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My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman
by B. H. Friedman (Editor), Frank O'Hara (Afterword)
Morton Feldman
(1926-1987) is among the most influential American composers of
the 20th century. While his music is known for its extreme quiet
and delicate beauty, Feldman himself was famously large and loud.
His writings are both funny and illuminating, not only about his
own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets,
and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including his friends
Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg,
Frank O’Hara, and John Cage.
Together with
John Cage, Feldman is the principal representative of the New
York School of composers, a group of American avant-gardists who
in the 1950s and 1960s challenged the European music establishment
with their use of graphic scores, chance techniques, and indeterminate
compositions. Yet despite Feldman’s devotion to these radical
innovations, his music was known above all for its sensuousness
and melancholy. "There never was and there is not now in
my mind any doubt about its beauty," wrote John Cage in his
landmark book Silence. "It is, in fact, sometimes too beautiful."
It is Feldman’s
intuitive, almost spiritual approach to music that has caused
him to become one of the most performed composers of our time;
since his death in 1987, no fewer than 80 CDs of Feldman’s music
have been released, and his works can now be heard in classical
music halls worldwide. His music has also won a large following
outside the classical establishment: Feldman is one of the most
listened to and discussed composers among fans (and practitioners)
of avant-garde rock and techno music... (Amazon.com)
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