’s ‘Solfeggio’, yet conversely, it comes out of the kind of systemic rigour that Feldman would have shunned. In the piece, Pärt treats the C major scale as a tone row, and follows strict serial procedure, meaning certain notes only overlap at certain times, and immediate repetition of tones is avoided. The text is drawn directly from the solfeggio tradition, in which each note corresponds to a distinct syllable; accordingly, the only words Pärt sets are do re mi fa so la ti, and do. Coming relatively early in Pärt’s career in 1963, ‘Solfeggio’ is an interesting stylistic junction: between Pärt the serial composer of sonoristic, timbre-driven music, and the Pärt of today, best known for his religious, tonal, bell-like compositions.
HUGH MORRIS
Giacinto Scelsi, ‘Ave Maria’
Solo cello, 1972 (2’)
Scelsi, the lovably eccentric Italian composer who died in 1988, initially composed within the smallest musical bandwidth—his was music with a focused centre, with tiny microtonal murmurations and subtle timbral changes blurring the music’s edges. But after World War II, he returned to composing wishing to deny the idea of composing altogether—or at least, the nation of authorship. Using processes of improvisation and detailed transcription, Scelsi reinvented his process. The ‘Ave Maria’ heard here, from Scelsi’s ‘Three Latin Prayers’, reach further back in time; originally cast as an austere plainsong-like chant for choir, it’s pared back further here in a version for solo cello.
HUGH MORRIS
Isobel Waller-Bridge, ‘No. 9’
Choir, string quartet, celeste and percussion, 2024 (14’)
In Rothko’s own words about his painting, No. 9 :‘White on Black on Wine’: “when you turned your back to the painting, you would feel that presence the way you feel the sun on your back”.
The bold heavy colour of this painting, the imposing scale of the work, and the powerful balance of contrasting tones generates a personal feeling – I stood in front of this painting for a long time. Sound emanated from it.
Prototype
The face
The face closely resembles its prototype
The face resembles the face
Form
ISOBEL WALLER-BRIDGE
Katherine Balch, ‘songs and interludes’
Choir (soprano and alto), harmonica, celeste and percussion, 2024 (10’)
My response to Rothko Chapel pulls from a few disparate sources. The first is Morton Feldman’s ‘Rothko Chapel’. As my title identifies, I have borrowed Feldman’s formal structure of alternating songs with instrumental interludes.
Then there’s the question of Rothko’s art, especially the triptychs in Rothko Chapel itself — massive, a space of patience and bold commitment. I don’t think the “colour” of my music matches their blacks and near-blacks, so I’ve turned to earlier Color Field works as inspiration for musical textures and timbres — the bold complimentary hues of works like Untitled (1955), Yellow and Blue (1955), and the warm, enveloping tones of No. 7 (Green and Maroon) (1953) and Orange (1957).
Rothko and Feldman’s works seem the opposite of what I tend to do: intensely detailed and intricate pieces on the shorter side. I wanted to find a text that could be the bridge.
Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, offered this. I am attracted to it for a lot of reasons, but mainly for its elegance of language and storytelling. I cannot set a one-hundred-something-page essay to song, so I filtered out words, bit by bit. This process, black-out poetry, results in a page of writing that is mostly blacked out with only a word or two visible. It resembles, in my mind, Rothko Chapel’s black triptychs — mostly monochromatic, with textural ripples. My piece sets several of these black-out texts, each corresponding to a chapter in Virginia Woolf’s essay.
I wonder how Woolf, who died of suicide just shy of 30 years prior to Rothko, would have felt sitting in Rothko Chapel, or hearing Feldman’s response. Would they feel a resonance between their works as I do?
KATHERINE BALCH
Kaija Saariaho, ‘7 Papillons', No.2’
Solo cello, 2000 (2’)
Following the successful staging of her opera ‘L’Amour de loin’, Kaija Saariaho wanted to tread new musical ground. To do so, she imagined the metaphor of the butterfly. If the first movement of her ‘Papillons’ set can be heard as a birth, then the second is a first flight. Fast string crossings, fluttering bow-movements, and shiny overtones make this short movement exceedingly characterful.
