Morton Feldman: Use

Morton Feldman was American avant-garde composer. Explore interesting quotes on use.
Morton Feldman: 26   quotes 0   likes

“To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe … not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it.”

Morton Feldman

Quoted in a 1976 interview, published in Desert Plants by Walter Zimmermann.

Life , Music , Feeling , Idea

“Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us.”

Morton Feldman

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.

Dreams , Music

“It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed…. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition…Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.”

Morton Feldman

quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

Music , Idea , Appearance , Memory