Morton Feldman

Biography

Morton Feldman came into the world on January 12, 1926, in Woodside, Queens. His parents, Irving and Frances Breskin Feldman, were Russian Jews who had left Pereiaslav (Irving in 1910) and Bobruysk (Frances in 1901) for New York.

Irving ran a business making children’s coats. As a boy, Feldman took piano lessons from Vera Maurina Press, who gave him what she called a “vibrant musicality rather than musicianship.” His early composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, an early American adherent of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who had trained under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Much of their time together was spent just talking about music and art.

One evening in early 1950, Feldman went to hear the New York Philharmonic play Webern’s Symphony. The crowd’s rude response to the piece upset him, so he walked out before the Rachmaninoff work that followed. In the lobby he ran into John Cage, who had also left early.

They quickly became close, and Feldman moved into Cage’s building. Through Cage, Feldman met sculptor Richard Lippold (who shared a studio with artist Ray Johnson), artists Sonja Sekula and Robert Rauschenberg, and composers Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil. A 1967 interview with Feldman appeared in the debut issue of the magazine 0 to 9.

Encouraged by Cage, Feldman started writing music that ignored older systems like traditional harmony or serialism. He tried out unusual notation, often using grids that told a player how many notes to sound at a given moment but not which specific pitches. These experiments pushed Cage to create pieces such as Music of Changes, where the I Ching decided the notes.

Cage also introduced Feldman to Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Frank O’Hara. Abstract expressionist painting inspired him, and during the 1970s he produced several works around twenty minutes long, including Rothko Chapel (1971, written for the chapel housing Mark Rothko’s paintings) and For Frank O’Hara (1973). In 1977, he composed the opera Neither, using an original text by Samuel Beckett.