Meetings with Morty: An American Composer's 85th Anniversary

A Bulgarian National Radio journalist recently asked me: Do you know the American composer Morton Feldman personally? Me:  No, he died over 20 year ago. BNR: And you never met him before he died? Me: You mean ‘v mladezhkite si godini'? (as a youngster?) No, I never came into contact with him.

And so this line of questioning ended.  I guess I could have spun a little yarn about the last time me and Morty met up in New York City, at that café he and Cage and the gang used to hang out at, how when he left Morty said, “Give my regards to Eighth Street” and later that became the title of a book of Feldman’s selected (or was it collected?) writings – at my suggestion. Morty and me – good times!

But let's return to history as it may have actually happened.  In his phenomenal book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Ross begins an insightful profile of Morton Feldman – who would have been 85 today – with the first meeting of two of the great musical minds of the last century, based on their own accounts:

It was after a New York Philharmonic performance of Anton Webern’s Symphony, on January 26, 1950, that John Cage met a six-foot-tall, nearly 300-hundred-pound Jewish guy named Morton Feldman… When their paths crossed by the door [of Carnegie Hall], Feldman turned to Cage and asked, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” A lifelong friendship began.

Morton Feldman (1926-1989) and John Cage (1912-1992)

Taking his cue from Webern, Feldman’s music finds “a world of meaning in a rigorously limited smattering of notes,” and “slow[s] the pace of events in the Viennese universe” to reveal “the expressive power of the space around the notes. The sounds animate the surrounding silence.” (Ross 2007, p. 527-9)  Another major influence on Feldman were the New York Abstract Expressionist painters such as Rauschenberg, Newman and Rothko, whose work led Feldman toward composing music that, in his words, was “more direct, more immediate, physical than anything that had existed before.” (Quoted in Ross 2007, p. 529)

Listen here to the first part of Feldman’s Rothko Chapel of 1971. The title of this work refers to the nondenominational place of worship in Houston that opened the same year. Now celebrating its fortieth anniversary, the Chapel is described by its website as a “tranquil meditative environment inspired by the mural canvases of Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), [welcoming] thousands of visitors each year, people of every faith and from all parts of the world." 

 Interior of Rothko Chapel

In Bulgaria, as composer Lazar Nikolov once told me, Feldman is famous as “that American composer who uses 'mnogo tihi dinamiki' (very soft dynamics).” The sustained transparency of Feldman's delicate textures and the absence of agitation or "action" in his large-scale musical canvasses sets his music apart from that of any other composer of his time. The "imperturbable separateness" of Feldman finds a distant analogy in the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose later symphonies Feldman deeply admired. (Ross p 531) Hear the opening of Sibelius's Symphony No. 5, one of Morty's personal favs, here.