Morton Feldman Overview

Morton Feldman was a colleague of John Cage and part of the New York School of avant garde composers to emerge from the experimental wing of the 1950s. Early experiments using graphic scores and non-traditional notation yielded compelling and challenging new... [more]

Morton Feldman was a colleague of John Cage and part of the New York School of avant garde composers to emerge from the experimental wing of the 1950s. Early experiments using graphic scores and non-traditional notation yielded compelling and challenging new open forms emphasizing interpretive freedom on the part of the performer. Having more inn common with the abstract expressionist painters of the time, Feldman thought of his sometimes extraordinarily long pieces (6 hours in some cases) as large canvases on which the sounds could be thought of as color or shape, which could simply be allowed to exist, to float in space and then ripen and expand in the listener's memory. Karlheinz Stockhausen once asked him "Morton, what is your secret?" To which Feldman replied "I don't push the sounds around"...Stockhausen: "Not even a little bit?" [show less]