Morton Feldman
From Sequenza21/NetNewMusic Wiki
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Some additional information on Feldman, in no particular order:
- Of Cage, he indicated that he owed everything to him, yet he also owed nothing to him
- His last work was the ephemeral Piano Violin Viola Cello
- There has been a renaissance of sorts of Feldman's music in the past decade, particularly in Europe
- A useful link not on Wikipedia's profile of Feldman is Chris Villar's Feldman site, which lists upcoming performances, has many good online texts relating to Feldman and his music, and includes the why patterns mailing list
- Beginning in 1977, particularly with his work Piano, there was a gradual emergence of works of longer duration, all in one continuous movement. Feldman also incorporated repetitive elements into his music, beginning with the Turfan Fragments (1980).
- Of his first string quartet, which was not well received during its NY premiere, Feldman said "It's a fucking masterpiece." It is, but is performed all too infrequently.
- Feldman was very fond of using unconventional notation (F-flat, double flats, double sharps, B#, etc) and extraordinarily complex tuplets, as well as very quiet dynamics (ppp and quieter), generally all with a metronome marking of a quarter = 60-63 bpm. He did not use microtones in general, however.
- There are a number of recorded interviews with Feldman, including an early one with Charles Shere and the five conversations between Cage and Feldman called "Radio Happenings" from the '60s at the Other Minds audio archive.
