Morton Feldman

(born New York City, 1926; died Buffalo, New York, 1987) American composer who studied with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. He met John Cage in 1949, a turning point that inspired Feldman to experiment with indeterminacy in composition. Influenced by the painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston, who encouraged him to find a personal, gestural sound world, Feldman devised a form of graph-paper notation that specified only the instrumentation, register, and time structure. After 1953, Feldman abandoned graph-paper notation, and, in the early 1960s, developed a type of "duration free" notation that specifies pitch, but leaves the length of each note to the performer's discretion. From the 1970s Feldman worked exclusively with precise, conventional notation. Feldman held the position of Edgard Varèse Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Buffalo until his death.

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