Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.
Morton FeldmanWhat was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.
Morton FeldmanFor me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me
Morton FeldmanI was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!
Morton FeldmanIt appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.
Morton Feldman