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.
Philip Guston’s Friend — To M.F. (1978). Courtesy of The Guston Foundation.
Sound & Consciousness
The performance is presented in partnership with AyurPrana Listening Room as part of Sound & Consciousness: A Day Exploring What Happens When We Listen to Sound, a day-long exploration of sound, attention, perception, and consciousness across experimental music and contemplative listening practices.
The larger AyurPrana program brings together Mary Lattimore, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Make Noise’s Experimental Meditation Club, and Binaural Beats with Katya Lovejoy.
Admission to For Philip Guston at BMCM+AC is free with advance RSVP. Tickets for the additional Sound & Consciousness programs at AyurPrana Listening Room are available separately through AyurPrana.
About AyurPrana Listening Room:
AyurPrana Listening Room is Asheville’s premier intimate music venue for transcendent, spiritual, and world music — housed inside a beautifully converted church with exceptional acoustics. Their building is located in the heart of West Asheville at 312 Haywood Rd.
About the Artists:
Roberta Michel, flute
Brooklyn-based flutist Roberta Michel is dedicated to the music of our time and has commissioned and premiered hundreds of new works. She is Co-Director of Wavefield Ensemble and a member of Da Capo Chamber Players, PinkNoise, and Duo RoMi. She has performed with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Wet Ink Ensemble, SEM Ensemble, Wordless Music Orchestra, and others, appearing at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Roulette, the Kennedy Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Michel is Assistant Teaching Professor of Flute at Bowling Green State University.
Matt Mitchell, piano
Matt Mitchell is a pianist, composer, and electronic musician whose work moves between composed and improvised music, acoustic and electronic sound, and multiple strains of contemporary experimental practice. He leads Phalanx Ambassadors and co-leads Snark Horse with Kate Gentile and has worked extensively with artists including Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, Steve Coleman, Miles Okazaki, Ches Smith, Anna Webber, and many others. Mitchell is a recipient of a Doris Duke Impact Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
Dennis Sullivan II, percussion
Dennis Sullivan II is a New York-based percussionist, improviser, composer, and sound artist working across contemporary music, electronics, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance. He is a founding member of Popebama and Radical 2 and has performed with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Either/Or, Argento, and others. His work has been presented throughout the United States and Europe, and he is a recipient of the Darmstadt Stipendium Prize.
