Morton Feldman, the Kronos Quartet, and the Sound of Schubert

‘It should sound like Schubert’, said Morton Feldman of his own music during a rehearsal with the Kronos Quartet. In this article, his surprising remark serves as the basis for intertwined analyses of Feldman’s relationship to musical performance and to the musical past. A comparison of his late piece Piano and String Quartet and Schubert’s late Notturno for piano trio reveals one possible explanation of what it meant, for Feldman, to ‘sound like Schubert’, and it shows the importance of performers such as the Kronos Quartet—to whom Feldman’s piece is dedicated—in calling forth that sonic likeness.