Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman

American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman''s musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman''s musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of sounding pitch in time. Beyond this, Feldman''s work is revealed to be essentially concerned with the 12-tone chromatic field, and with the delineation of complexes of simple proportions in ''crystalline'' forms. Through close reading of several important works from the early 1950s, Noble shows tha