Morton Feldman

Teaches at Harvestworks | Digital Media Arts Center

Morton Feldman was a unique and influential American composer. His experimentation with non-traditional notation, improvisation, and timbre led to a characteristic style that emphasized isolated and usually quiet points or moments of sound. His work with John Cage and his association with the avant-garde of American painters, including Pollock, Rauschenberg, and Rothko helped him to discard traditional music aesthetics for a less ordered and more intuitive, "moment form" approach to structure.

By 1970, using conventional notation, his distinctive doctrine of quietness, stillness and lack of dramatic rhetoric was fully in place. Feldman's best-known chamber works of this period include The Viola in My Life (1970-1971), Rothko Chapel (1971), and Why Patterns (1978). In his last compositions, Feldman became interested in the use of time and proportion. The resulting pieces became greatly expanded in scale, at least nine lasting more than ninety minutes. His composition For Philip Guston lasts four hours, and his String Quartet II can take up to six hours to perform. Yet even in his last works, Feldman's method is apparently intuitive, as he never admitted to, nor has any theorist been able to uncover, any systematic means of pitch selection.