Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

Description

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.

Ryan Dohoney is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, USA. He specializes in experimental music in the US and Europe since World War II.

Dohoney's graceful and affecting meditation on the plexus of Feldman's relationships compellingly surveys Feldman's dedication-and his dedications-to his friends, his love for poetry, painting, and for their makers, and the mourning and melancholy that ultimately tied them together. Feldman's music becomes increasingly concerned, in Dohoney's vivid account, with what survives, what endures, and what can still be heard, even as it ebbs. * Martin Iddon, Professor of Music and Aesthetics, University of Leeds, UK * Ryan Dohoney's book distinctively illuminates and contextualizes Morton Feldman's modernist music. It is an account of Feldman's relationships, in particular, with the poet and art writer Frank O'Hara and the visual artist Philip Guston. Two large themes emerge, friendship and death. This is a new kind of musicology, with much detailed historical research that also finds emotional elements central to understanding the music, an affective account of what Feldman would call his life in art. It puts together the personal and what we have "out there," the music. * Christian Wolff, composer and Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music, Emeritus, Dartmouth College, USA * Ryan Dohoney's fantastic book on Morton Feldman points to a Copernican turn within studies of the social life of the arts: trapped for decades in the domain of theme and anecdote, friendship here emerges instead as the infrastructure or medium it in fact is. Friendship thus does not "contextualize" Feldman's music from the outside, but rather enables and structures it from within, like the charged gaps between his notes. * Lytle Shaw, Professor of English, New York University, USA *