While much has been written on and by "downtown" composers-particularly John Cage, little analysis of the music has been done. This essay contributes to that scant body of writings by considering The King of Denmark for solo percussionist of 1964 by a close associate of Cage, Morton Feldman.
Feldman provides a particularly sharp challenge to the traditionally formalist oriented techniques of analysis practiced by music theorists. Because the composer claims to avoid symbolic, rhetorical, historical, and constructive procedures in generating music, is it reasonable to expect that formalist techniques will reveal significant relationships between the work's entities? This essay answers affirmatively.
Feldman's The King of Denmark is our subject here because it is frequently performed and is from his graphic notation period. This graphic score consists of rows of three stacked rectangles filled with codes signifying event numbers and types. Relative pitch height and location in the time stream are indicated by an event's placement within the rectangles in the most general ways expected for Western musical notation. Given the work's performance medium, conventional issues concerning pitch and time are considerably deemphasized. Thus, this score posses Feldman's challenge in perhaps its most acute form.
The few and unconventional, for that time period, structural musical dimensions for this work are relative "pitch" height, density, and instrumental assignment. These structures are arrayed upon an ordinal time scale where each rectangle or "box" in Feldman's terminology occupies a time slot equal to MM 66-92. Recent published work in contour theory and musical spaces by Elizabeth West Marvin and Robert Morris provide appropriate tools for the analysis, and this essay shows that the resulting structures are perceptually discrete and available for modeling by a suitably adjusted contour theory. However, each of these musical dimensions contains a perceptually "indiscrete" element that evokes the transcendental and provides a link with aspects of early ninteenth-century musical aesthetics.