|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other authors named Morton:
|
|
|
|
Author's popularity: 3
Vote:  
|
If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
|
|
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory! |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In a kind of middle-aged crisis, it dawned upon me that there was a possibility that music might not even be an art form. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Most people think what could I do, I think what shouldn't I do. What I should do perhaps is involved with the fact that I'm Jewish and what is known as Jewish paranoia. I don't feel comfortable enough to feel that everything is on my side and that it's going to work just the way I want it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | No one has the Houdini school of composition. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | This business about being flung out of paradise is his gift to me. I'm glad I got out; it was getting too hot in there. |
|
Biography
|
Morton Feldman (born January 12, 1926, died September 3, 1987) was an American composer. He is best known for his mature instrumental pieces which are frequently written for unusual groups of instruments, feature isolated, carefully chosen, predominantly quiet sounds, and are often very long.
Feldman was born in New York City. He 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. Feldman was composing at this time, but in a style very different to that he would later be associated with.
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, and the two became good friends. Under Cage's influence, 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. See aleatoric music and indeterminate music.
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 though 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).
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 Piano and String Quartet (1985, around eighty minutes), For Philip Guston (1984, around four hours) and, most extreme, the String Quartet II (1983), which is over five hours long without a break. It 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). Typically, these pieces do not change in mood throughout 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.
Feldman married the composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New York.
External links
*Geometry.net: Morton Feldman
*Morton Feldman in conversation with Thomas Moore
*Morton Feldman: Structures for String Quartet (1951) by Lejaren Hiller
*GregSandow.com: Feldman Draws Blood Village Voice, June 16, 1980
Listening
*UbuWeb: Morton Feldman featuring The King of Denmark
*Epitonic.com: Morton Feldman featuring tracks from Only -- Works for Voice and Instruments
...(more on Wikipedia)
|
|
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Morton Feldman".
|
|
|