My research concerns modernist, avant-garde, and experimental music and art in the U.S. since World War II. I have a special interest in two groups of musicians and visual artists, those of the New York School (and particularly Morton Feldman) and those associated with the development of minimalism. Supported by grants, I have worked with composers’ manuscripts at several major archives, including the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel) and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). An advocate of interdisciplinary scholarship, I have held research affiliations with Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow) and with the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (as a graduate fellow).
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Articles
“It should sound like Schubert,” said Morton Feldman of his own music during a rehearsal with the Kronos Quartet. In this article, his surprising remark serves as the basis for intertwined analyses of Feldman’s relationship to musical performance and to the musical past. A comparison of his late piece Piano and String Quartet and Schubert’s late Notturno for piano trio reveals one possible explanation of what it meant, for Feldman, to “sound like Schubert,” and it shows the importance of performers such as the Kronos Quartet—to whom Feldman’s piece is dedicated—in calling forth that sonic likeness.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07494467.2026.2629042
Morton Feldman’s Only is a single-page piece by a composer notorious for the length of his late-career works, a diatonic piece by a composer whose musical vocabulary was predominately non-tonal, and an “openly poignant” piece—to quote the vocalist Joan La Barbara—by a composer who typically preferred his poignance cloaked in abstraction. Written in 1947, while Feldman was a student of Stefan Wolpe, the work received its premiere only in 1962; when it was finally published in 1976, the score bore no indication of the piece’s date of composition. This essay explores the tangled history of Only, linking the piece to important dates in Feldman’s personal and professional life while offering circumstantial evidence that it held special value to him. The essay proposes that his encounters with Only across three decades were motivated by his reflection on the passage of time and coincided with moments in his life when old relationships were strained or severed.
Wishing to unmask the folly of the avant-garde, the BBC critic Hans Keller in 1961 broadcast the performance of a work he created with his own hands but presented to the public as the product of a fictional composer named Piotr Zak. In a follow-up roundtable program with music critics, he adamantly denied the piece the ontological status of “musical work” and criticized listeners who could not discern real music from what he viewed as its counterfeit twin. Unbeknownst to Keller, his reactionary stunt traced the inverted contours of an earlier and more famous one in the history of the avant-garde, when Marcel Duchamp, acting under the alias R. Mutt, submitted an object not of his own making—a commercially produced urinal—to an art exhibition, provoking dialogue on the role of intention and authorship in the classification of art. This essay revisits what Keller termed “the strange case of Piotr Zak,” drawing upon the unpublished transcript of the BBC’s roundtable program and examining the ruse in the historical context of the postwar avant-garde. Central to that movement was the composer John Cage, heir to Duchamp’s artistic legacy, whose influential essay collection Silence was published the same year in which Keller perpetrated the Zak hoax.
Despite the relative scarcity of documentation concerning his life and work, Terry Jennings (1940–1981) was an important voice in the earliest period of the minimalist movement on both American coasts. His musical collaborators or associates included Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, John Cale, Harold Budd, Peter Garland, Charlemagne Palestine, Richard Teitelbaum, and David Mahler, among others. As both a performing musician and a composer from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, he worked alongside colleagues to fuse elements of New York School experimentalism, modal jazz, serialism, and non-Western music into improvisational and compositional practices now associated with minimalism and postminimalism. This article surveys his output chronologically, tracking the emergence of several of those practices as they spread within communities of musicians: the exploration of sustained tones and modular repetition as the basis of musical style, the pursuit of an aesthetic of radical reduction, the embrace of modal pitch collections, and the merging of improvisation and composition.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.32.1.0082
Morton Feldman’s well-known attraction to visual art is difficult to disentangle from another stimulus to his creative thought during the first two decades of his career: his obsession with musical time and struggle to represent it through the visual medium of notation. Inclined to frame compositional questions in terms drawn from painting, he was forced to reconcile the inherent temporality of his own art form with the inherent spatiality of another, often looking toward notation for answers. This essay explores the notational strategies Feldman cultivated between 1950 and 1970 in light of his evolving esthetics of musical time, taking into account the significance of his uniquely performative conception of the creative act, his fascination with the relationship of sound and sight, and his conviction that notation serves as a key determinant of musical style.
“Feldman, Morton” (revision of article by Steven Johnson). In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Garrett, Vol. 3, pp. 252–56. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.09435.
“Frog Peak Music.” In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Garrett, Vol. 3, p. 392. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2282935.
“Holland, Bernard.” In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Garrett, Vol. 4, p. 216. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2283228.
“Sandow, Greg.” In The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Garrett, Vol. 7, p. 326. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2289360.
In the winter of 1950–51, Morton Feldman composed a series of pieces titled Projections in a new notation of his own invention. The first-known graphically scored works of the postwar era, the Projections were immediately championed by Feldman’s friend John Cage in the language of his budding philosophy of non-intention, a framework of thought largely alien to Feldman. In later years, Feldman instead explained the Projections through the discourse of abstract- expressionist painting, substituting its model of willful creative action for Cage’s Zen-inspired doctrine of aesthetic indifference. Yet the story behind his graphic notation is more tangled still, for its sources included both Edgard Varèse and Stefan Wolpe, composers whose spatialized vision of sound influenced Feldman’s new conception of the creative act. An examination of the origin and reception of the Projections offers insight into the forces that catalyzed experimental notation in postwar New York and the rationales that were ultimately ascribed to it.
False Relationships and the Extended Ending (1968) is one of several works composed by Morton Feldman between 1958 and 1978 in which individual voices or subsets of an ensemble are intended to remain either partially or wholly uncoordinated with one another in performance. A close examination of the work’s preparatory materials, housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel), reveals moments of strategic alignment among the uncoordinated voices, lending support to the argument that Feldman wished for the performers of such pieces to remain in rough proximity to one another as the music unfolded, not to become separated by long spans of time.
Conference Presentations
- “Negation and Ambivalence in the Music of Morton Feldman.” Music Biennale Zagreb (“Broken Relationships”), Zagreb, Croatia, 2025.
- “Keller’s Zak, Duchamp’s Mutt, and the Art of the Ruse.” American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Rochester, 2017.
- “Counterfeit Music.” Ninth Biennial International Conference on Music Since 1900, Glasgow, 2015.
- “Stylistic convergence in early West Coast minimalism, 1958–60.” Society for American Music, Lancaster, 2014.
- “Terry Jennings at the margins.” Third International Conference on Music and Minimalism, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2011; LSU Music Forum 2012.
- “Morton Feldman’s Projections: origins, development, and spin.” AMS National Meeting, San Francisco, 2011; AMS Southern Chapter, Thibodaux, LA, 2011; LSU Music Forum 2010.
- “The look of sound: modernist musical discourse and the non-pictorial image.” Modernist Studies Association 11th Annual Conference, Montréal, 2009.
- “Feldman, Guston, and the emergence of the figure.” American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Nashville, 2008.