The Feldman feast continues with two more volumes in the admirably planned Mode series. The fourth is called ‘Indeterminate Music’. This involves pieces such as the Projections series, where the score is laid out like a graph and the performers choose the specified number of pitches in high, middle or low registers. In the Durations pieces each player has a written part; they start together then proceed independently in what has been called race-course design.

A good example of this is Durations 3 for violin, tuba and piano. Everything is soft: ‘dynamics are very low,’ Feldman says. The first three movements are slow, with only the higher notes of the tuba protruding like a distant fog-horn. Then the fast fourth movement is a surprise.

It’s extraordinary that both these techniques result in the unique Feldman sound and atmosphere but the players naturally bring a sense of the right style – Feldman once rebuked a student of mine for choosing a minor triad in the graph notation of Projection 2 when, as he put it, she had ‘all the sounds in the world to choose from’. It’s a good idea to have all the Projections and Durations pieces together, fastidiously played and recorded – plus the more lusciously scored Straits of Magellan and Two Pieces. However, there’s a three-CD set on Etcetera (listed above) which provides both of these plus the Vertical Thoughts series and much more.

‘Voices and Instruments’, the fifth volume in the Mode survey, is full of delights, including three first recordings. Now we can compare Feldman’s response to e e cummings with that of John Cage 13 years earlier. By 1951 Feldman is the more pointillistic, showing the influence of Webern, but Claron McFadden is in complete command of the angularities of his extreme tessitura both here and in Journey to the End of the Night, which has a text from the novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Charles van Tassel also feels exactly right in a more subdued role with The O’Hara Songs.

How rewarding to hear Three Clarinets, Cello and Piano (a British commission written for Alan Hacker) where every detail, including the plentiful silences, is precise – Feldman’s finesse requires that kind of dedication. Since so much of Feldman is soft and slow, the sole fortissimo in the work is a poised shock. Feldman enthusiasts will continue to buy the Mode series, which benefits from well-informed CD booklets with full texts, and it ought to make new converts.

Unfortunately Hänssler’s CD is well below the standard of the latest volumes in the Mode series. It gets off to a bad start by claiming Christian Wolff in Cambridge as a première recording. This short unaccompanied choral piece was first released by Odyssey, with the Brandeis University Chamber Chorus under Alvin Lucier in 1967 and is currently available in the US on New World Records , the rest of which was recorded in 2000, including For Stefan Wolpe (1986).

The Christian Wolff piece consists of 16 chords and three single notes, all heard twice. Feldman asks for the duration of each chord to be ‘very slow’. The Brandeis chorus had distinctly weak intonation but merged each chord into the next through the use of staggered breathing. Huber attacks each chord separately, but the impression of the piece as a whole is too rushed. The same is true of the piece for Stefan Wolpe, who was Feldman’s most significant teacher. This time the unaccompanied choir is joined by two vibraphones, but the overall impression lacks the magic associated with Feldman who said he wanted his sounds to be ‘sourceless’ – and there’s some background noise.

Rothko Chapel is a Feldman classic from 1971. Philip Brett directed the California EAR Unit and Berkeley University Chamber Chorus in a well-balanced and recorded performance, along with the only available recording of Why Patterns?, and Richard Whitehouse was very impressed by the Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Chorus and Orchestra under Beat Furrer. So there is little to recommend about this new CD with the competition in Feldman recordings at an increasingly high level.