Photography and recording technology have made gradual but dramatic changes in our relationship to both our memory and our sense of what is real. Something funny happens when we externalize our memory: we develop a new relationship - not with the memory itself, but with the documentation of it. We have offloaded the responsibility of memory to an external, ‘objective’ source separate from our own experience. Our relationship to these memory objects can retroactively change our experience, sometimes creating new memories entirely.

For example: when I am the subject of a photograph, I am looking at the photographer and standing side by side with whom I’m sharing the frame. When I look at the photo later, I don’t remember the feel of my spouse’s arm against mine or what the photographer said to help us smile, instead I have adopted a perspective outside of myself. Not the perspective of the photographer, but of the camera, whose perspective is informed by apertures and film speeds rather than experiences and emotions. The photograph itself becomes the memory.

Before recording technology a musical performance could only exist in two places: in the air of a live performance, and in the memory of those who heard it. There is always a discrepancy between the ‘actuality’ of an event and our memory of what occurred. After all, our memories are an internal reproduction of the event, not the event itself, and an external recording allows for an unchanging reference point separate from our internally colored perspective.

Recording technology has flash-frozen a particular instance of the music, which previously only existed in the shared time and space between audience and performer. For better or worse, the first recording of a piece often becomes an authority, the definitive experience of the work.

One might argue that the innovations of audio engineering, the multiple takes and extensive editing, create a realization of a piece that is closer to the intent of the composer or performer, and is therefore more valuable and authentic than a less “perfect” live performance. On the other hand, we still show up in-person for live performances, so perhaps there is more value to that slippery, malleable internal experience than I’m giving credit for.

Three Voices is a piece that asks for a singer to perform alongside two recordings of their own voice. The piece could easily be, and in fact sometimes is, performed by a live trio of singers. The score, however, specifically asks that the piece be realized through a combination of live and pre-recorded performance. Not a backing track that is replacing a live accompaniment, but two recordings of the performer, two instances of their past self, to which they add a third, present, living voice. The three voices are intended to have equal presence on stage, two coming from speakers and one from a living body. Here Feldman is playing with these questions of what is real and authentic as the voices become indistinguishable from one another, but he is also exploring memory and how our relationship to ourselves and each other is changed through the use of this technology. 

Three Voices is a memorial. The two speakers symbolize the tombstones of the poet Frank O’Hara and the painter Philip Guston, dear friends who had passed years prior to whom the work is dedicated. In a way, the three voices are all Feldman’s, as embodied by the performer, an indication of the longing he feels to continue being in conversation with his friends, even if those conversations only exist in his memory and his imagining of what could have been.

Every night, my spouse and I sing to our child before he goes to sleep. We each have our own repertoire and don’t always know the other person’s songs. Likely influenced by this concert, I had the morbid thought that perhaps we should record ourselves singing these lullabies in case something happens to one of us. I have mixed feelings about this idea. On one hand, I feel an urge to preserve these tender moments between parent and child; on the other, I fear being haunted by the disembodied voice of a loved one. I wonder if, in the event of tragedy, it would be better for those who remain to take up their songs, keeping both song and memory present by embodying them in the voice of the living, as Feldman has perhaps done through musical metaphor.

I don’t know if these questions of memory and preservation were part of Feldman’s thinking. I do think he has created a kind of musical space that bends our sense of time, stretching it towards timelessness, while placing memory as the central theme. Memory, both internal and external, not only creates time, it bridges it, bringing that which was available in the past into the present moment, in this case taking the imaginative longing one man has to be with his friends again, and immortalizing it for us to replay on his behalf.

Through the interweaving lines and rhythms of this mostly wordless piece, there lies a moment of meditative clarity at the center, a single line taken from a poem Frank O’Hara wrote for Feldman two decades earlier, A statement turned question, perhaps hinting at the surprising inevitability of loss.

“Who’d have thought that snow falls…”

 For those from our past whom we hold dearly in the present, may their memory be a blessing.