Morty and Me: Appartment House perform Patterns in a Chromatic Field at the Purcell Room

Patterns in a Chromatic Field was the second piece by Morton Feldman I ever heard, and it remains one of my favourites. The first time I encountered it was in Huddersfield in 1996, in a late-night concert straight after the one that featured the first Feldman piece I'd ever heard, For Samuel Beckett.

I was there because I had a piece in contention for the festival's Young Composer Award. (I didn't win, although I did get beyond the workshop stage and get a proper concert performance alongside the piece that did win. Long story.) Feldman was one of the featured composers that year (the first time a dead man had been featured this way in Huddersfield, I believe), so there was quite a lot of his music to hear. Being a provincial boy who'd been to a provincial university, I'd never heard of him before. Hearing For Samuel Beckett was an extraordinary experience. I'd read about him beforehand and so had an idea of what to expect (slow, quiet, goes on a long time), but I really wasn't prepared for how it would feel to sit through something like this. It started off well; Feldman's music has a sound that's immediately attractive. So for the first few minutes it was great. As it progressed though, the sheer apparent stasis of it began to get to me. By about 20 minutes in it began to feel like some form of torture. After that confusion and disorientation began to set in. And then something odd happened. The music seemed to be putting me into a kind of trance like state, not entirely unlike the state of mind you might find yourself in after a low dose of hallucinogens. By about the 50 minute mark when the piece finished, I couldn't decide whether it had gone on far too long or not nearly long enough. We left the hall and walked over to the venue where the late-night gig was happening. This was Patterns in a Chromatic Field, and here everything clicked into place, I experienced that rare sense of revelation that classical music delivers rather more rarely than it promises, and I became the devote of Feldman's music that I remain today.

So Patterns holds a special place in my heart. It's where I "got" Feldman, and it came into my life at a very exciting time when it briefly seemed I might amount to something. It's also a piece for cello, so I also get to have the (probably futile) notion that one day I might play it myself. In my mind it's become a rep piece for cello. I've heard a good four or five recordings of it since then, but last night's performance by Anton Lukoszevieze and Philip Thomas of Apartment House is only the second time I've heard it live.

That's important, because Feldman's is a music that feels significantly different in concert. It's something to do with commitment. Listening to a recording in your own living room, there are always distractions, the possibility of doing something else while the music's playing. Going to a performance requires a higher level of commitment. You're there for an hour and a half of quiet, often superficially uneventful music that demands a level of concentration that's almost superhuman. (This goes for everyone there, whether they're performing or listening.) At the same time, the fact that there's nothing else but you and the music (well, and the rest of the audience), makes it easier. It's just you and this intimidating experience ahead of you, and the only thing that can distract you (apart from the rest of the audience) is whatever thoughts spring into your mind as it struggles to maintain its focus on the moment.

I say superficially because of course there's actually a huge amount going on. You hear a lot of music written under the influence of Feldman, and what most of it fails to grasp is that although tiny motifs and ideas return and reiterate again and again, over and over, there's actually very little repetition in Feldman. Like walking into a dark room, once you've acclimatised yourself you find there's actually a huge amount of detail to appreciate where initially there seemed to be nothing. Patterns is unusual in late Feldman in that it's often quite antsy and fidgety in texture, and has a sense of nervous activity that only periodically dissipates to reveal a more glacial texture. Lukoszevieze and Thomas's performance tends towards the slower end of the range I've heard (they come in at just over 90 minutes), and yet they still mange to convey this jitteriness, a quality that I think often gets lost in the race to play Feldman as slowly as possible. This is quiet and defective and profound music, sure, but there's also humour to be had, another element of Feldman's personality that often gets neglected, and which they convey deliciously here in the the throwaway ending, for instance.

