Morton Feldman: Time as Canvas — Jared Redmond, Piano

This fall, the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation celebrates the centennial of Morton Feldman, one of the most visionary and influential composers associated with the New York School. Feldman lived and worked on the Lower East Side as part of the same close-knit artistic community as many Abstract Expressionist painters. His friendships, conversations, and artistic exchanges with these figures profoundly shaped the way he thought about gesture, sound, time, and memory.

For the first concert in this centennial series, acclaimed composer-pianist Jared Redmond will perform two works for solo piano by Feldman: the concise, unsettled Intersection 3 (1953), written in graphic notation, and the expansive, meditative Triadic Memories (1981)—traditional in notation, yet radical in experience.

Both works emerged from Feldman’s sustained engagement with painting. As he famously stated, “I learned more from painters than I learned from composers.” In Intersection 3, Feldman employs a graphic score composed of boxes of numbers and patterns, leaving considerable freedom to the pianist. His approach parallels Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” method, which Feldman translated into music through his concept of the “time-canvas.” Nearly three decades later, at a conference held the year after he composed Triadic Memories, Feldman revealed that the use of the sustaining pedal in the piece had been inspired by Cy Twombly’s application of gesso.

Heard together, these two works trace Feldman’s journey from the graphic experimentation of the 1950s to the suspended, labyrinthine sound world of his music in the 1980s. Although Triadic Memories may appear more “measured” through its use of traditional notation, Feldman’s inquiry has shifted from the explicitly visual experimentation of his early scores toward a more gestural, and perhaps more abstract exploration of granularity, in which the smallest variations of sound, duration, resonance, and touch acquire expressive significance.

Artist photograph by Sung-Soo Park

Program

Morton Feldman, Intersection 3 (1953)

Morton Feldman, Triadic Memories (1981)

About the Artist

Jared Redmond is a pianist-composer from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently based in Berlin. In performance, he matches historical repertoire, especially underplayed masterworks, with contemporary experimental music. His repertoire stretches from music of the 16th through 21st centuries, and he has appeared as a piano soloist, composer, and improviser throughout North America, Europe, and East Asia.

In October and November of this year, Jared tours the United States and Korea, performing solo programs celebrating the centennials of Morton Feldman, Betsy Jolas, and György Kurtág. In addition, he will give the Asian premiere of Dennis Johnson's 5-hour minimalist piano masterpiece November (1959) in Seoul, in his own realization from the composer's sketches.

Recent appearances include performances at the Palais Lichtenau, Silent Green (Berlin),

Berkeley Piano Club, KM28 (Berlin), University of South Florida, Kagurane (Tokyo), Vallejo Symphony, University of California Santa Cruz, the Korean premiere of Stockhausen’s Kontakte, and universities and contemporary music festivals in Korea, Europe, and the United States.

In 2025, Jared released his solo album Scintillant, including music by Scarlatti, Antonio Soler, and Pierre Boulez. From 2018-20 he was Visiting Scholar-Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Hanyang University, and from 2020-24 he taught at the Seoul National University School of Music.