Alex Ross: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is Morton Feldman the greatest postwar American composer? He’s one of them. I love Feldman’s music. And Feldman did something really remarkable, where he took this modernist vocabulary, the vocabulary of Schoenberg, the second Viennese School atonality, and then John Cage, the student of Schoenberg, brought that vocabulary into the world of . . . He sort of created the postwar American avant-garde movement. And Feldman was a figure, of course, a very important pioneer himself, alongside Cage, but it goes back to these unearthly, otherworldly, atonal chords of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. That’s the fundamental vocabulary of Feldman’s music, but it’s totally different in terms of its emotional temperature. The dynamic level in Feldman is always quiet. Everything is spaced out, and these harmonies that can be prickly and alarming and unnerving in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern and so much other modernist music of the 20th century — in Feldman, they become distant, and they acquire this eerie beauty. It’s as if you can step way back from them and contemplate them as art objects. And they become like . . . Of course, he loved Rothko’s paintings. He knew Rothko very well. He knew so many of these early abstract expressionist painters, but especially with Rothko — it has that misty, distant, unearthly quality, not at all assaultive, not at all aggressive, and it becomes this totally new world of radical beauty. From the moment I first heard his music, he just had an extraordinary effect on me, and I still find him one of the great originals in musical history — extraordinary, extraordinary composer. Who or what would even be a rival to Feldman? So much of Cage now sounds gimmicky, even though it was important. You could say the early Philip Glass operas — like Feldman, they’re recognizable who they’re by the moment you hear them. What else in American music postwar stacks up to early Philip Glass and Morton Feldman?…

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