HUGH MORRIS
Missy Mazzoli ‘Vespers for Violin’
Solo violin and electronics, 2014 (5’)
Mazzoli, a Collective favourite, composed ‘Vespers for a New Dark Age’’ in 2014. It represented her attempt to reimagine the traditional evening service for the digital age, interspersing modern poetry alongside the ancient texts and in turn, questioning our relationship with God in an age of technology. In ‘Vespers for Violin’ Mazzoli intensely respun her musical material until it was something almost completely new. A solo violin cuts through a murky electronic texture, leaving a trail of its own through the air. Yet, unlike the clean glow of the Feldman, the Vespers is altogether dirtier; like dredging up a precious artefact from the bottom of a muddy pool, we hear a memory at purity alongside with the grimy residue, and a gravity dragging it back into the depths.
HUGH MORRIS
Edmund Finnis, ‘Blue Divided by Blue’
Choir, string quartet and tubular bells, 2024 (10’)
“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. If you are moved only by their colour relationships then you miss the point.” (Mark Rothko)
This piece is a lament, written in remembrance of absent friends. It is scored for choir, string quartet and bells. The music is made in three connected parts:
A viola solo, elegiac and searching, eventually bleeds into harmonies voiced by the rest of the quartet.
The choir sings a text assembled exclusively from words found in titles of paintings by Rothko:
‘blue divided by blue … light, earth and blue … four darks in red …’ These colour words become a fabric of sounds that are interwoven and layered with the string quartet and resonances from the bells. The final word sung alludes to a place of suffering (and is the subject of one of Rothko’s striking earlier paintings).
Finally the coursing lines of the quartet come to the fore, overlapping and reaching outwards. Against this the choir, now wordless, sings slowly falling lines.
Bells toll.
EDMUND FINNIS
Morton Feldman, ‘Rothko Chapel’
Choir, solo viola, celeste and percussion, 1971 (23’, 5 movements)
Where Morton Feldman was tall, stocky, and talkative, his most famous music is quite the opposite: flat, spare, and quiet. Perhaps where man and music overlapped was in expansion—that one of New York’s best talkers could write music that would last for five hours is hardly surprising.
Feldman, born in Queens, New York in 1926, consciously avoided the standard route of the American ‘Academy’ composer, preferring instead to work a day job at his family’s and dry-cleaning and children’s coat businesses. Conscious too was Feldman’s avoidance of the kinds of compositional systems preferred by those within musical institutions—tonality, serialism, other -isms—opting instead for a more intuitive practice of slowness, silence, and experiments in chance music.
If there’s something of a cool nighttime air to Feldman’s music, then it’s because most of his art-making happened after hours—with John Cage (whom he met after the pair walked out of a Webern concert at the same time) and alongside a set of New York’s most famous artists. Feldman enjoyed relationships with poet Frank O’Hara and visual artist Jackson Pollock; after painter Philip Guston immortalised Feldman in a famous painting of him smoking, Feldman returned the favour with the four-and-a-half hour piece for flute, percussion and piano.
And then there was Mark Rothko, the painter of glowing colour fields, whose legacy holds the key to this concert of musical art and visual music.
‘Rothko Chapel’ is short by Feldman’s standards, lasting for thirty minutes rather than three hours. It was written to be performed inside what turned out to be Rothko’s final masterpiece: an octagonal chapel in Houston, Texas, featuring fourteen of Rothko’s darkest canvases. (Rothko would never see his creation, dying by suicide before the chapel opened in 1971.) It’s a challenging space to enter, one where the viewer is surrounded, almost ambushed, by the art. And, though the chapel exists as a non-denominational space of worship, it’s most profound in triggering reflection. Like many Rothko works, the chapel dislodges the clouded glass protecting souls, and peers right in, forcing the viewer to follow its gaze.
Feldman’s score begins and ends with the viola, the second time a rare outbreak of melody in his distinctly abstract oeuvre. (Feldman described this moment as a “quasi-Hebraic melody,” written when he was 15 years old.) The rest of the piece is slow and hallowed; wordless chords from the choir match the ring of a vibraphone, giving a shimmering, ethereal feel. "Rothko's imagery goes right to the edge of his canvas, and I wanted the same effect with the music,” Feldman said of his work. “It should permeate the whole octagonal room and not be heard from a certain distance.” Much like Rothko, Feldman paints on the widest canvases, with the rarest of means.
HUGH MORRIS