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Felder Feldman

Morton Feldman (1926 - 1987) Morton Feldman was born in New York on January 12, 1926. At the age of twelve, he studied piano with Madame Maurina-Press, who had been a pupil of Busoni, and it was she who instilled in Feldman a vibrant musicality. Feldman was composing short Scriabin-esque pieces until, in 1941, he began to study composition with Wallingford Riegger. Three years later, he began to study with Stefan Wolpe, though they spent much of their time together simply arguing about music. Then, in 1949, Feldman met John Cage, and the meeting marked the beginning of an artistic association of crucial importance to American music in the 1950s. Cage encouraged Feldman to have confidence in his own intuition and Feldman then began to write totally intuitive compositions. He began to work from moment to moment, from one sound to the next, never using any system that anyone has been able to identify. Feldman's friends during the 1950s in New York included composers Earle Brown and Christian Wolff; painters Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg; and pianist David Tudor. The painters, in particular, influenced Feldman to search for his own sound world, one that was more immediate and more physical than had existed before. In 1973, the State University of New York at Buffalo asked Feldman to become the Edgard Varese Professor, a post he held for the rest of his life. From the late 1970s, his compositions expanded in length to such a degree that his second string quartet can last for up to five and a half hours. The scale of these works was often a cause of controversy, but Feldman would always be happy to attempt to explain the reasoning behind them. He would point out: "My whole generation was hung up on the 20 to 25 minute piece. It was our clock. We all got to know it, and how to handle it. As soon as you leave the 20-25 minute piece behind, in a one-movement work, different problems arise. Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half its scale. Form is easy - just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter. You have to have control of the piece - it requires a heightened kind of concentration. Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they're like evolving things." Nine of Feldman's single-movement compositions have durations of more than one and a half hours. In June 1987, Morton Feldman married the composer Barbara Monk. On September 3, 1987, at the age of 61, he died at his home in Buffalo.

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