One of the startling things I find listening to this piece on the flesh again after all those years is how much of it has seeped into my own music. Feldman's been a huge influence on me, of course, but it's startling to sit listening to Patterns and real is how much this specific piece has left its mark on my own work. Sometimes this is the result of initial enthusiasm and half-absorbed lessons: you can hear this in Infinite Breathing, where a Feldmanish texture jostles for supremacy with passages in thrall to Ustvolskaya, whose music I discovered around the same time as Feldman's. Later on in Le tombeau de Feldman it's a more deliberate allusion, but it's startling to realise how what I thought at the time was a kind of generalised ersatz-Morty was a half-memory of this particular piece, the main difference being that my figures tend more towards the diatonic than Feldman's (that at least was a deliberate thing).

I sometimes wonder if Feldman, who twenty years ago was a fairly marginal figure, isn't now becoming too pervasive a figure. I certainly worry that it's become  cliché to write music under his influence (albeit often without a real understanding of what he's doing and why he uses those textures and strategies), and periodically try to kick the Feldman habit in my own music. Having said that, he's clearly not edged quite so far into respectability that some people won't walk out before he's done. Five did last night. One of them was a woman who heroically and selflessly sneaked out as quietly as she could before she succumbed to a coughing fit. I salute her. The other four confuse me (why on earth stick it out for over an hour and disappear with 20 minutes or less to go?) and annoy me (if you are going to duck out early, couldn't you at least try to leave quietly?).  But to come back to this piece, to her it live in that situation where you're stuck in a hall with it, and just as you settle in having made sure you went to the toilet first, you experience a momentary frisson of exhilarating fear as you register what you're committing yourself to, banishes thoughts like that. What's wonderful, what makes it great music, is its capacity to come out and startle you, and (particularly in a well-judged performance like this one) make you feel like music you've been listening to for years is music you've never properly heard before. You thought you had it figured, and then you realise that you've hardly scratched the surface.

Ensemble Plus Minus, Kings Place

Or should that be plus-minus ensemble at King's Place? Or +/- @ kingsplace? This sort of typographical quandry is par for the course in the world of Modern Music.

And this gig was definitely Modern Music, with capitals and all. I felt like I'd been transported back to the late 80s. Within seconds of arriving I saw my first Man Dressed In Black.

When I was a nipper, there was a certain set of clichés about Modern Music and the people who went to hear it. Men (always men), almost certainly dressed in black, either bald as a coot or hirsute, possibly of questionable hygiene, never smiling. This is Modern Music. It's Serious. It's Art. NO SMILING. Angular, difficult, hard edged music. Music for Men. Men who smoke and shun deodorant. Men who probably write similar music themselves.

If you believe what you read on the internet (and why wouldn't you?) this sort of thing's yesterday's news. We're no longer scared of music written by non-dead people, we all love each other and even know girls. There were actually some girls there, but they tended not to be talking to the boys, a bit like a school disco. I did see a couple of people smiling, so things haven't remained entirely static since 1989 for these folks.

(I'm uncomfortably aware, by the way, that if you drew a Venn diagram of people who fit into the category I'm talking about, I'd have at least one foot inside it. A lot of these guys are dressed like 80s-90s students, i.e. exactly like I did when I was a student, and sometimes still do. Although I rarely wear all-black these days, it feels weird when I inadvertently do.)

Like Goths and Catholicism, though, the old guard survives, and you'll find them at a gig like this. The particularly fearsome man who sat stiff-backed, hands at the ready to applause the second the Xenakis finished to show he knows when it ends (and is therefore better than the rest of us), paunch nearly covered by grubby shirt and leather jacket, the gentle smell of stale fag smoke wafting gently from his person, was only the most striking example of this Lost World of Modern Music fans (as in fanatics). Gruffly barking "Bravo!" to show he understands and appreciates Difficult Music more than the rest.

Back in the day you'd have gone to a church or a school drama studio to hear this sort of stuff. Fortunately King's Place Hall two has much the same vibe as a drama studio, so there's some continuity there. The presentation is resolutely old-school, too. No talking to the audience or anything like that, just a procession of musicians coming on, playing, and walking off again. This is Difficult Music. If you don't understand it there's no point trying to explain it to you.

