Rob Bogaerts for Anefo · CC0

Morton Feldman composed music of deliberate quiet and slowness, developing graphic and proportional notations that let pitch and rhythm float free of the strict metric grid that had organized Western composition for centuries. Working alongside John Cage and the experimental New York School, he treated silence and duration as compositional materials in their own right rather than as an absence of content. His late works, after 1977, pushed this further into pieces lasting hours, a scale that asked listeners to abandon concert-going habits built around beginnings, middles, and ends.