Morton Feldman

Born in New York in 1926 and died in Buffalo in 1987, Morton Feldman is a figure of 20th‑century American contemporary music, at the crossroads of experimentation, indeterminacy and the New York School alongside John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. Trained notably with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, Feldman developed from the 1950s a compositional approach that moved away from traditional frameworks of harmony and serialism, including scores with graphic notation that left part of the decision-making to performers. His encounter with John Cage in New York in 1950 played a central role in this trajectory, as did his proximity to the visual arts and Abstract Expressionism. From the 1970s Feldman steered his music toward a more precise rhythmic notation while retaining a language of very restrained dynamics, asymmetric motifs, delicate timbres and an expanded sense of time. Works such as Rothko Chapel (1971), For Frank O’Hara (1973), the opera Neither (1977) set to a text by Samuel Beckett, String Quartet II (1983) and For Philip Guston (1984) illustrate this move toward long, sparsely eventful forms. From 1973 Feldman taught at the University at Buffalo, where he held a chair of composition.