A remarkable piece of music lasting for a continuous three and a half to four hours is the latest challenge for The Broken Line Trio.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Six Newspapers. Lovely to speak
00:07to Adam Swain. Now Adam, before long you are playing in Brighton with your trio,
00:12a remarkable piece of music, which could be three and a half hours long, it could be four hours long.
00:18What is this piece of music and why are you doing it? Yeah, thank you very much Phil. Yep,
00:24on November the 2nd with my colleagues Helen Whittaker, the flautist, and the percussionist
00:29Adam Bushall. We're presenting, as you say, a three and a half hour to four hour piece of music
00:35called For Philip Guston by Morton Feldman. It's an extraordinary piece of music, sensual,
00:43transient, a bit like going to an art gallery on a Saturday afternoon and immersing yourself in a
00:49big painting by Mark Rothko or similar artists of the American zeitgeist of the second half of the
00:5720th century. We want the audience to engage with it in that way. Do bring a cushion, it's
01:04going to be a once in a generation fascinating opportunity to experience an epic landscape in
01:09sound. What on earth is it going to be like for you playing this? Is it all about intense
01:15concentration or do you allow yourself to go with the flow? How does it work for you? Yeah,
01:21that's a great question because it's going to take a lot of concentration and it's going to
01:25take a lot of patience and a lot of careful preparation beforehand. I mean, I think as
01:30musicians we are used to playing our instruments, you know, for practicing for great lengths of
01:36time, so it's not going to be unusual in that respect. But this piece takes a lot of
01:42concentration because we're often playing in different time signatures and repeating the
01:48material at slightly different rates and this means that we need to sort of hold on to each
01:53other's parts consistently throughout the piece, so it will take a lot of concentration. Goodness,
01:58and you're saying this is almost certainly the first time it's been performed in Brighton.
02:01Does it get performed very much in the UK at all? It does receive some performances actually. It was
02:08recently done at Tate Modern, a very appropriate venue for a piece of music like this. Morton
02:15Feldman was an associate of John Cage and Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham and his music does have
02:21a lot of currency with that sort of American experimental scene. So yeah, it's a famous
02:26piece but it's rarely heard. Absolutely and you've been working on this for, well, since the beginning
02:32of the year, haven't you? Yeah, we have. We first formed as a trio in 2016 to perform one of
02:39Feldman's other pieces, Crippled Symmetry, and we've done quite a few concerts since then but
02:44this is really something that we've been aiming for, well, for eight years and it's been
02:49really remarkable to build up during our rehearsals to get a sense of the overall canvas
02:56of the piece. But we're never actually going to sit down and play it all the way through until
03:01we get to the concert, which is going to be a really fascinating experience. And is it just
03:05the one-off performance or will you be taking it elsewhere? I hope we'll take it elsewhere. It's
03:11a piece that I think deserves to be heard in lots of different locations. For us, the Friends
03:17Meeting House in the middle of Brighton is the perfect venue for this because it is an oasis of
03:22calm amidst quite a busy scene and a Saturday afternoon is quite carefully timed, really. It
03:30starts at half past two so it'll be finished well in time for dinner and I think it will be a really
03:37fascinating experience, slightly different from going to the football but perhaps equally as
03:44rewarding, especially if Brighton win. It sounds fantastic. It sounds a wonderful challenge.
03:51Good luck with it and lovely to speak to you again, Adam. Thank you. Thank you, Phil. Thank you.