- 107 - 10923 - 0 - The Graph Music of Morton

Morton Feldman’s graphs merit attention because they altered the course of Western classical music, as John Cage observed in the epigraph to this volume. Early examples quickly gained notoriety in new music circles in the United States, becoming some of the very first musical works presented in a strikingly new notation to receive public attention. Moreover, they greatly affected Cage’s ownmusic, initially inspiring his recourse to chance operations and graph paper and subsequently encouraging his own experiments with indeterminacy and new notations. It is also likely that they affected the music of Earle Brown, who had already used similar ideas as tools in the compositional process without allowing them to take centre stage. Cage and Brown would go on to become leading proponents of graphic notations and indeterminacy, the use of which would flourish in the United States and Europe in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. There are other reasons for interest in these works within the narrower field of Feldman studies. In terms of sheer numbers, they represent approximately one-quarter of Feldman’s published output from the 1950s and 1960s and one-eighth of his entire catalogue, meaning that an understanding of his music as a whole is impossible without recourse to them. Additionally, his tendency to switch between graph notation and other formats in the 1950s and 1960s is a singular aspect of his approach that invites scrutiny, as is the fact that the grids that underpin the presentation of his graphs eventually surfaced in modified form in his nongraph works. Despite their historical pedigree, Feldman’s graphs have been performed only infrequently and relatively few recordings have been issued. First commercial releases of three, including In Search of an Orchestration (1967), which Feldman regarded as the culmination of this subset of his music, appeared as recently as 2005, and in four cases, there remains only one extant recording at this time. Given that the graphs allow a