Morton Feldman was born on January 12, 1926, and died on September 3, 1987. He was an American composer and an important figure in 20th-century classical music. Feldman was a supporter of indeterminacy in music, a concept linked to the experimental New York School of composers, which also included John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman’s music used new ways of writing notes to create his unique style. His compositions often featured rhythms that felt free and drifting, soft and unclear pitches, quiet and slow music, and repeated uneven patterns. After 1977, his later works also focused on pieces with very long or very short durations.

Biography

Morton Feldman was born in Woodside, Queens, New York City, on January 12, 1926. His parents, Irving and Frances Breskin Feldman, were Russian Jews who moved to New York from Pereiaslav (Irving, in 1910) and Bobruysk (Frances, in 1901). His father made children’s coats for a living. As a child, Feldman studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, who taught him to focus on a strong sense of musical feeling instead of formal training. His first composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who had studied under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent much of their time discussing music and art.

In early 1950, Feldman heard the New York Philharmonic perform a piece by Anton Webern. After this performance, the orchestra was to play a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, but Feldman left the concert immediately because he was upset by the audience’s disrespectful reaction to Webern’s work. In the lobby, he met John Cage, who had also left the concert. The two became close friends, and Feldman later moved into the building where Cage lived. Through Cage, Feldman met sculptor Richard Lippold (who had a studio next to artist Ray Johnson), artists like Sonja Sekula and Robert Rauschenberg, and composers such as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil. An interview with Feldman was published in the first issue of 0 to 9 magazine in 1967.

With Cage’s support, Feldman began writing music that did not follow traditional methods, such as tonal harmony or serialism. He experimented with unusual ways to write music, often using grids in his scores and specifying how many notes should be played at a certain time, but not which ones. Feldman’s ideas about notation and musical uncertainty inspired Cage to create works like Music of Changes, where the notes played are chosen by consulting the I Ching.

Through Cage, Feldman met many important artists in New York, including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Frank O’Hara. He was influenced by abstract expressionist painting and, in the 1970s, wrote several pieces lasting about 20 minutes, such as Rothko Chapel (1971), which was written for the building that houses paintings by Mark Rothko, and For Frank O’Hara (1973). In 1977, he composed the opera Neither, with text written by Samuel Beckett.

Feldman was asked to write the music for Jack Garfein’s 1961 film Something Wild. After hearing Feldman’s music for a scene in which a character (played by Garfein’s wife, Carroll Baker) is raped, the director stopped the project and chose Aaron Copland instead. Garfein reportedly said, “My wife is being raped, and you write music for the celesta?”

Feldman’s music changed in 1970, moving away from unclear and rhythmless notation toward precise rhythms. The first piece of this new style was a short work called Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, which honored his childhood piano teacher.

In 1973, at age 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor of Music Composition (a title he created) at the University at Buffalo in New York. Before this, he worked full-time at his family’s textile business in Manhattan’s Garment District. Feldman also taught at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1980s.

Later in his career, Feldman composed very long pieces, often over 30 minutes in length. These included Violin and String Quartet (1985, about 2 hours), For Philip Guston (1984, about 4 hours), and String Quartet II (1983, over 6 hours). These works usually moved slowly and used very quiet sounds. Feldman once said that quiet sounds were the only ones that interested him, asking in a 1982 lecture, “Do we have anything in music, for example, that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?”

Feldman married Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died of pancreatic cancer on September 3, 1987, at his home in Buffalo.