In the 1980's, Morton Feldman composed an epic piece for his favourite instrument, the piano. For Bunita Marcus (1985) clocks in at about 90 minutes and exposes the stripped-down, almost dismissive structures of Feldmans last works created from 1984 to 1987. Feldman himself described For Bunita Marcus as a piece in which he “seriously grappled with the idea of meter”.

“ I was very interested in this whole problem of meter and the bar line. I was so interested that I started to write a piece in which I took meter very seriously. I saw that nobody knew how to notate. Sometimes, Stravinsky! In my notation I'm close to Stravinsky; that is, meter and rhythm actually being simultaneous and also being more grid-oriented, a balance between rhythm and meter. For Bunita Marcus is essentially made up of just three-eight, five-sixteen and two-two. Sometimes the two-two would have musical content, which was at the end of the piece. Sometimes the two-two acted as silences, either on the left side or the right side or in the middle of the three-eight and thefive-sixteen, and I was using meter as a construction, not rhythm but meter and the time, the length of what is going on.”

Excerpt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren