Biography
Morton Feldman stood apart as an American composer whose innovations in notation, improvisation, and timbre produced a singular aesthetic centered on sparse, typically hushed sonic events. Encounters with John Cage and the American avant-garde painters Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Rothko prompted him to abandon conventional musical values in favor of a freer, more intuitive “moment form” structural approach.
His training encompassed piano lessons with Madame Maurina Press, later honored in the 1970 tribute Madame Press Died Last Week at 90, along with composition studies under Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. The decisive turning point came in 1950 upon meeting Cage, an encounter that redirected Feldman’s entire artistic path. Within Cage’s circle, which embraced Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, and alongside the visual artists he befriended, Feldman cultivated a personal, instinct-driven compositional practice.
During the 1950s he explored graphic notation that supplied only approximate directives to performers, an approach he eventually found wanting because it permitted non-idiomatic, unchecked improvisation. He tested successive notational schemes that granted performers differing degrees of latitude. One solution eliminated rhythmic notation entirely: pitches appeared precisely via open note heads while every remaining parameter was left to the players. Another placed identical parts before several musicians to generate “a series of reverberations from an identical sound source,” a technique exemplified by Piece for 4 Pianos (1957). A further variant again left durations free yet fixed every other element in exact notation. In King of Denmark (1964) for solo percussion, graphic symbols serve merely as cues enabling each performer to fashion an individual realization.
By 1970, working once more in conventional notation, Feldman’s mature idiom of quietness, stillness, and absence of dramatic rhetoric stood fully formed. Representative chamber pieces from these years comprise The Viola in My Life (1970–1971), Rothko Chapel (1971), and Why Patterns (1978). In his final period Feldman turned toward questions of time and proportion, producing works of unprecedented length; at least nine exceed ninety minutes, among them the four-hour For Philip Guston and the String Quartet II, which may last six hours. Even in these expansive scores his method remained apparently intuitive; he never disclosed, and no theorist has yet identified, any systematic principle governing pitch choice.
Feldman resided and worked in New York for most of his early creative life until 1973, when he accepted the Edgar Varèse Chair in composition at the University at Buffalo, a post he retained until his death in 1987.
His training encompassed piano lessons with Madame Maurina Press, later honored in the 1970 tribute Madame Press Died Last Week at 90, along with composition studies under Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. The decisive turning point came in 1950 upon meeting Cage, an encounter that redirected Feldman’s entire artistic path. Within Cage’s circle, which embraced Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, and alongside the visual artists he befriended, Feldman cultivated a personal, instinct-driven compositional practice.
During the 1950s he explored graphic notation that supplied only approximate directives to performers, an approach he eventually found wanting because it permitted non-idiomatic, unchecked improvisation. He tested successive notational schemes that granted performers differing degrees of latitude. One solution eliminated rhythmic notation entirely: pitches appeared precisely via open note heads while every remaining parameter was left to the players. Another placed identical parts before several musicians to generate “a series of reverberations from an identical sound source,” a technique exemplified by Piece for 4 Pianos (1957). A further variant again left durations free yet fixed every other element in exact notation. In King of Denmark (1964) for solo percussion, graphic symbols serve merely as cues enabling each performer to fashion an individual realization.
By 1970, working once more in conventional notation, Feldman’s mature idiom of quietness, stillness, and absence of dramatic rhetoric stood fully formed. Representative chamber pieces from these years comprise The Viola in My Life (1970–1971), Rothko Chapel (1971), and Why Patterns (1978). In his final period Feldman turned toward questions of time and proportion, producing works of unprecedented length; at least nine exceed ninety minutes, among them the four-hour For Philip Guston and the String Quartet II, which may last six hours. Even in these expansive scores his method remained apparently intuitive; he never disclosed, and no theorist has yet identified, any systematic principle governing pitch choice.
Feldman resided and worked in New York for most of his early creative life until 1973, when he accepted the Edgar Varèse Chair in composition at the University at Buffalo, a post he retained until his death in 1987.
Albums
The Possibility Of A New Work For Electric Guitar
2024
For Samuel Beckett (1987)
2011
Patterns In A Chromatic Field
2004
Feldman, Vol. 7: Late Works with Clarinet
2003
Feldman: Crippled Symmetry
1999
Rothko Chapel
1991
Singles
