""...We met in 1950, through John Cage, when I was sixteen and he in his early twenties. We were all doing work that was clearly different, newly different - from one another, but joined by our delight in each other's work (and by John Cage's organizing the concerts of it and a few musicians, David Tudor centrally, playing it), and by its difference from any other we knew. I still find mysterious his way of putting the music together, or rather of erasing any traces of a sense of its having been put together: it's just there. How does he do it? He's the only composer I know whose work seems made in a way that cannot be accounted for, explained, by any other means than the impossible one of becoming that composer oneself. 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, Composer and Pianist"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Written in 1987 at the request of Gisela Gronemeyer and Reinhard Oehlschlägel, first published in German in MusikTexte 22, Köln, December 1987. [Cues, pp364-368]
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Morton_Feldman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (12 January 1926 – 3 September 1987) was an American composer.
15 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Morton Feldman →
Related Quotes
"Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon."
"Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to …"
"The composer makes plans, music laughs."
"After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles."
"It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-…"
"...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection."
"To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?"
"To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a h…"
"For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart."
"My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a p…"