Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) was an American composer associated with the New York School alongside John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. A close friend of the abstract expressionist painters — particularly Mark Rothko and Philip Guston — Feldman developed a compositional language centred on extreme quietness, unusual timbres, and temporal suspension, seeking in music an analogue to the surface and silence of painting. His late works, produced from the 1970s until his death, are among the most radically extended in the contemporary classical canon — pieces lasting hours, built from repeating cells that drift in and out of resemblance. He taught for many years at SUNY Buffalo.