Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman

Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Morton Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Through close reading of several important works Noble shows that there is a remarkable consistency of compositional method despite the varied experimental notations used by Feldman at this time. Indeed much of the language developed by Feldman in this period was still in use even in his late works of the 1980s.