The Brooklyn Rail

In his life as a composer, Morton Feldman was known for many things: musical expressions of great length and delicacy, moving beyond traditional forms of notation, incorporating unusual instrumentation and chance into his work. But he was also known, and became emblematic of his era—New York City from the fifties through the seventies especially—for the range and importance of his friendships. Feldman counted among his circle a number of key figures in the New York School, including poet Frank O’Hara, composer John Cage, painter Philip Guston, and a long list of others.

Friendship is a defining factor in any artistic circle, but it carried a special resonance with this group. In a sense, all were pursuing a similar project: to map out new forms of artistic inquiry, ones that crossed over, co-mingled, and helped to rewire the aesthetics of the era. But it was the friendships themselves that mattered just as much, with each member pushing the other, providing support and (usually) friendly competition. This was especially useful in pursuing work that had no substantial audience at the time. Many have remarked on how contained the avant-garde was in those days, amounting to some small, overlapping peer groups. Without the prospect of great financial success, they could focus on their aesthetic goals, and sustain each other—at least emotionally—in the process.

The uncertainty of exactly what they were seeking was another bonding agent. Feldman famously remarked that “what was great about the fifties is that, for one brief moment—maybe, say six weeks—nobody understood art.” That loss of definition represented a great opportunity for these artists to remake the world around them. It was their faith in each other, their encouragement to make these leaps into the unknown, that propelled the group forward.

Feldman and Cage met by chance in the Carnegie Hall lobby in 1950 at a concert by the New York Philharmonic. They had heard a piece by Anton Webern that, with its use of atonality, alienated the audience. Rather than return for a work by Rachmaninoff in the second half, they left together. In a sense, their relationship was rooted in rejection, of the audience to the piece, and of these young composers to the audience. Feldman is described, in the program notes to a performance by Ensemble Musikfabrik of his profound and beautiful Last Pieces (1959), as “rejecting the most basic tenets of conventional musical discourse.” Yet in this rejection is an extraordinary act of acceptance, of the new relationships to harmony and to time, to music itself, that Feldman and Cage went on to explore.

As with Pound to Eliot, Cage was “il miglior fabro” (the greater poet) to the considerably younger Feldman. He encouraged Feldman to push past existing boundaries of composition, incorporating chance and indeterminacy into his work. Feldman came to exult in those freedoms, but he applied them in a different fashion and toward different ends. Whereas Cage took a Zen-oriented philosophical approach in devising systems to remove personal intention from his music, Feldman created works that continued to bear the mark of expression shown by great earlier European composers such as Webern and Edgard Varèse. He took Cage’s idea of chance and turned it into indeterminacy, in the hands of both composer and performer. His early brief, and later extended, through-composed, works embrace the amorphous nature of chance while retaining a certain elegant gravity.

From these early days, Feldman drew on the ideas and friendship of fellow composers to develop his work. But he was equally well-acquainted with a number of painters and writers. In fact, Cage brought Feldman to gallery shows downtown by the Abstract Expressionists, and introduced him to a number of artists. In time, they became not only his good friends, but major influence on his work. In an interview, Feldman said, “The degrees of stasis found in a Rothko or Guston were perhaps the most significant elements I brought to my music from painting.” It makes sense that the way these artists used space—as a sacred arena for the creation of meaning—would serve as a model for his compositions; all avoided the tendency toward racing movement in the service of a different kind of sublime. It takes artistic courage to slow the rush of creation, to bend time and space toward stillness. The support and inspiration of these close friends from different arenas helped Feldman see possibilities for his art. In the process, he was able to compose music so prescient that, as one commentator noted, “it could have been written next Wednesday.”

The crossover among different types of artists within the New York School was substantial; O’Hara, for instance, worked a day job as an administrator and sometimes curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and interacted and collaborated with painters regularly. But it may have reached its apogee when, in 1969, Feldman was appointed the Dean of the recently founded New York Studio School on Eighth Street. How did a composer wind up leading an influential art school that counted among its faculty artists Alex Katz and Esteban Vicente and art historians Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg? Some have speculated that it was because of an affair Feldman was having with the founder of the school, Mercedes Matter. But the appointment stuck at least for a few years, in part because of Feldman’s friendship with so many of the artists who formed the faculty there. His lectures at the school were acclaimed and his general brilliance broadly recognized, but his large circle of influential artist friends also played a key role.

Yet despite all the love and mutual regard among the members of this group, discord regularly arose. Feldman and Guston, who had been the best of friends, had a serious falling out (they later reconciled), and others pursued different directions, away from that centrifuge of invention. The inevitability of this kind of rupture is suggested in the charming poem by Kenneth Koch, himself an important member of the group and collaborator with painters Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher, which begins:

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

Feldman ended up leaving New York and his fragmenting social circle in 1972, and taking a professorship at the University of Buffalo that he held until his death in 1987. He maintained contact with many of his artist friends, though, and paid homage to them in several of his later works. Feldman recognized the importance of his friendships in forming and refining his artistic outlook, and he developed a new circle, with himself as the senior figure, in his years upstate.

A hard fact that is learned with experience is that relationships don’t always last. They may shift suddenly and dramatically or more imperceptibly over time. But that doesn’t diminish their importance in sustaining us. For an artist and naturally social person like Feldman, friendship was a defining feature of his life. Its sustenance can be sensed in the passionate nature of his work. Whatever formal strictures the composer challenged in his art, he remained woven into a network of friends that informed his music with an essential humanity.