Morton Feldman was an American composer.
A major figure in 20th-century 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's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration.
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“If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble.”
Cited as having said that to John Cage in 1952 in Begin Again: A Bibliography of John Cage by Kenneth Silverman, p. 96 https://books.google.com/books?id=i11wgznLRZIC&pg=PA79&hl=pl&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=true.
At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.
Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)
“For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.”
Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)
“Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us.”
Sound Noise Varese Boulez, in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music http://books.google.pl/books?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA15&focus=viewport, edited by Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner. A&C Black, 2004. p. 16 http://books.google.pl/books?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA15&focus=viewport.
Quoted in Remembrance by Tom Johnson (September 1987)
“After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.”
Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.
quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812
“The composer makes plans, music laughs.”
Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.
Quoted in a 1976 interview, published in Desert Plants by Walter Zimmermann.
“To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?”
Quoted in a 1976 interview, published in Desert Plants by Walter Zimmermann.
Quoted in Remembrance by Tom Johnson (September 1987)
“…The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.”
Quoted in a May 1976 interview, published in Studio International (November 1976) pp 244-248.
