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collection of Feldman’s writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews, and unpublished writings in the Morton Feldman Archive at SUNY Buffalo (where Feldman taught for many years).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: #156757 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-02
• Released on: 2004-03-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Composer Morton Feldman (1926-87) was a crucial figure in the post-war New York art world, using elements of chance composition to construct exquisite, quietly powerful scores that produce wonderfully varied interpretations. In Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, Feldman reflects on his own work and ideas, as well as on those of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara, John Cage and many others. If "Silence is my substitute for counterpoint," these occasional articulations give us a way into it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
About Morton Feldman:

"Like the artists involved in the new American painting, he was pursuing a personal search for expression which could not be limited by any system… His music sets in motion a spiritual life which is rare in any period and especially so in ours."
— Frank O’Hara

"He talked wonderfully, sharply, outrageously, but that wasn’t quite his music. One thinks of the disparity of his large, strong presence and the delicate, hypersoft music, but in fact he too was, among other things, full of tenderness and the music is, among other things, as tough as nails."
— Christian Wolff

"There are people who say, ‘If music’s that easy to write, I could do it.’ Of course they could, but they don’t. I find Feldman’s own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, ‘Now that things are so simple, there’s so much to do.’ And then he went back to sleep."
— John Cage

"He was extremely nearsighted and wrote his music as if touching the notes with his eyes. Whenever I hear his music I think of its tactile quality, of his eyes ‘hearing’ the sounds."
— Toru Takemitsu

About the Author
B.H. Friedman (b. 1926) is a novelist, dramatist, and art critic who was first introduced to Morton Feldman by their mutual friend Jackson Pollock. He is the author of Jackson Pollock: Energy made Visible (McGraw-Hill, 1972; revised edition Da Capo Press, 1995), and the monographs Franz Kline (Fundació Antonio Tàpies, 1994) and Lee Krasner (Abrams, 1999), in adddition to numerous novels and plays.

Customer Reviews

The Ever-Lasting Yes
Morton Feldman's essays and liner notes are every bit as challenging as his music. In fact, I would like to turn one of Morty's quotable lines on its ear and say that "Feldman couldn't write a note unless it was literary." Of course, I'm inserting Feldman's name for the orginal Ives (see page 165 of this book), but I have to say that this composer provides in these pages the "narrative dark matter and coherent strange attractors" for his--in the main--disjunctive sounds. With this book Feldman positions himself in the same great tradition of writer-musicians as Berlioz, while all the while disparaging that very tradition! In fact, I would say that of all the recent experimentalists--Cage included--Feldman had to have been the most literary.

What a fine mind, and what a great loss to have only one side of Feldman's legendary conversational powers in this book, but, until everyone in the world has sense enough to stop what they're doing and applaud Morton Feldman's brilliance and the END of TIME COMES and Feldman himself descends from on high seated on a golden bar stool, ready to take on all comers, they will have to be content with this written fossil. And of course the music...but that's another story.

This book includes an appreciation of Morty and his work by Frank O'Hara, another person I wish I'd met.

Essential reading for Feldman fans
This book, collecting all of Morton Feldman's published writings--along with four miscellaneous pieces--is an expanded version of a book originally published in a bilingual German/English edition in 1985, edited by Walter Zimmermann. To the original book, the editor, B. H. Friedman has added his own introduction, a postface by the poet Frank O'Hara, a late friend of Feldman's, and various other writings not collected in the original book.

There is much to enjoy here, from Feldman's reminiscences of his New York School colleagues, his admiration for Varese, his not uncritical appreciation of Webern and Stockhausen and his dislike for Boulez and Schoenberg. Equally, there is much interesting material on the visual arts as well: Feldman's passions for Mondrian, Pollock, Guston and Rothko are intimately related to his music and this book illuminates this strongly. Feldman's understanding of the need for a specifically US artistic and musical tradition--and how this tradition came about--is particularly illuminating, as is his writing about his colleague and friend John Cage.

Feldman's writing style is clear and conversational--if it occasionally lacks in depth this is a minor sin in comparison to the wilfully obfuscatory writings of the young Boulez, for example. Because of its own nature as a collection of unrelated pieces, this book tends to contain a little too much repetition and some very slight pieces (often notes from recordings or performances). I would have liked a little more writing on Feldman's own music--the rare occasions where he explains his techniques are highly interesting--but even with these flaws anyone interested in Feldman's music or the New York School in general will find this book very interesting.

a primary document of the American avant-garde
" The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew- a very great painter-and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper,' That son of a b---he did it'. . . . With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away from it." Feldman was very much part of that era, the Fifties when American art was becoming the most important post-war art there was its unique expressions. Sure Europeans tried to copy us but only became more academic about as Boulez and his excursions into chance/aleatoric gesturing. This collection of essays very clearly reveals how important American expeimentalism was to music. Feldman's forever endeavor to merely create, create at a high intensity working like a Dutch diamond cutter,or lens grinder,toying with creative means as his use of indelible ink, this he said makes you think about what your writing than how you are writing, puts the creative process back into the head.Or composing at the piano, which slows you down so you need to think more. He followed the intellectual currents, anything that brought a sense of richness and other dimension to his art, he knew for instance Henri Bergson's concept of memory and time,how that might affect his music,and painterly means was second nature to him hanging out at the Cedar Bar in New York talking for hours on Light,texture,perception,shape,design,concept, facility,gesture,timbre,tone,chiarscuro, there is ample historical data here as well, almost like a subtext of these ,like an unwritten history of the avant-garde, a "Conversation with Stravinsky"(not really),his first meeting with John Cage(after a performance of Webern), Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, also his travels to Berlin, and England and experiencing the avant-garde through Cornelius Cardew, and British experimentalism.His last years was devoted to long durational compositions, and he merely said he had more time to compose in these years,but Feldman here is filled with marvelous quotes,things,items,shapes for the mind"I knew I was going to be a professional the day I first became practical.Practicality took the form of copying out my music neatly,keeping my desk tidy and organized-all the unimportant things that seem unrelated to the work,yet somehow do affect it.". He also knows how to look from greater heights from mountains, tothe substance of modernity, those who stopped creating and became more interested in themselves as Stockhausen were "Modernists"; for Feldman allowing your materials,the shape,structures of your music tell you the secrets of creativity was most important and became a cause.