Morton may refer to:

People[link]

• Morton (surname)
• Earl of Morton, Scottish peerage
• All pages beginning with "Morton"

Fictional[link]

• Morton Koopa, Jr., a character and boss in Super Mario Bros. 3
• A character in the Charlie and Lola franchise

Places[link]

Australia

• Morton National Park, New South Wales

Canada

• Morton, Manitoba
• Morton, Ontario, a community in Rideau Lakes

England

• Morton, Carlisle, Cumbria
• Morton, Eden, Cumbria
• Morton, Derbyshire
• Morton, Gloucestershire
• Morton, Isle of Wight
• Morton, Norfolk
• Morton, Nottinghamshire
• Morton and Hanthorpe, Lincolnshire
• Morton by Gainsborough, Lincolnshire
• Morton-on-Swale, North Yorkshire

France

• Morton, Vienne

Scotland

• Morton, Dumfries and Galloway, a civil parish
• Morton Castle, a seat of the Earls of Morton in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland

United States

• Morton, Illinois
• Morton, Indiana
• Morton, Minnesota
• Morton, Mississippi
• Morton, New York
• Morton, Pennsylvania
• Morton, Texas
• Morton, Washington
• Morton Arboretum, a large plant collection in Lisle, Illinois
• See also: Morton County (disambiguation) and Morton Township (disambiguation)

Other uses[link]

• Morton's Fork, an expression that describes having to choose between equally unpleasant alternatives
  • Morton's fork coup, a technique in the game of Bridge that uses the principle of Morton's Fork
• Morton order a.k.a. Z-order, a space filling curve, often used in computer science
• Morton's neuroma, a benign neuroma of the interdigital plantar nerve
• Morton's Potato Chips, an American company in the 1960s and 70s
• Morton's Restaurant Group, owner and operator of upscale restaurants, including Morton's The Steakhouse
• Morton's theorem, a principle in the game of Poker articulated by Andy Morton
• Morton's toe, condition in which the second toe extends further than the first toe
• Greenock Morton F.C., Scottish football club
• Morton Salt
• USS Morton (DD-948), US Navy destroyer
• USS General C. G. Morton (AP-138), transport ship named for Charles Gould Morton
• Ulmus 'Morton', a variety of elm tree that originated at the Morton Arboretum
• A. Morton & Co, New York, from ~1848 to ~1920, they produced gold nibs, gold pens, gold and silver pencil & pen cases

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Jelly Roll Morton
Morton, 1918
Background information
Birth name	Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (possibly spelled Lemott, LaMotte or LaMenthe)
Also known as	Jelly Roll Morton
Born	(1885-09-20)September 20, 1885
Origin	New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Died	July 10, 1941(1941-07-10) (aged 55)
Genres	Ragtime Jazz Jazz blues Dixieland Swing
Occupations	Vaudeville comedian Bandleader Composer Arranger
Instruments	Piano
Years active	ca. 1900–1941
Associated acts	Red Hot Peppers New Orleans Rhythm Kings

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (October 20, 1885 – July 10, 1941),^[1] known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer.

Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton is perhaps most notable as jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential spirit and characteristics when notated.^[2] His composition "Jelly Roll Blues" was the first published jazz composition, in 1915. Morton is also notable for naming and popularizing the "Spanish tinge" (habanera rhythm and tresillo), and for penning such standards as "Wolverine Blues", "Black Bottom Stomp", and "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say", the latter a tribute to turn of the 19th to 20th century New Orleans personalities.

Reputed for his arrogance and self-promotion as often as recognized in his day for his musical talents, Morton claimed to have invented jazz outright in 1902 — much to the derision of later musicians and critics.^[3] However, jazz historian, musician, and composer Gunther Schuller writes about Morton's "hyperbolic assertions" that there is "no proof to the contrary" and that Morton's "considerable accomplishments in themselves provide reasonable substantiation".^[4]

Biography[link]

Birth[link]

Morton was born into a Creole of Color community in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of downtown New Orleans, Louisiana. A baptismal certificate issued in 1894 lists his date of birth as October 20, 1890; however Morton himself and his half-sisters claimed the September 20, 1885, date is correct. His World War I draft registration card showed September 13, 1884 but his California death certificate listed his birth as September 20, 1889. He was born to F. P. Lamothe and Louise Monette (written as Lemott and Monett on his baptismal certificate). Eulaley Haco (Eulalie Hécaud) was the godparent. Eulalie helped him to be christened with the name Ferdinand. Ferdinand’s parents were in a common-law marriage and not legally married. No birth certificate has been found to date. He took the name "Morton" by anglicizing the name of his stepfather, Mouton.

Morton claimed to have written "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1905.

New Orleans[link]

Morton was, along with Tony Jackson, one of the best regarded pianists in the Storyville District early in the 20th century. At the age of fourteen, he began working as a piano player in a brothel (or as it was referred to then, a sporting house.) While working there, he was living with his religious church-going great-grandmother and had her convinced that he worked as a night watchman in a barrel factory.

In that atmosphere, he often sang smutty lyrics and it was at this time that he took the nickname "Jelly Roll",^[5] which at the time was black slang for the female genitalia.^[6]

Morton's grandmother eventually found out that he was playing jazz in a local brothel, and subsequently kicked him out of her house. "When my grandmother found out that I was playing jazz in one of the sporting houses in the District, she told me that I had disgraced the family and forbade me to live at the house... She told me that devil music would surely bring about my downfall, but I just couldn't put it behind me."^[7] Tony Jackson, also a pianist at brothels and an accomplished guitar player, was a major influence on his music; according to Morton, Jackson was the only pianist better than himself.

Touring[link]

Around 1904, Morton started wandering the American South, working with minstrel shows, gambling and composing. His works "Jelly Roll Blues", "New Orleans Blues", "Frog-I-More Rag", "Animule Dance", and "King Porter Stomp" were composed during this period. He got to Chicago in 1910 and New York City in 1911, where future stride greats James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith caught his act, years before the blues were widely played in the North.^{[citation needed]}

In 1912–1914, he toured with girlfriend Rosa Brown as a vaudeville act before settling in Chicago for three years. By 1914, he had started writing down his compositions, and in 1915 his "Jelly Roll Blues" was arguably the first jazz composition ever published, recording as sheet music the New Orleans traditions that had been jealously guarded by the musicians. In 1917, he followed bandleader William Manuel Johnson and Johnson's sister Anita Gonzalez to California, where Morton's tango "The Crave" made a sensation in Hollywood.^{[citation needed]}

Vancouver[link]

Morton was invited to play a new Vancouver nightclub called The Patricia, on East Hastings Street. Jazz historian Mark Miller described his arrival as "an extended period of itinerancy as a pianist, vaudeville performer, gambler, hustler, and, as legend would have it, pimp".^[8]

Chicago[link]

Morton moved back to Chicago in 1923 to claim authorship of his recently-published rag "The Wolverines", which had become a hit as "Wolverine Blues" in the Windy City. There he released the first of his commercial recordings, first as piano rolls, then on record, both as a piano soloist and with various jazz bands.^{[citation needed]}

In 1926, Morton succeeded in getting a contract to make recordings for the largest and most prestigious company in the United States, Victor. This gave him a chance to bring a well-rehearsed band to play his arrangements in Victor's Chicago recording studios. These recordings by Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers are regarded as classics of 1920s jazz. The Red Hot Peppers featured such other New Orleans jazz luminaries as Kid Ory, Omer Simeon, George Mitchell, Johnny St. Cyr, Barney Bigard, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, and Andrew Hilaire. Jelly Roll Morton & His Red Hot Peppers were one of the first acts booked on tours by MCA.^{[citation needed]}

New York City[link]

In November 1928, Morton married showgirl Mabel Bertrand in Gary, Indiana, and moved to New York City, where he continued to record for Victor. His piano solos and trio recordings are well regarded, but his band recordings suffer in comparison with the Chicago sides where Morton could draw on many great New Orleans musicians for sidemen.^{[citation needed]} Although he did record with such great musicians as clarinetists Omer Simeon, George Baquet, Albert Nicholas, Wilton Crawley, Barney Bigard, Lorenzo Tio and Artie Shaw, trumpeters Bubber Miley, Johnny Dunn and Henry "Red" Allen, saxophonists Sidney Bechet, Paul Barnes and Bud Freeman, bassist Pops Foster, and drummers Paul Barbarin, Cozy Cole and Zutty Singleton, Morton generally had trouble finding musicians who wanted to play his style of jazz, and his New York sessions failed to produce a hit.^{[citation needed]}

