Morton Feldman

For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay / In keen and quivering ratio / To the ecstasy." It almost seems as if Emily Dickinson could have been describing the early piano music of Morton Feldman when she wrote those lines nearly one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. Certainly, the uncommonly short, acutely concentrated, unadorned and vulnerable pieces Feldman composed between 1950 and 1964 each span just an “ecstatic instant” — a brief, heightened experience measured not according to time but intensity and awareness.