MortonFeldman

In January 1950 Morton Feldman heard Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21, at Carnegie Hall, with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic. Afterwards he saw John Cage in the hall and walked over. “Wasn’t that extraordinary?” he asked. Remembering the meeting for Alan Beckett in International Times in November 1966, Feldman said that Cage was shaking with excitement. Cage asked what he did; Feldman said he wrote music. They made an appointment to look at it.

Cage’s apartment impressed him nearly as much as the concert. Five flights up were windows looking over the East River, plants, a straw mat, Japanese cushions and a Steinway. Feldman, brought up among conventional furniture, went out and bought a drafting table and fluorescent lamp like Cage’s. He later moved into the same building. Cage encouraged him to trust what he was already doing. In that 1966 interview Feldman said of the debt, “I owe him everything and I owe him nothing.”

1926–⁠50New York, Riegger, Wolpe and Varèse

Wolpe’s political convictions sometimes made the lessons uncomfortable. Feldman told Alan Beckett in 1966 that Wolpe had once scolded him in his studio on Fourteenth Street over his responsibilities to the man in the street. Looking out of the window, Feldman saw Jackson Pollock crossing the road. He said nothing, and Wolpe went on talking about the public.

The 1950s and 1960sGraph notation and the Projections

Feldman also tried the reverse arrangement. In the five Durations pieces of 1960–⁠61, he supplied the notes and let each player proceed at an independent pace. A piano chord could fade while a string player held on, and the next flute note might arrive before either had finished. He wrote fully notated pieces alongside these experiments. He stopped using graphs after In Search of an Orchestration in 1967; his later scores fixed small differences with changing time signatures and exact rests.

Painters and playersRothko Chapel and the painters

Philip Guston, Rothko, Franz Kline and Pollock were Feldman’s friends, people he argued with and visited. At the Cedar Tavern, Feldman and Cage sat among painters who were making enormous canvases with no story or central figure. For years the family clothing business paid Feldman’s bills. He became dean of the New York Studio School in 1969, spent 1971–⁠72 in Berlin on a DAAD residency, and began teaching at Buffalo in 1973, in a professorship named after Varèse.

The violist Karen Phillips prompted The Viola in My Life, four pieces of 1970–⁠71 with accompaniments that change from piano to orchestra. In them a melody is heard, stops and returns. Talking to Howard Skempton in London on 13 January 1977, Feldman said he wanted it to come back “like a ghost, like a memory”. A short interruption from the snare drum can break the melody off.

1976–⁠77Beckett and neither

Feldman met Samuel Beckett in Berlin in 1976 to discuss a proposed opera. As Feldman recalled to Skempton the following January, Beckett said, “Mr Feldman, I don’t like opera.” Feldman answered, “I don’t blame you!” Beckett later sent the short text of neither. Feldman had already started composing, and the opening has no voice because he did not yet have the words. A solo soprano sings the text, often high above repeated orchestral figures. The work was performed at the Rome Opera in May 1977, staged by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.

The late worksRugs and repetition

In Crippled Symmetry (1983), the flute, keyboard and percussion players count their own repetitions, and parts printed on the same page do not necessarily sound together. The Second String Quartet, written the same year, can last more than five hours. Plucked notes interrupt bowed chords, and small rocking figures return long after they first appear. For Bunita Marcus (1985) lasts roughly seventy minutes and is played very quietly throughout, with the sustaining pedal held down, so that the strings go on sounding through the rests.

Piano and String Quartet, also from 1985, sets the decaying piano sound against four bowed instruments. For the large orchestra of Coptic Light, first performed in 1986, Feldman imagined a sustaining pedal made of instruments. Ancient textiles in the Louvre had set him thinking about what remains of a civilisation in scraps of cloth. He placed two pianos within the orchestra and kept its soft sounds renewing one another.

The last solo piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), takes about twenty-five minutes. Bunita Marcus commissioned it and played the première in the loft of its dedicatee, the painter Francesco Clemente. Feldman had seen a photograph of the ruined palace at the Louvre. The piece returns to the uneven patterns of his earlier music. In 1987 he returned to Beckett with music for the radio play Words and Music and the ensemble piece For Samuel Beckett. He continued teaching until the end of his life and died of pancreatic cancer in Buffalo on 3 September 1987, aged sixty-one.