Morton Feldman (1926-87) was born in New York City and began studying piano at the age of 12. He studied composition and counterpoint with Wallingford Reggel at 15 and at 18 studied briefly with Stefan Wolpe. At 24 he met John Cage, a meeting which began an artistic association of crucial importance to Feldman:
"I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it for a long time and then said, 'How did you make this?...' In a very weak voice I answered John, 'I don't know how I made it.' The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, 'Isn't that marvelous. Isn't that wonderful. It's so beautiful, and he does't know how he made it.' Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts."
Thus began Feldman's association with a wide range of contemporary artists experiment within and across disciplines - composers Earle Browne, Christian Wolff and David Tudor, painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and multi-disciplinary artist Robert Rauschenberg. Over the course of his career he wrote music for a wide variety of media - orchestra, chorus and solo voices with or without instrumentation, and ensembles and solo instruments. He composed pieces for ballet and film. He became known for his mystical, spare, graphically notated and indeterminate pieces that focused on sound rather than form.
In the 1970s, Feldman began to write fully determined pieces of very long duration. In these works he kept his patterns of chords, notes, motives or sounds carefully arranged so that their repetitions would not be recognized as repetitions, their patterns not discernible, the memory disoriented, so that the sounds themselves might always seem new and compelling. The String Quartet II, completed in 1983, is the longest of Feldman's works. The Kronos Quartet is the only ensemble to perform it (the premiere in Toronto, and subsequently in London, Miami, and Darmstadt). There are no plans at this time to record it.
"My compositions more often than not are really not 'compositions' at all. One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less prime the canvas with an over all hue of music."