The King of Denmark, Morton Feldman

The King of Denmark (1964) is Morton Feldman's only composition written exclusively for percussion. Affectionately referred to as "The King" by performers, the piece has been described by Steven Schick as "an anti-percussion" piece due to its extremely quiet dynamics and the unusual instruction prohibiting the use of sticks and mallets.

Schick argues that the work embodies a sense of "directionlessness": "Directionlessness is key here. The King of Denmark is music that refuses to dictate the way it should be perceived. It does not light a particular way nor lead you by the ear like an angry headmaster along a corridor of preferred comprehension. It simply floats in timeless ether to be looked at from any angle, any proximity, any point of view." (Steven Schick, The Percussionist's Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, 2006, p.XYZ).

Yet this raises a paradox: if directionlessness lies at the heart of the work, why did Feldman choose to use a grid—a rigid, spatiotemporally oriented notation system? Does the grid not represent a contradiction? This paradox became my entry point. As Rosalind Krauss argues in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, the grid is a hallmark of modernist aesthetics—appearing in architecture, painting (Mondrian, Rothko), and music as a visual representation of time and structure. In The King of Denmark, the grid functions as both compositional tool and metaphor, carrying multiple layers of meaning: modernist efficiency, spatial order, but also—as Alistair Noble suggests in his analysis of Feldman's Intersection 3, potential references to concentration camp fences, given Feldman's Jewish identity and the period in which he worked. The grid, then, became my entry point. Exposing, challenging, disrupting, and ultimately collapsing the grid are central strategies in my hacking process.

Creative Destruction: Matta-Clark and Anarchitecture

In his lecture Wild Things: An Aesthetics of Collapse (2021), Jack Halberstam discusses "creative destruction" and cites the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who in the early 1970s developed the concept of anarchitecture—a fusion of "anarchy" and "architecture." Matta-Clark's work involved cutting, splitting, and slicing buildings to expose voids, gaps, and leftover spaces.

In clear contrast to Le Corbusier's modernist architecture, Matta-Clark deliberately altered buildings by splitting and deconstructing them. His goal was to undo the rigid, imposed order of modernism by exposing the structures' inner voids—the gaps where artistic potential emerges. This became my conceptual framework for The King of Denmark. Halberstam proposes that creative destruction involves practices of undoing, unmaking, and unbuilding. I asked: how can one enact such a process in musical performance? And what might result from it?

The Hacking: Slicing, Boxing, Collapsing

My response was to reject the use of percussion stands entirely—these stands being, to me, the most tangible symbol of rigid disciplinary structures imposed on percussion performance. Instead, I constructed a simple wooden cube. I then sliced the score into 3×3 boxes—what I call "Basic Unit Feldman (BUF)". Instead of considering the score as a whole, I divided it into these sub-units and analyzed each individually, noting all events occurring within each BUF. This mapping allowed me to identify the minimum number and quality of instruments needed. I then recreated the BUF grids on each face of the wooden box using approximately 80 meters of yellow wire. The performance unfolds in two parts:

Part 1: Setup and Constraint I arrange my setup from inside the box. As I hang or place instruments, their weight stretches the wires and alters the structure's original shape. This dynamic setup increasingly restricts my movement—the more instruments I add, the more confined I become. The box becomes both cage and instrument. Part 2: Collapse and Liberation I deliberately collapse the structure. As scholars like Halberstam and artists like Matta-Clark have shown, collapse is not mere destruction—it is a generative gesture that opens new perspectives. The fallen structure creates unplanned sonic interactions: instruments contact each other, producing unpredictable, impure resonances—new textures born from proximity, friction, and chance.

After the collapse, I perform The King of Denmark following the score—but now within this transformed sonic environment. What was once separate becomes entangled. The grid's collapse produces what Feldman himself might have called "catastrophe"—the unfixing of elements that allows sounds to exist in themselves.

Body as Instrument

In the score's legend, Feldman includes "S – Skin," allowing the performer to choose any membrane instruments. I began to wonder: what if the most dynamic and expressive "skin instrument" available was my own skin?After all, it is capable of producing a remarkable range of sounds while remaining completely mobile and responsive. It aligns with both my analytical approach and the piece's demand for subtle sonic variation. I decided to explore the relationship between my body, the collapsed setup, and the work itself—dissolving the boundary between performer and instrument, between interpretation and embodiment.