In an age of algorithmic din, Feldman’s appeal lies in his unhurried, monkish devotion to the elementals of sound. His output can be seen as a kind of wilderness preserve, in which stray fragments of musical history are allowed to roam free, without having to worry about adapting themselves to any modish system or sensibility. You encounter ambiguous piano chords that could have survived a charred sonata by Schubert; darkly sighing flute motifs that might have graced a quieter page of one of Schoenberg’s expressionist eruptions; cryptically tolling percussion tones out of late Stravinsky; static repetitions that nod toward minimalism. Each sound inhabits its own space, hardly touching the others. A canyon of silence envelops them all.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter