20th Century New Music

PostClassic: January 2008 Archives: "in the 1980s, composers in New York cultivated their niches and avoided stepping on each others' toes. To make a piece that only explored one aspect of music was a logical extension of minimalism, but the variety of types of limitations people came up with reveals that Feldman was often the more profound impetus. Feldman didn't so much inspire minimalism as he inspired postminimalism. Perhaps it was partly a response to the difficulty of creating an artistic identity in the crowded Manhattan scene, but it was partly OK because Feldman had done it.

Stockhausen once told Feldman, 'Your music could be a moment in my music,' but it was Feldman who had the last laugh. His monochrome music relegated Stockhausen's panoramas to an earlier historical era."...

..."One of my favorite stories Feldman liked to tell was of Marcel Duchamp visiting an art class in San Francisco, where he saw a young man wildly painting away. Duchamp went over and asked, 'What are you doing?' The young man said, 'I don't know what the fuck I'm doing!' And Duchamp patted him on the back and said, 'Keep up the good work.' In music, it was Feldman, more than anyone else, who gave us permission not to know what the fuck we were doing."...

..."The difficulty of assessing Morton Feldman's impact is that it is so pervasive. Music has by now been so changed by people who were changed by people who were changed by Feldman that I think it would be difficult to trace the various streams of his influence back to their source. Musically, we live in a post-Feldman age, and I am certainly conscious of being a post-Feldman composer. Things are done now that were not done before Feldman gave us precedents. There is music before and after Monteverdi, and before and after Beethoven, and before and after Stravinsky, and I would not be surprised to find that poeple someday talk about music before and after Feldman."