""I really don't feel that it's all necessary anymore," Morton Feldman told an interviewer in 1972. "And so what I try to bring into my music are just a very few essential things that I need-to at least keep it going, for a little while more." Feldman had been asked whether his corpus of work, with its brooding slowness and trembling softness, had something to do with Jewish mourning in the wake of the Holocaust."
"But a cult was growing around him, and in the past few decades his influence on new music has become pervasive. The late Feldman archivist Chris Villars assembled a list of some two hundred and fifty pieces written in Feldman's memory. Linda Catlin Smith, who wrote two of them, recently told the critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson that hearing Feldman "made me feel that writing music was possible, that I might be able to write music that I want to hear.""
Morton Feldman pared music down to a few essential elements and favored extreme slowness and fragile dynamics. He avoided explicit statements about personal or historical grief while acknowledging private reflection. At his death in 1987 he was often portrayed as an esoteric associate of John Cage and noted for long works, but a growing cult of admirers reframed his legacy. Numerous composers have written tributes and works inspired by his aesthetic, and critics and musicians describe his music as enabling the possibility of new compositional approaches. Feldman's quiet, unhurried focus functions as a counterpoint to pervasive algorithmic noise.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]