(b New York, 12 Jan 1926; d Buffalo, 3 Sept 1987). American composer. He studied with Riegger and Wolpe and from 1950 was closely associated with Cage; he also gained much from contact with New York painters. In 1972 he joined the faculty of the State University of New York, Buffalo. His consistent concern was with quiet, pure and open-textured music, sometimes elastically notated (as in the Projection series of 1950-51) but more often fully written out. The Viola in my life series (1970-71) and Rothko Chapel (1971) are the best known of his works. Several later pieces are extremely long, for example the First String Quartet (1979) which lasts c 100 minutes and the Second (1983), intended to last six hours.
Feldman, Morton, 1926-87, American modernist composer, b. New York City. An associate of John Cage and other experimental composers, Feldman was part of the so-called New York school. He was also a friend of many of the major painters involved in abstract expressionism, and the directness, immediacy, and elements of chance that characterize his work were heavily influenced by their philosophy and work. Among compositions directly inspired by these artists are Rothko Chapel (1971) and For Philip Guston (1984). Also influenced by the visual arts was the new system of graph musical notation Feldman developed in the early 1950s and used until 1960. It employed symbols to indicate such elements as register, interval, and texture and allowed for improvisation. Among his works using graph notation are Projection (1950) and Atlantis (1958). Feldman often concentrated on sound rather than form, and is especially known for his delicate, extremely muted and moody minimalist compositions. During the 1970s his works became much longer in duration, with his String Quartet II (1983) lasting up to six hours. Feldman wrote compositions for orchestra, chorus, solo voices and instruments, and chamber ensembles.
Bibliography
See his collected writings (ed. by B. H. Friedman, 2001) and Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987 (ed. by C. Villars, 2006); T. Delio, ed., The Music of Morton Feldman (1996); S. Johnson, ed., The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts (2001).
Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Electronic/Computer Music, Film Music, Keyboard Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Vocal Music
Biography
Morton Feldman was a unique and influential American composer. His experimentation with non-traditional notation, improvisation, and timbre led to a characteristic style that emphasized isolated and usually quiet points or moments of sound. His work with John Cage and his association with the avant-garde of American painters, including Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Rothko helped him to discard traditional music aesthetics for a less ordered and more intuitive, "moment form" approach to structure. His earlier work of the 1950s utilized graphic notation in which only approximate indications were given to the performers. This eventually proved unsatisfactory to Feldman because it allowed for non-idiomatic, uncontrolled improvisation. Throughout the decade, he experimented with different versions of notation that gave varying amounts of freedom to the performers. The first experiment was to abolish rhythmic notation altogether. The pitches were specified exactly with open note heads, but all other elements were left entirely up to the performers. The second experiment involved giving an identical written part to several players with the intention of producing "a series of reverberations from an identical sound source." A work that is indicative of this reverberation technique is the Piece for 4 Pianos (1957). Feldman's third innovation of this period was a variation on the first one. Once again, note durations were left up to the performers, but in this case, all other elements were notated precisely. In his Prince of Denmark (1964), for solo percussion, the graphic notation is a key that assists the performer in making their own version of the piece.
By 1970, using conventional notation, his distinctive doctrine of quietness, stillness and lack of dramatic rhetoric was fully in place. Feldman's best-known chamber works of this period include The Viola in My Life (1970-1971), Rothko Chapel (1971), and Why Patterns (1978). In his last compositions, Feldman became interested in the use of time and proportion. The resulting pieces became greatly expanded in scale, at least nine lasting more than ninety minutes. His composition For Philip Guston lasts four hours, and his String Quartet II can take up to six hours to perform. Yet even in his last works, Feldman's method is apparently intuitive, as he never admitted to, nor has any theorist been able to uncover, any systematic means of pitch selection.
Feldman's first teachers were Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, but it was his meeting with John Cage in 1950 that set his entire future direction and musical aesthetic. Cage's circle of composers, which also included Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, combined with the influence of the visual artists that Feldman befriended, allowed him to develop his personal and instinctual method of composing. Feldman lived and worked in New York throughout most of his earlier creative career. In 1973, he was offered the Edgar Varèse Chair in composition at the University of New York at Buffalo, which he held until his death in 1987. ~ Steven Coburn, All Music Guide
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.
Feldman studied piano with Madame Maurina-Press, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, and later composition with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. He did not agree with many of the views of these composition teachers, and he spent much of his time simply arguing with them. He was composing at this time, but in a style very different from that with which he would later be associated.
In 1950, Feldman went to hear the New York Philharmonic give a performance of Anton Webern's Symphony. At the concert, he met John Cage. The two became good friends, with Feldman moving into the apartment downstairs from Cage. 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.
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.
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])
