PERFORMANCE: Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston
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Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston
Featuring Roberta Michel, Matt Mitchell, and Dennis Sullivan II
Saturday, November 21, 2026 from 10AM – 2PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free with Registration
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and AyurPrana Listening Room present a rare complete performance of Morton Feldman’s monumental For Philip Guston (1984), performed by flutist Roberta Michel, pianist Matt Mitchell, and percussionist Dennis Sullivan II. This event is presented in partnership with AyurPrana Listening Room as part of Sound & Consciousness: A Day Exploring What Happens When We Listen to Sound.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE:
Spanning approximately four hours, For Philip Guston asks something unusual of performers and listeners alike: time. Not time as a container for musical events, but time itself as material.
Sounds emerge, disappear, return changed. Patterns hover at the edge of memory. Small shifts begin to feel enormous. Feldman removes the familiar architecture of climax and resolution and creates instead a vast, quiet field in which listening becomes intensely physical and strangely elastic. The result is less like following a piece from beginning to end than entering an environment.
Composed in 1984, For Philip Guston was written in memory of Feldman’s longtime friend, the painter Philip Guston. Their relationship had fractured years earlier after Guston abandoned abstraction and returned to figurative painting, a radical shift Feldman initially rejected. After Guston’s death in 1980, Feldman came to understand his friend’s artistic transformation differently. The resulting work carries the complicated weight of friendship, distance, memory, admiration, and loss.
Feldman was a central figure in the group of composers and artists often called the New York School, alongside John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor. His music developed through unusually close relationships with visual artists including Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg. For Philip Guston occupies that porous territory between music and visual art, between composition and perception, between an object and the experience of being with it over time.
That territory has particular resonance at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. The performance extends the museum’s ongoing exploration of experimental music and the artistic constellation surrounding John Cage, Rauschenberg, and the radical interdisciplinary ideas that took shape at Black Mountain College.
And there may be no shortcut through this piece.
Four hours changes the terms of listening. Attention drifts and returns. The room changes. Your ears change. Music that initially seems almost still reveals a constantly shifting interior life.
You listen differently because you have been there a while.
Featuring Roberta Michel, Matt Mitchell, and Dennis Sullivan II
Saturday, November 21, 2026 from 10AM – 2PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Free with Registration
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and AyurPrana Listening Room present a rare complete performance of Morton Feldman’s monumental For Philip Guston (1984), performed by flutist Roberta Michel, pianist Matt Mitchell, and percussionist Dennis Sullivan II. This event is presented in partnership with AyurPrana Listening Room as part of Sound & Consciousness: A Day Exploring What Happens When We Listen to Sound.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE:
Spanning approximately four hours, For Philip Guston asks something unusual of performers and listeners alike: time. Not time as a container for musical events, but time itself as material.
Sounds emerge, disappear, return changed. Patterns hover at the edge of memory. Small shifts begin to feel enormous. Feldman removes the familiar architecture of climax and resolution and creates instead a vast, quiet field in which listening becomes intensely physical and strangely elastic. The result is less like following a piece from beginning to end than entering an environment.
Composed in 1984, For Philip Guston was written in memory of Feldman’s longtime friend, the painter Philip Guston. Their relationship had fractured years earlier after Guston abandoned abstraction and returned to figurative painting, a radical shift Feldman initially rejected. After Guston’s death in 1980, Feldman came to understand his friend’s artistic transformation differently. The resulting work carries the complicated weight of friendship, distance, memory, admiration, and loss.
Feldman was a central figure in the group of composers and artists often called the New York School, alongside John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor. His music developed through unusually close relationships with visual artists including Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg. For Philip Guston occupies that porous territory between music and visual art, between composition and perception, between an object and the experience of being with it over time.
That territory has particular resonance at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. The performance extends the museum’s ongoing exploration of experimental music and the artistic constellation surrounding John Cage, Rauschenberg, and the radical interdisciplinary ideas that took shape at Black Mountain College.
And there may be no shortcut through this piece.
Four hours changes the terms of listening. Attention drifts and returns. The room changes. Your ears change. Music that initially seems almost still reveals a constantly shifting interior life.
You listen differently because you have been there a while.
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Where is it happening?
120 College Street, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherBlack Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
