Product Description

"What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment — maybe, say, six weeks — nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened." — Morton Feldman

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.

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collection of Feldman’s writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews, and unpublished writings in the Morton Feldman Archive at SUNY Buffalo (where Feldman taught for many years). Feldman’s writings explore his music and his theories about music, but they also make clear how heavily Feldman was influenced by painting and by his friendships with the Abstract Expressionists. As editor B.H. Friedman notes in his introduction, Feldman’s "writing about art is also of lasting importance."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120041 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Customer Reviews

A lucid insight into Feldman's life and ideas.
An enlightening collection of Feldman's writings, placing the development of his ideas and work within the historical social context of 1950's New York. Relating not only his obvious associations with Cage, Wolff, Tudor and Brown, but also with the Abstract Expressionist school of painters and the great impact that their ideas and methods had upon his own work. Each article is delivered in an idiosyncratic and polemical style in which he bares his amused derision for the post-Schoenberg school of Darmstadt composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen. A fine collection of writings which provide a human angle on abstract ideas.

Essential
Another superb title from Exact Change, an essential book for anyone interested in Feldman's music and composition in general. Most of his major works are discussed in an informal and entertaining manner with numerous and often funny anecdotes and asides. The collection provides interesting insights into Feldman's group of radical composers (Cage, Wolff, Brown etc) and the 'abstract expressionists' and their interaction, as well as Feldman's other painterly influences such as Piero della Francesca and Paul Cezanne. Thought provoking, inspiring and entertaining.