Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman was born in Woodside, Queens, into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Feldman's first composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who studied under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent most of their time simply talking about music and art. In early 1950, Feldman met John Cage, and theу quickly became friends. With Cage's encouragement, Feldman began to write pieces that had no relation to compositional systems of the past, such as traditional harmony or the serial technique. He experimented with nonstandard 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 music "changed radically" in 1970, moving away from graphic and arhythmic notation systems and toward rhythmic precision. The first piece of this new period was a short, 55-measure work, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, dedicated to his childhood piano teacher, Vera Maurina Press. In 1973, at the age of 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor (a title of his own devising) at the University at Buffalo. Until then, Feldman had earned his living as a full-time employee at the family textile business in New York's garment district. In addition to teaching at SUNY Buffalo, Feldman held residencies during the mid-1980s at the University of California, San Diego. Later, he began to produce very long works, often in one continuous movement, rarely shorter than half an hour in length and often much longer. He said that quiet sounds had begun to be the only ones that interested him. Feldman married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New York.