Morton Feldman

Composer

• Born: January 12, 1926
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 3, 1987
• Place of death: Buffalo, New York

American classical composer

Part of the New York School, a circle of composers associated with John Cage, Feldman was a pioneer in indeterminism and graphic notation. His music is known for its static quality and soft dynamics.

The Life

Morton Feldman was born in 1926 in New York City. At the age of twelve, he began piano lessons with Vera Maurina Press, a student of Ferruccio Busoni. While in high school, Feldman studied composition with Wallingford Riegger, and later he became a student of Stefan Wolpe.

Meeting the composer John Cage in 1950 was a turning point for Feldman. Cage had little direct influence on Feldman’s music, but his openness to new ideas gave Feldman the confidence to pursue an iconoclastic path. Cage also introduced Feldman to other musicians and artists. Meeting a group of Abstract Expressionist artists that included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston was especially important to Feldman. He was fascinated by their art and by their ways of working. While many composers were occupied with such compositional systems as serialism, Feldman, like the painters he had met, relied on intuition; he worked deliberately, letting the music come to him sound by sound.

Feldman worked in his family’s clothing business until he was forty-four. In 1974 he accepted the Edgard Varèse professorship at the State University of New York at Buffalo, becoming a dynamic and unorthodox teacher. He developed an interest in Turkish rugs, which influenced and inspired his later music, just as painting had earlier. Feldman died of pancreatic cancer in 1987.

The Music

Although Feldman’s music evolved throughout his career, the unique aspects of his compositional style remained remarkably consistent. His music is abstract with little sense of a narrative or dramatic structure. Extended melodies are rare; his thought was predominantly harmonic. He favored dissonant chords, but the bite of the dissonances is moderated by his use of extremely soft dynamics. His music tends to move slowly and deliberately, dwelling on the sensuality of pure sound.

The King of Denmark.The King of Denmark for a solo percussionist uses graphic notation. The score consists of three rows of boxes, specifying high, middle-range, and low sounds, and each column is a unit of time. Numbers in the boxes specify how many sounds are to be played, but the precise patterns are left to the performer’s discretion. All sounds are to be extremely soft and equal in volume. To this end, the instruments (drums, cymbals, bell gongs, vibraphone) are played only with the fingers. This is exceedingly delicate music, as barely audible sounds emerge from silence and then return.

Rothko Chapel.The Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, is a nonsectarian chapel designed by Rothko. Fourteen Rothko paintings surround the octagonal space. When Rothko committed suicide in 1970, Feldman was commissioned to write a piece in his memory. This is one of Feldman’s most well-known and emotionally expressive works.

Rothko Chapel is scored for viola, percussion, celesta, vocal soloists, and chorus. At one point, the chorus softly sustains slowly changing chords for three full minutes. Time seems to stand still, perhaps reflecting the sense of immobility represented in Rothko’s large canvases. Near the end, Feldman uncharacteristically uses an expressive tonal melody. The melody, which he had written when he was fifteen, is reminiscent of music he heard in synagogue.

Why Patterns?Scored for the unusual combination of flute, glockenspiel, and piano, Why Patterns? reflects Feldman’s interest in handmade Turkish rugs. He was fascinated by the intricate woven patterns and the subtle changes of color in the dyed yarn. Why Patterns? is a musical analogue to the patterns of the rugs. The individual parts are notated with exactitude, but they do not coordinate precisely, so that the instruments seem to proceed independently of one another. A quiet and slowly unfolding piece, it creates a calm, mesmerizing atmosphere as disparate melodic patterns undergo subtle variation as they are woven together.

Palais de Mari.Some of Feldman’s late works are exceedingly long. (String Quartet 2 lasts more than five hours.) Palais de Mari, one of Feldman’s final works, is similar in concept to the lengthy works, but it is compressed into a shorter span of time. The piano work lasts about twenty minutes. Palais de Mari is soft and slow moving, with pauses of varying lengths. The sustaining pedal is kept down nearly throughout, causing the notes of one gesture to blur into the next (reminiscent of the way Rothko’s rectangles bleed into the background color rather than have a sharp edge). Feldman dwells on the opening four-note motive throughout. Other ideas displace it temporarily, but the undulating motive continually returns, varied and presented in different contexts. This is intimate music addressed to the inner self.

Musical Legacy

In an age when compositional experimentalism often resulted in chaotic and unstructured music, Feldman pursued his singular vision with great effort and discipline, drawing as much inspiration from visual artists as from other musicians. Although stunningly original, Feldman’s music challenges his audience to learn to listen in new ways. Most works have a dramatic structure, with one event leading to another; Feldman’s music, in contrast, is fragmentary and static. For some, it is simply boring; others find that the slow, quiet music encourages them to listen more closely and with greater awareness of the pure sensuousness of the sounds. For these listeners, Feldman’s music possesses unique and extraordinary beauty.

Principal Works

chamber works:The Straits of Magellan, 1961; The King of Denmark, 1964; The Viola in My Life, 1970; Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, 1971; The Viola in My Life 4, 1971; For Frank O’Hara, 1973; Routine Investigations, 1976; Ixion, 1977; Why Patterns?, 1978; String Quartet, 1980; String Quartet 2, 1983; For Philip Guston, 1984.

choral works:Rothko Chapel, 1972.

orchestral works:Intersection, 1953; Atlantis, 1960.

piano works:Extensions 3, 1952; Extensions 4, 1954; Vertical Thoughts, 1963; Vertical Thoughts 4, 1964; Triadic Memories, 1981; Palais de Mari, 1986.

Bibliography

DeLio, Thomas, ed. The Music of Morton Feldman. New York: Excelsior, 1996. This collection of essays includes a discussion of Feldman’s aesthetic, musical analyses, and three essays by Feldman. The music analyses require an understanding of music theory, but the other essays are approachable by the general reader.

Feldman, Morton. Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Edited by B. H. Friedman. Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 2000. Feldman writes about his music, his artistic ideas, his career, and many of the musicians and artists he knew.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964-1987. Edited by Chris Villars. London: Hyphen Press, 2006. Interviews and lectures, most of which have been previously published in various journals, are brought together under a single cover. Includes examples of pages from Feldman’s scores and a chronological outline of his life.

Gann, Kyle. “Painter Envy: Morton Feldman Ascends His Pedestal as Softly as Possible.” The Village Voice (July, 23, 1996). A short but substantive summary of and a subjective evaluation of Feldman’s work.

Johnson, Steven, ed. The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts. London: Taylor & Francis, 2001. A superb collection of essays about the interactions among the musicians of the New York School (Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff) and their counterparts in the visual arts, the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and more). Several essays focus on Feldman in particular.