In the year that marks the centenary of composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987), Conversations for Two constitutes a programme in his honour. For the New York author, whose musical career was greatly influenced by artists such as Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), it would be necessary to free music from the traditional rhetoric of composition in order to project sounds in accordance with their plastic disposition.Feldman's musical language sought to focus on the timbre of instruments, that is, on their own irregularities and interferences, considering not so much the sounds that are part of the music, but the effects they enable. Feldman's signature sound, typically on the threshold of audibility, accentuates the roughness that makes music more ‘direct and physical,’ in a perspective similar to painting. These creative orientations would favour a proximity to the indeterminism of the New York School (ca. 1950-1960). In Feldman's words: ‘it's just a matter of maintaining the tension and static nature of the music. Everything is frozen, but at the same time it vibrates’.
The composition processes, the proximity to other areas of artistic expression and the convergence with the ideas of John Cage (1912–1992) would lead to one of the most significant collaborations in his work from the second half of the 20th century onwards. Recorded between 1966 and 1967 at the WBAI studios in New York, the informal conversations, ‘Radio Happenings: In Conversation’, cover the acceptance of unintentional sounds in music, new approaches to sounds and silences, as well as the social and political concerns of the time. This testimony, in which Cage's infectious laughter and the matches that always lit Feldman's cigarettes can be heard, treats the listener to a fluid record of ideas and good humour. About the radios that ruined a day at the beach for his friend Morty, Cage said: ‘Perhaps we need ideas that do not impose themselves on radio transistors.’In Conversations for Two, Morton Feldman's music, as contemporary today as it was in the past, brings to Serralves a brief dialogue in his memory, in correspondence with the radio conversations he recorded with John Cage.

16:00, Serralves Library
Conversation with António Pinho Vargas and Tomás Quintais

10:00 – 19:00, Auditorium Foyer
Loop broadcast of “Radio Happenings: In Conversation” between Morton Feldman and John Cage (series of five episodes)