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Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York City.

A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations which he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms which seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings which seem softly unfocussed; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration.

Biography

Feldman was born in Brooklyn, New York City into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Kiev. His father was a manufacturer of children's coats.^[1][2] As a child he studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, who, according to the composer himself, instilled in him a "vibrant musicality rather than musicianship."^[3] Feldman's first composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who studied under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent most of their time simply talking about music and art.^[4]

In early 1950 Feldman went to hear the New York Philharmonic give a performance of Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21. After this work, the orchestra was going to perform a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feldman left immediately before that, overwhelmed by Webern's work. In the lobby he met John Cage, who too attended the concert and was leaving for precisely the same reason.^[5] The two composers quickly became good friends, with Feldman moving into the apartment on the second floor of the building Cage lived in. Through Cage, he met painters Richard Lippold (who had a studio next door), Sonia Sekula, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, and composers such as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil.^[6]

With encouragement from Cage, Feldman began to write pieces which had no relation to compositional systems of the past, such as the constraints of traditional harmony or the serial technique. He experimented with non-standard systems of musical notation, often using grids in his scores, and specifying how many notes should be played at a certain time, but not which ones. Feldman's experiments with the use of chance in his composition in turn inspired John Cage to write pieces like the Music of Changes, where the notes to be played are determined by consulting the I Ching.

Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for Jack Garfein's 1961 film, Something Wild. However, after hearing the music for the opening scene, in which a character (played by Carroll Baker, incidently also Garfein's wife) is raped, the director promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the startled director was said to be, "My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?" [1]

Through Cage, Feldman met many other prominent figures in the New York arts scene, among them Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Frank O'Hara. He found inspiration in the paintings of the abstract expressionists, and throughout the 1970s wrote a number of pieces around twenty-minutes in length, including Rothko Chapel (1971, written for the building of the same name which houses paintings by Mark Rothko) and For Frank O'Hara (1973). In 1977, he wrote the opera Neither with words by Samuel Beckett.

In 1973, at the age of 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor (a title of his own devising) at the University at Buffalo. Prior to that time, Feldman had earned his living as a full-time employee at the family textile business in New York's garment district.

Later, he began to produce his very long works, often in one continuous movement, rarely shorter than half an hour in length and often much longer. These works include Violin and String Quartet (1985, around 2 hours), For Philip Guston (1984, around four hours) and, most extreme, the String Quartet II (1983, which is over six hours long without a break.)
"String Quartet II" was given its first complete performance at Cooper Union, New York City in 1999 by the FLUX Quartet, who issued a recording in 2003 (at 6 hours and 7 minutes, and spanning 5 CDs, or uninterrupted on 1 DVD) via New York's Mode Records. Typically, these pieces maintain a very slow developmental pace (if not static) and tend to be made up of mostly very quiet sounds. Feldman said himself that quiet sounds had begun to be the only ones that interested him. In a 1982 lecture, Feldman noted: "Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?"

Feldman married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died from pancreatic cancer in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New York, after fighting for his life for three months.

Works

See: List of compositions by Morton Feldman

Notable students

Notes

References

• Feldman, Morton. 1968. Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Artnews Annual. Included in Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (2000), The Music of Morton Feldman, and elsewhere.
• Gagne, Cole, and Caras, Tracey. 1982. Interview with Morton Feldman. In: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers, 164–177. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press Inc, 1982. Available online.
• Hirata, Catherin. 2002. Morton Feldman. In: Sitsky, Larry, ed. 2002. Music of the Twentieth-century Avant-garde. Greenwood Publishing Group
• Revill, David. 1993. The Roaring Silence: John Cage – a Life. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1559702206, ISBN 978-1559702201
• Ross, Alex. 2006. American Sublime. The New Yorker, June 19, 2006. Available online.
• Zimmerman, Walter, ed. 1985. Morton Feldman Essays. Kerpen: Beginner.

