Pianist/composer and Guggenheim Fellow Amy Williams performs Triadic Memories, a solo piano piece composed by Morton Feldman in 1981. Triadic Memories was jointly dedicated to the classical pianists Roger Woodward and Aki Takahashi; Woodward performed the world premiere at the ICA London, UK in 1 October of 1981.
This piece heralds the composers late period, as Feldman himself described this work as the biggest butterfly in captivity. This statement refers to its vastness, the duration lasting over an hour and a half. Why these enormous lengths? Feldman says: Personally, l think the reason the pieces are so long is that form, as I understand it, no longer exists. My pieces aren’t too long, most pieces are actually too short…lf one listens to my pieces, they seem to fit into the temporal landscape I provide. Would you say that the Odyssey is too long?