DOC Museums and Public Value: Creating Sustainable Futures by From Ashgate in Arts-Photography

Description

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music; with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time; much about his music remains enigmatic; largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices.In Composing Ambiguity; Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldmans musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources; including Feldmans musical sketches; he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame; allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this; Feldmans work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field; and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in crystalline forms.Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s; Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method; despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Not only are there direct relations to be found between staff-notated works and grid scores; but much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.