The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar
1966
Genre
Electric Guitar Solo
Premiere
Christian Wolff, electric guitar
Comment
This piece is lost.
Source
Chris Villar website;
Details
Morton Feldman's The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar, a piece written for me in, I think, 1966, played three times (in New York, San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts), and then lost when the only copy of it, kept in my guitar case, was stolen along with the guitar. (Wiek [Hijmans] found in the Feldman archive a page of material relating to an electric guitar piece, which must have been a follow up to The Possibility - The Possibility was written directly while I was there and waited for it and tried it on the guitar as it was being written.)
That was a long time ago. Now in 2004 what I remember of Feldman's piece is only a general impression of a sequence of those beautifully heard chords, maybe an occassional three or four single note gesture and several glissandi, not too long, made possible by the guitar's vibrato bar.
I think Feldman liked the electric guitar's ability to allow sound to speak with a minimum of attack and possibly a slight initial crescendo, similar to his feeling at the piano of making sound appear as though with almost no attack."
- source: Christian Wolff, liner notes to "Classic Electric" by Wiek Hijmans, liner notes by Anthony Fiumara