Morton Feldman wrote as he composed music, carefully placing one
element after another, producing some of the avant-garde's most lucid
considerations of what it means to make music
Morton Feldman (1926-87) is among the most influential American
composers of the 20th century, a man whose music is known for its
extreme quiet and delicate beauty (while Feldman himself was famously
large and loud). Karlheinz Stockhausen once asked the composer what his
secret was: I don't push the sounds around, Feldman replied. His
writings resemble his music in their quiet steadiness, their
oscillations between assertion and doubt. They are also 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 Feldman's friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko,
Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara and John Cage. Give My Regards to
Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings,
culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures,
interviews and unpublished writings. It is one of those rare books from
which anyone can draw inspiration, no matter what the vocation or
discipline.