The Late Music of Morton Feldman

From the University of Pittsburgh, a Feldman Symposium:

The late music of Morton Feldman: A symposium

November 4, 2011
Presented by Pitt’s Department of Music and its contemporary chamber music series, Music on the Edge
Funded by the Arts and Sciences Faculty Research and Scholarship Program.
Organized by Amy Williams, Assistant Professor of Composition/Theory

The works of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) occupy a central place in the American experimental tradition, not just within the music world. Feldman was very often inspired by non-musical sources, including Persian rugs, abstract expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, and texts of Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara. Kyle Gann remarked that, “in the current Babel of musical styles, Feldman is almost the only composer whose music appeals across stylistic boundaries, among minimalists, postserialists, 12-tone holdouts, electronic composers, academics, Downtowners, MAX programmers, DJ artists, and other miscellaneous wastrels.” Why does this music have such a broad appeal? This is one of the questions that will be explored during the one-day symposium on Feldman’s late music. The first session will include scholars whose research places Feldman within a larger historical context. The second session will call upon performers and composers who worked intimately with Feldman in the 1970s and 1980s. The symposium will be framed by two concerts presenting two late chamber pieces, Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Crippled Symmetry.

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