Top 13 Morton Feldman Quotes

If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

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.

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