Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change) [Paperback]

Morton Feldman (Author), B. H. Friedman (Editor), Frank O'Hara (Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2004 | Series: Exact Change

Morton Feldman (1926-1987) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th century. While his music is known for its extreme quiet and delicate beauty, Feldman himself was famously large and loud. His writings are both funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets, and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara, and John Cage. Give My Regards to Eighth Street is an authoritative collection of Feldman's writings, culled from published articles, program notes, LP liners, lectures, interviews, and unpublished writings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Composer Morton Feldman (1926-87) was a crucial figure in the post-war New York art world, using elements of chance composition to construct exquisite, quietly powerful scores that produce wonderfully varied interpretations. In Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, Feldman reflects on his own work and ideas, as well as on those of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O'Hara, John Cage and many others. If "Silence is my substitute for counterpoint," these occasional articulations give us a way into it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

B.H. Friedman (b. 1926) is a novelist, dramatist, and art critic who was first introduced to Morton Feldman by their mutual friend Jackson Pollock. He is the author of Jackson Pollock: Energy made Visible (McGraw-Hill, 1972; revised edition Da Capo Press, 1995), and the monographs Franz Kline (Fundació Antonio Tàpies, 1994) and Lee Krasner (Abrams, 1999), in adddition to numerous novels and plays.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Exact Change (March 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878972316
• ISBN-13: 978-1878972316
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ever-Lasting Yes, January 30, 2005

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M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change) (Paperback)

Morton Feldman's essays and liner notes are every bit as challenging as his music. In fact, I would like to turn one of Morty's quotable lines on its ear and say that "Feldman couldn't write a note unless it was literary." Of course, I'm inserting Feldman's name for the orginal Ives (see page 165 of this book), but I have to say that this composer provides in these pages the "narrative dark matter and coherent strange attractors" for his--in the main--disjunctive sounds. With this book Feldman positions himself in the same great tradition of writer-musicians as Berlioz, while all the while disparaging that very tradition! In fact, I would say that of all the recent experimentalists--Cage included--Feldman had to have been the most literary.

What a fine mind, and what a great loss to have only one side of Feldman's legendary conversational powers in this book, but, until everyone in the world has sense enough to stop what they're doing and applaud Morton Feldman's brilliance and the END of TIME COMES and Feldman himself descends from on high seated on a golden bar stool, ready to take on all comers, they will have to be content with this written fossil. And of course the music...but that's another story.

This book includes an appreciation of Morty and his work by Frank O'Hara, another person I wish I'd met.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wondering if there's more, May 1, 2008

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John Smithy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change) (Paperback)

If there's one book on the mystery that is Morton Feldman, it's "Give My Regards", it's in his own words, for starters. In it he covers his fascination and love of painting, particularly shedding light on his relationship with Philip Guston, and giving pretty expansive coverage of his early years as a composer in the 1950s.

Along with his views on art, he gives insight into his musical philosophy, some places echoing what his colleague and friend John Cage would say. Feldman even gives sharp musical criticism about Cage, while at the same time, extolling their friendship, and writing about him in the most flattering light.

Aside from his relationship with Cage, Feldman covers Stockhausen and Boulez quite a lot, paying particular attention to Boulez's philosophy, as he humorously tears it apart. While not compiled by Feldman himself (complied by his widow and released in 2000) it gives a great look into Feldman, the composer, writer, and art critic. The book is even interspersed with various liner notes he wrote from his numerous recordings, and programs. At twelve dollars, I strongly recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn about Morton Feldman.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a primary document of the American avant-garde, February 23, 2001

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scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change) (Paperback)

" The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew- a very great painter-and told him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper,' That son of a b---he did it'. . . . With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era and walked away from it." Feldman was very much part of that era, the Fifties when American art was becoming the most important post-war art there was its unique expressions. Sure Europeans tried to copy us but only became more academic about as Boulez and his excursions into chance/aleatoric gesturing. This collection of essays very clearly reveals how important American expeimentalism was to music. Feldman's forever endeavor to merely create, create at a high intensity working like a Dutch diamond cutter,or lens grinder,toying with creative means as his use of indelible ink, this he said makes you think about what your writing than how you are writing, puts the creative process back into the head.Or composing at the piano, which slows you down so you need to think more. He followed the intellectual currents, anything that brought a sense of richness and other dimension to his art, he knew for instance Henri Bergson's concept of memory and time,how that might affect his music,and painterly means was second nature to him hanging out at the Cedar Bar in New York talking for hours on Light,texture,perception,shape,design,concept, facility,gesture,timbre,tone,chiarscuro, there is ample historical data here as well, almost like a subtext of these ,like an unwritten history of the avant-garde, a "Conversation with Stravinsky"(not really),his first meeting with John Cage(after a performance of Webern), Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, also his travels to Berlin, and England and experiencing the avant-garde through Cornelius Cardew, and British experimentalism.His last years was devoted to long durational compositions, and he merely said he had more time to compose in these years,but Feldman here is filled with marvelous quotes,things,items,shapes for the mind"I knew I was going to be a professional the day I first became practical.Practicality took the form of copying out my music neatly,keeping my desk tidy and organized-all the unimportant things that seem unrelated to the work,yet somehow do affect it.". He also knows how to look from greater heights from mountains, tothe substance of modernity, those who stopped creating and became more interested in themselves as Stockhausen were "Modernists"; for Feldman allowing your materials,the shape,structures of your music tell you the secrets of creativity was most important and became a cause.