Morton Feldman was born in Manhattan on 12 January 1926, the second son of Irving and Francis Feldman, a Jewish family that had immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine, via Warsaw. He studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, a student of Ferruccio Busoni, who had once known Alexandre Scriabine, whose influence on Feldman’s early works is clear. Press taught him “a kind of vibrant musicality, more than a musical profession.” In 1941, Feldman began studying counterpoint with Wallingford Riegger, who was a pioneer of the use of twelve-tone composing in America, although he never spoke of it in class. In 1944, Feldman began studying composition with Stefan Wolpe, who quickly arranged a meeting with Edgard Varèse, who told him, “You know, Feldman, you’ll survive. I’m not worried about you.” For many years, Feldman visited Varèse almost every week, “feeling not unlike those who make a pilgrimage to Lourdes hoping for a cure.”

In January 1950, Feldman met John Cage walking out of Carnegie Hall, where they had both gone to hear the New York Philharmonic play Anton Webern’s Symphony op. 21, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Feldman soon moved into Cage’s apartment building, Bossa’s Mansion, which was located on Grand Street, near the East River. Projection 1 (1950), for cello, was Feldman’s first venture into graphic notation. Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and David Tudor soon formed a group around Cage and Feldman, which was perhaps somewhat hastily dubbed the “New York School” - about whom Henry Cowell wrote an article titled “Cage and His Friends” in January 1952 in The Musical Quarterly.

Feldman continued to use graphic notation in Projection 2 (1951), setting the register, dynamics, and durations while leaving the choice of pitch to the performer; later, in his Durations (1960-1961) series, he would develop what he called racecourse design, in which pitch and timbre were provided in the score, along with an overall tempo, but the musicians proceeded at their own pace, selecting durations for themselves, creating a vertical and changing sense of coordination within the piece. Not wishing his work to be taken for any kind of improvisation, he abandoned graphic notation in the period between 1953 and 1958, returned to it for some of his compositions, and then gave it up entirely, using it for the last time in 1967, with In Search of an Orchestration.

Feldman was strongly influenced by his reading of Kierkegaard the 1960s, which played a crucial role in his quest to create an art that excluded any trace of dialectic. In the 1970s, as dean of the New York Studio School (1969-1971), Feldman became interested in rugs from the Middle and Near East, which he collected, along with books and articles about them. His fascination with them was musical, and inspired what he called “crippled symmetries” or “disproportionate symmetries” which he used to “contain” his material within the metric frame of a measure.

In 1970, Feldman got to know the violist Karen Philipps, for whom he composed the series The Viola in My Life. After composing The Rothko Chapel for the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston (Texas), Feldman was invited by DAAD to be an artist-in-residence in Berlin from September 1971 to October 1972, an experience he said led him to rediscover his Jewish identity. Upon his return to the United States, he was appointed the Edgard Varèse Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973, a post he held until his death. “I’m going to have to teach them to listen.”

In 1976 Feldman returned to Berlin, where he met Samuel Beckett. Several weeks later, Beckett sent him a post card with the words to his poem neither, as a libretto for Feldman’s opéra, which premiered the following year in Rome at the Teatro dell’Opera, with staging by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Feldman dedicated two other works to Samuel Beckett in 1987 — music for a radio play titled Words and Music and For Samuel Beckett, for ensemble. As early as 1978, Feldman began writing compositions that ventured into the minutest of nuance, with no regard for convention, performability, or audience expectations; this approach reached its zenith in String Quartet (II) (1983), which lasts for nearly five hours.

Feldman continued teaching until the end of his life, notably in Germany, at the Darmstadt Summer courses (1984-1986). He died of cancer on 3 September 1987.

Feldman’s friendships with the poet Frank O’Hara, the pianist David Tudor, composers such as John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, and painters such as Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly are reflected in the titles of many of his compositions.