Morton Feldman Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn't going well… He asked me to come to his studio — which I did — I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, 'What's wrong?' And I said, 'Simple – it's a loss of nerve.

Morton Feldman
I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

Morton Feldman
Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

Morton Feldman
To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

Morton Feldman
Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?

Morton Feldman
For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

Morton Feldman
It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed.... To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition... Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves—not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

Morton Feldman
After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

Morton Feldman
Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

Morton Feldman
... The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

Morton Feldman
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 proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.... He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment... Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.

Morton Feldman
Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

Morton Feldman
Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us.

Morton Feldman
Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.

Morton Feldman
Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries.

Morton Feldman
To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe … not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it … except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life … if you're into it.

Morton Feldman
I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country

Morton Feldman