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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in the 1950s
2. “Élan vital … and how to fake it”
Intermission: The Necessary Other
3. The Elegiac Science
4. “We broke up because of style”
Conclusion: Friendship’s Silence
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the author
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.
Summary
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.
Foreword
This book brings to light a wide range of unpublished archival materials on Feldman and his community, and relates his life and work to the collaboration and conflict in the history of the U.S. avant-garde.
Additional text
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.
