Book review: Give my Regards to Eight Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman
Give my Regards to Eight Street is a collection of writing of the American composer Morton Feldman. I have always been interested in Feldman’s music and to find this book was a good way to find out a bit more about his way of thinking. Feldman is a composer who uses very subtle changes over long periods of time and creates a sonic world in which you enter. You can hear a sound and explore it from different perspectives, but never can see the whole thing from a vantage point.
Feldman was not somebody who gave much away about his compositional thinking and in this book he makes clear why that is. There are two major strands in this book: The first one talks about the rationalisation of twentieth-century music while the second one talks about his relationships with other artists (most notably painters).

Rationalisation
Twentieth-Century composition has been characterised by a proliferation of systems-creation_ the composer develops a system and derives musical material from that system. Dodecaphonic music is a prime example with composers like Boulez and Babbit as the main proponents of this systematisation. Inventive as the systems might be, Feldman considers them to be academic. It distances the composer from the sound and it kills the music. One could say that the composer outsources his creativity to an external system. Instead, Feldman writes and decides intuitively about the progress of his composition: he will let his inner-self tell him wether to repeat a motive five or six times, not through a (mathematical) process. This is the central line in his thinking: the rejection of the primacy of a process in composition.
Feldman criticizes Cage, who says that everything is music but at the same time Boulez, who says that he needs to know all the rules before stepping of the carpet. He is pragmatic though: he respects the other composers and their way of thinking but is not afraid to follow his own line.
Relation to other artists
In the artistic hotbed the New York was and still is, Feldman came in contact with many other artists. John Cage seems to be a central figure who introduced him to many other artists and brought people together. Feldman got most of his inspiration from painters such as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, among many others, and demonstrates how their work influences his music. His fascination with ancient rugs is interesting as he explains how the imperfection is what makes them interesting.
Evaluation
This book gives a good insight in Feldman’s thinking and his compositions. Never a man of systems, he has not written in a systematic way about his compositions like Schoenberg or Xenakis did. Through this collection of writing, one can get started to understanding his thinking.
This will cater probably most to people who were already into Feldman, however, I think that it is worth for people who do not particularly like his music. You will not read a systematic explanation of his composition but an insight in his philosophy, which can be inspiring. I think it is worth to buy and a good addition to one’s library.
You can get the book on Amazon UK and Amazon USA.
