Morton Feldman was born on 12 January 1926 in Woodside, Queens, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants from Pereiaslav and Bobruysk; his father manufactured children’s coats. He studied piano as a child with Vera Maurina Press, who he said gave him a vibrant musicality rather than musicianship, and composition with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, with whom he mostly just talked about music and art. In early 1950 he walked out of a New York Philharmonic concert, disturbed by the audience’s reaction to Webern’s Symphony, and met John Cage in the lobby doing the same; he moved into Cage’s building, and through him met Richard Lippold, Robert Rauschenberg, Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Frank O’Hara. In 1973, at forty-seven, he became Edgard Varèse Professor of Music Composition at the University at Buffalo, a title he devised himself. He died on 3 September 1987.

With Cage, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown he formed the New York School, and was a central figure in the turn to indeterminacy: he wrote in grids that fixed how many notes should sound at a given moment without saying which, a notation that in turn prompted Cage’s Music of Changes. The sound that resulted — quiet, slow, floating in rhythm, softly unfocused in pitch — stayed constant even after 1970, when he abandoned graphic notation for exact rhythm, beginning with the fifty-five-bar “Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety”, written for his childhood piano teacher. Abstract expressionist painting gave him both subject and scale: Rothko Chapel (1971) and For Frank O’Hara (1973) run about twenty minutes, and the works after 1977 — among them the opera Neither, on a text by Samuel Beckett — push duration to extremes.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Feldman
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q316427