Further reading

• Feldman, Morton. Morton Feldman Says. Chris Villars, ed. London: Hyphen Press, 2006.
• Feldman, Morton. Morton Feldman in Middelburg. Lectures and Conversations. R. Mörchen, ed. Cologne: MusikTexte, 2008.
• Feldman, Morton. Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. B.H. Friedman, ed. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.
• Gareau, Philip. La musique de Morton Feldman ou le temps en liberté. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006.
• Hirata, Catherin (Winter 1996). "The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman", Perspectives of New Music 34, no.1, 6-27.
• Herzfeld, Gregor. "Historisches Bewusstsein in Morton Feldmans Unterrichtsskizzen", Archiv für Musikwissenschaft Vol. 66, no. 3, (Summer 2009), 218-233.
• Lunberry, Clark. “Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman's String Quartet II and Triadic Memories.” SubStance 110: Vol. 35, Number 2 (Summer 2006): 17-50. (Available at http://www.cnvill.net/mftexts.htm [#105 on the list])

External links

• Morton Feldman Page
• Morton Feldman in conversation with Thomas Moore
• Morton Feldman: Structures for String Quartet (1951) by Lejaren Hiller
• GregSandow.com: Feldman Draws Blood Village Voice, June 16, 1980
• Morton Feldman profile at New Albion Records
• The New Yorker: The Critics at Large
• Morton Feldman at Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music
• (French) A biography of Morton Feldman, from IRCAM's website.

Listening

• Art of the States: Morton Feldman three works by the composer
• UbuWeb: Morton Feldman featuring The King of Denmark
• Epitonic.com: Morton Feldman featuring tracks from Only – Works for Voice and Instruments
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 1
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 2
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 3
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 4
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 5

From Wikiquote

Morton Feldman (12 January 1926 – 3 September 1987) was an American composer.

Sourced

• The composer makes plans, music laughs.
  • Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.

• After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.
  • Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.

• It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.
  • quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• ...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.
  • Quoted in a May 1976 interview, published in Studio International (November 1976) pp 244-248.

• For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.
  • Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)

• My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.
  • Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)

• Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?
  • Quoted from a 1982 lecture^{[specific citation needed]}

About Feldman

• [Regarding indeterminacy]"...I think this interest had to do with his interest in painting. He used to put sheets of graph paper on the wall, and work on them like paintings. Slowly his notation would accumulate, and from time to time he'd stand back to look at the overall design. For him it had less to do with belief in chance: it was more function than anything else. He would talk about different weights of sound - and that was simply the easiest way to express them. Pitches didn't really matter, as there were so many other controls, and he used chance without its interfering with expression. What Cage admired in him and what they had most in common was heroism - trusting in performers, despite the risk that they might destroy the thing completely. Unless the performer committed himself to the pieces, they could be horrible, and it was their very dangerousness which made them so beautiful. Cage's were beautiful in the same way, just because you never knew what would come next." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist

• Quoted from a conversation with Victor Schonfield, director of "Music now" in London, published in Music and Musicians, London, May 1969. [Cues, pp66-68]

• "...We met in 1950, through John Cage, when I was sixteen and he in his early twenties. We were all doing work that was clearly different, newly different - from one another, but joined by our delight in each other's work (and by John Cage's organizing the concerts of it and a few musicians, David Tudor centrally, playing it), and by its difference from any other we knew. I still find mysterious his way of putting the music together, or rather of erasing any traces of a sense of its having been put together: it's just there. How does he do it? He's the only composer I know whose work seems made in a way that cannot be accounted for, explained, by any other means than the impossible one of becoming that composer oneself. He talked wonderfully, sharply, outrageously, but that wasn't quite his music. One thinks of the disparity of his large, strong presence and the delicate, hypersoft music, but in fact he too was, among other things, full of tenderness and the music is, among other things, as tough as nails." - Christian Wolff, Composer and Pianist

• Written in 1987 at the request of Gisela Gronemeyer and Reinhard Oehlschlägel, first published in German in MusikTexte 22, Köln, December 1987. [Cues, pp364-368]

External links

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Morton Feldman