Ryan Dohoney

Bio

Ryan Dohoney is a musicologist and historian and writes on experimental music in the U.S. and Europe since World War II. He is currently completing a book on the religious affordances of experimental music in the 1960s and 1970s focused on Morton Feldman’s music for the Rothko Chapel. The present article is part of a larger project titled “For Morton Feldman: Friendship, Collaboration, and Mourning in the New York School.” He serves as Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.

Contributions

Spontaneity, Intimacy, and Friendship in Morton Feldman’s Music of the 1950s

Peer Reviewed

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The problem of music, of course, is that it is, by its very nature, a public art. . . . Yet somehow there is something demeaning in the fact that there is no other dimension for music than this public one. —Morton Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art” [1] Morton Feldman became a full-time composer at the age of forty. He had worked in the family business—a children’s coat factory near LaGuardia Airport in New York City—since his early twenties and been disparaged by Pierre Boulez as a dilettante because...

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