Reporter Volume 25, No.20 March 10, 1994

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
The UB Department of Music and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will
present "For Morty," a celebration of the life and work of the late
American composer Morton Feldman, March 15 and 16 on UB's North
Campus. 
All related events except the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra concert
on March 16 are free of charge and open to the public.
Feldman was a member of the UB music faculty for 16 years and at the
time of his death in 1987, was one of the senior and most respected
figures in American music. He was the leading member of the generation
of experimental postmodernist composers profoundly influenced by John
Cage and the non-Western aesthetics he espoused. 
Feldman's own influence continues to reverberate throughout the
generation of composers that followed him, and in the last few years
has enjoyed a great rebirth of interest among recording artists,
performers and critics here and abroad, as evidenced by the great many
recordings of Feldman works that have appeared since 1990.
At the time of his death Feldman held the Edgar Varse Chair in the
Department of Music, an appropriate post for a composer whose only
obvious stylistic models were Cage, Webern and Varse, one of the
greatest composers of the 20th century.
"For Morty" is comprised of several events, including a Tuesday, March
15 performance of Feldman's chamber work, Crippled Symmetry by Nils
Vigeland, Jan Williams and Eberhard Blum, the three performers for
whom it was written. It will take place at 8 p.m. in the atrium of the
Fine Arts Center.
Earlier that day the three performers will participate in a public
discussion of Feldman's work and aesthetic sensibilities with
composers David Felder, associate professor and Birge Cary Chair in
music at U, and Jeffrey Stadelman, associate professor of music. They
call this event an "encounter" with the composer. The discussion will
take place at 4 p.m. in 250 Baird Hall.
 The next day, March 16, the Buffalo Philharmonic will hold two open
rehearsals of their evening performance in Slee Concert Hall. The
rehearsals, from 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:45 -3:45 p.m., will give the
public an opportunity to see and hear the orchestra acclimate itself
to Feldman's idiosyncratic minimalist style and to the works of Varse
and UB associate professor David Felder that are also on that
evening's program.
	At 8 p.m. that night, the BPO will present a concert featuring
three works. They are Turfan Fragments by Feldman; Octandre by Varse
and Six Poems from Neruda's "AlturasS by Felder, who worked with
Feldman at UB and went on to become a composer of international
reputation. The concert will be preceded by a panel discussion of
Feldman's work at 7 p.m. with Blum, Vigeland, Williams, Stadelman and
Felder. Tickets are $10, $5 and $4.
During his years at UB, Feldman served for three years as music
director of the UB Center on the Creative and Performing Arts, a
complex, radical and ambitious program in support of composers and
performers of new music. He also founded the North American New Music
Festival, one of the first festivals of new music on the continent and
still held annually at UB.
Along with composers Christian Wolff, David Tudor and Earle Brown, he
was associated with the abstract expressionist painters of the 50s.
For Feldman in particular, the visual arts were a pre-eminent
influence on his music throughout his life. 
In the 1950s he began composing pieces immediately recognizable by
their extreme pointilistic scoring, austere timbres and subdued
dynamic range. One critic noted "a near absence of pulse" in his music
"and a fastidious ear for instrumental colour."
 At the same time he became known for inventing new means of notations
that gave certain freedoms in performance and in the articulation of
musical ideas. Beginning with graph notation in the early 50s, these
ideas developed eventually into a hybrid technique combining elements
of conventional and graphic models.
Among his best known works are the Viola in My Life Series (1970-71)
and Rothko Chapel (1971), works referred critically as having "gently
lapping modal lines and an approach to instrumental textures that seem
to apply the colour-field aesthetic of painters such as Rothko to
musical structures, suffusing a parcel of time with a generalized wash
of colour." Other compositions, like his final work, For Samuel
Beckett, connects Feldman to the minimalist language of the great
Irish writer. 
K. Robert Schwarz of the Institute for Studies in American Music,
Brooklyn College, calls Feldman "a composer who consistently avoided
the rut of technique, shunned analytical discussion and put his faith
in intuition (and) was concerned primarily with sound itself, with
timbre and texture and with its antithesis, silence."
Turfan Fragments, which will be performed during the BPO concert on
March 16, is such an "intuitive work," scored for an orchestra that is
small and conventional, except for an absence of upper strings.
Typical of Feldman's music is its short tempo, almost inaudible
dynamic and use of repetition. Schwarze describes Turfan Fragments as
having "no glitzy percussion instruments and little interest in
coloristic effect."
David Felder says that from Morton Feldman he learned "reverence for
the moment, the importance of the sonic "image" at any given
instantQthe right thing at the right time." This program was developed
by Felder in his role as composer-in-residence with the BPO, the
Greater Buffalo Opera and WBFO, UB's National Public Radio affiliate.