With the Great Depression and the near collapse of the phonograph record industry, Morton's recording contract was not renewed by Victor for 1931. Morton continued playing less prosperously in New York, briefly had a radio show in 1934, then was reduced to touring in the band of a traveling burlesque act while his compositions were recorded by Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman and others, though he received no royalties from these recordings.^{[citation needed]}

Washington, D.C.[link]

In 1935, Morton moved to Washington, D.C., to become the manager/piano player of a bar called, at various times, the "Music Box", "Blue Moon Inn", and "Jungle Inn" in the African American neighborhood of Shaw. (The building that hosted the nightclub still stands, at 1211 U Street NW.) Morton was also the master of ceremonies, bouncer, and bartender of the club. He was only in Washington for a few years; the club owner allowed all her friends free admission and drinks, which prevented Morton from making the business a success. Morton was stabbed by one of the owner's friends in 1938, suffering wounds to the head and chest. After this incident his wife Mabel demanded that they leave Washington.^[9]

	"Tiger Rag" noicon Sample of Morton's introduction and performance of the piece, with its innovative moving tone cluster evoking a tiger's growl
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

During Morton's brief residency at the Music Box, folklorist Alan Lomax heard Morton playing piano in the bar. In May 1938, Lomax invited Morton to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress. The sessions, originally intended as a short interview with musical examples for use by music researchers in the Library of Congress, soon expanded to record more than eight hours of Morton talking and playing piano, in addition to longer interviews during which Lomax took notes but did not record. Despite the low fidelity of these non-commercial recordings, their musical and historical importance attracted jazz fans, and they have helped to ensure Morton's place in jazz history.^[10]

Lomax was very interested in Morton's Storyville days and some of the off-color songs played in Storyville. Morton was reluctant to recount and record these, but eventually obliged Lomax. Morton's "Jelly Roll" nickname is a sexual reference as many of his lyrics from his Storyville days were vulgar. Some of the Library of Congress recordings were unreleased until near the end of the 20th century due to their nature.^[10]

Morton was aware that if he had been born in 1890, he would have been slightly too young to make a good case for himself as the actual inventor of jazz, and so may have presented himself as being five years older than he actually was, and his statement that Buddy Bolden played ragtime but not jazz is not accepted by consensus of Bolden's other New Orleans contemporaries. It is possible, however, that the contradictions stem from different definitions for the terms ragtime and jazz. These interviews, released in different forms over the years, were released on an eight-CD boxed set in 2005, The Complete Library of Congress Recordings. This collection won two Grammy Awards.^[10] The same year, Morton was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Later years[link]

During the period when he was recording his interviews, Morton was seriously injured by knife wounds when a fight broke out at the Washington, D.C. establishment where he was playing. A nearby whites-only hospital refused to treat him, and he had to be transported to a lower-quality hospital further away.^{[citation needed]} When he was in the hospital the doctors left ice on his wounds for several hours before attending to his eventually fatal injury. His recovery from his wounds was incomplete, and thereafter he was often ill and easily became short of breath. Morton made a new series of commercial recordings in New York, several recounting tunes from his early years that he had been talking about in his Library of Congress interviews.^{[citation needed]}

A worsening asthma affliction sent him to a New York hospital for three months at one point and when visiting Los Angeles with a series of manuscripts of new tunes and arrangements, planning to form a new band and restart his career, the ailment took its toll. Morton died on July 10, 1941 after an eleven-day stay in Los Angeles County General Hospital.

According to jazz historian David Gelly, Morton's arrogance and "bumptious" persona alienated so many musicians over the years that no colleagues or admirers attended his funeral.^[11]

Piano style[link]

Morton's piano style was formed from early secondary ragtime and "shout",^{[citation needed]} which also evolved separately into the New York school of stride piano. Morton's playing, however, was also close to barrelhouse, which produced boogie woogie.^{[citation needed]}

Morton often played the melody of a tune with his right thumb, while sounding a harmony above these notes with other fingers of the right hand. This added a rustic or "out-of-tune" sound (due to the playing of a diminished 5th above the melody). This may still be recognized as belonging to New Orleans. Morton also walked in major and minor sixths in the bass, instead of tenths or octaves. He played basic swing rhythms in both the left and right hand.