I've heard pieces by Xenakis that knocked me out, and others that bored me senseless. Neither of the works that began and ended the first half were at either extreme, though I preferred the piano solo Evryali to the violin and piano piece Dikhthas. Evryali came over like a cross between Ligeti's Piano Etudes and Ustvolskaya's Sonatas without being quite as compelling as either. In between came Rebecca Saunders' Vermilion. Saunders is published by Peters Edition, who despite their signing of the likes of Jonathan Dove in recent years will always be for me the publisher non plus ultra of Difficult Modern Music, printed in Very Big Scores. The scores in this case were surprisingly normal-sized, but it was still definitely the sort of piece where everyone plays from a score. Saunders clearly has a fine ear for texture, and there was much to admire in that respect, but I'm afraid it left me cold, neither seducing nor provoking me. It was there and it was OK, but I didn't feel any sense of its existence as being necessary.

It was the second half I was actually there for. I like Bryn Harrison's music, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's basically a massive rip-off of Morton Feldman. Talent borrows, genius steals, they say, which puts him firmly in the talented camp. If you're going to borrow on this scale though, you may as well do it well, and Harrison (Head of Composition at Huddersfield University) does. I do wish he'd reference something other than other pieces of his in his programme notes though. Unless you're deeply acquainted with his work it's unhelpful and irritating. The lengths he went to to avoid mentioning Feldman were amusing though. Repetitions in Extended Time was commissioned by the Huddersfield Festival.

I find myself wondering though. The Xenakis pieces are, what, 30-40 years old now? Which is old enough that the style has acquired a comfortably quaint, nostalgic patina. Is there some weird thing happening here where composers like that are for people like this what Beethoven and Mahler are for mainstream classical audiences? Something old and familiar, that they feel comfortable with (and therefore almost certainly no longer understand)? And is the Feldmanesque trope now becoming so common (there a a lot of other composers ripping him off, myself included) that it's in danger of going the same way? I'm certain that one day that style will seem just as quaint and cute as Xenakis does now. I'm sure the New Music Men see themselves as keepers of a flame. If there's one thing that's definitely better now than 40 years ago it's that there's no style police telling us what sort of music we can and can't write or listen to, so in a way it's reassuring that they're still about. But maybe they're just as hung up on nostalgia as everyone else. The trouble with writing the music of the future is that it tends to skip the present and go straight to being the music of the past.

Portishead: Third

Just to show there's more than one way to skin a cat, the other excellent new release this week is from a band who are pretty much the opposite to the Fall's work ethic, this being their third album proper in 14 years, and their first for 11. But if Scott Walker (of whom more later) can take 11 years between records, so can Portishead, and who cares when the results are as good as this?

Parr-zed (as you call them if you actually come from Portishead) are also pretty much The Fall's polar opposite in terms of their style, too, but there's a connection in the way they've managed to revitalise their sound while remaining recognisably themselves - "always the same, always different".

What's remarkable about this album is the juxtaposition of two entirely different textures: most of the music is harsh and stark, underpinned by brutally minimalist beats, and this is thrown into sharp relief by Beth Gibbons's fragile, pleading vocals. The effect isn't too far removed from Scott Walker's latter-day stuff, and it's interesting that this album is getting a lot of positive mention where Tilt was received with bafflement by many when it came out. Maybe this is a sign of how we've moved on.

The other music that comes top my mind as I listen to this album is that of Galina Ustvolskaya - there's a similar feel of supplications to an indifferent God, humanity somewhere deep in the midst of a vast, uncaring machine of a universe.

This isn't easy listening - there'll be few dinner parties with this on in the background, as Portishead's first album was unfairly condemned to - but it's powerful stuff, that reveals itself more and more with each listen. And it takes a very special kind of confidence to be able to produce this stark, oppressive sound, and then throw a ukulele into the middle of it, as happens on "Deep Water".