Compositions[link]

Some of Morton's songs (listed alphabetically):

Several of Morton's compositions were musical tributes to himself, including "Winin' Boy", "The Jelly Roll Blues", subtitled "The Original Jelly-Roll", and "Mr. Jelly Lord". In the Big Band era, his "King Porter Stomp", which Morton had written decades earlier, was a big hit for Fletcher Henderson and Benny Goodman, and became a standard covered by most other swing bands of that time. Morton also claimed to have written some tunes that were copyrighted by others, including "Alabama Bound" and "Tiger Rag".

Legacy and fictional portrayals[link]

Two Broadway shows have featured his music, Jelly Roll and Jelly's Last Jam. The first draws heavily on Morton's own words and stories from the Library of Congress interviews.

Jelly Roll Morton appears as the piano "professor" in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, where he is portrayed by actor Antonio Fargas, with piano and vocals played by James Booker.

Jelly Roll Morton's Last Night at the Jungle Inn: An Imaginary Memoir was written by ethnomusicologist and folklorist Samuel Charters in 1984, embellishing Morton's early stories about his life.^[12]

Jelly Roll Morton is featured in Alessandro Baricco's book, Novecento. He is the "inventor of jazz" and the protagonist's rival throughout the book. This book was later turned into a movie: Giuseppe Tornatore's The Legend of 1900. His character is played by actor Clarence Williams III. In this movie, he is depicted as an arrogant master in a piano competition against the film's main protagonist. He performed "Big Foot Ham", "The Crave", and "Fingerbreaker", in that order, against the protagonist.

Jelly Roll Morton is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and is a charter member of the Gennett Records Walk of Fame. In 2008, Jelly Roll Morton was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.^[13]

The play, Don't You Leave Me Here, by Clare Brown, which premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse on 27 September 2008, deals with Morton's relationship with Tony Jackson. Morton and his godmother, Eulalie, appear as characters in David Fulmer's mystery novel, Chasing the Devil's Tail. His influence continues to this day in the work of Dick Hyman and Reginald Robinson.^{[citation needed]}

Selected discography[link]

• 1923/24 1923-1924 (Milestone Records)
• Red Hot Peppers Session: Birth of the Hot, The Classic Red Hot Peppers Sessions (originally RCA Bluebird recordings) 1926-1927 (Sbme Special Markets)
• The Pearls 1926-1939 (Bluebird Records)
• Jazz King of New Orleans 1926-1930 (Bluebird Records)
• Kansas City Stomp, The Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1 1938 (Rounder Records)

Footnotes[link]

Sources[link]

• Dapogny, James. Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton: The Collected Piano Music. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982.
• The Devil's Music: 1920s Jazz
• Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man; page 486.
• "Ferdinand J. 'Jelly Roll' Morton", A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (1988), pp. 586–587.
• "Jelly", Time magazine, March 11, 1940.
• Ward, Geoffrey C., and Kenneth Burns. Jazz, a History of America's Music 1st Ed. Random House Inc.

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jelly Roll Morton

Music portal

• Ferd 'Jelly Roll' Morton
• Genealogy of Jelly Roll Morton
• Ferd Joseph Morton WWI Draft Registration Card and essay
• Jelly Roll Morton on RedHotJazz.com; biography with audio files of many of Morton's historic recordings
• Mister Jelly Roll, complete 1950 book by Alan Lomax; chronicles the early days of jazz and one of its main developers
• Free scores by Jelly Roll Morton at the International Music Score Library Project
• Jelly Roll Morton at Find a Grave

Johnnie James Morton, Jr. (born October 7, 1971) is a former American college and professional football player who was a wide receiver in the National Football League (NFL) for twelve seasons during the 1990s and 2000s. He played college football for the University of Southern California (USC), and was recognized as an All-American. Originally drafted by the Detroit Lions in the first round in the 1994 NFL Draft, he also played professionally for the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers of the NFL.

Early years[link]

Morton was born in Inglewood, California. He attended South High School in Torrance, California, and played for the Torrance Spartans high school football team.

College career[link]

While attending the University of Southern California, Morton played for the USC Trojans football team from 1990 to 1993. He broke twelve USC team and Pacific-10 Conference records for receptions and receiving yards. Morton was nicknamed "Johnnie Hero" by USC broadcaster Pete Arbogast, thanks to a game-winning touchdown pass Morton caught in the 1990 USC-UCLA rivalry game—a 23-yard strike from Trojans quarterback Todd Marinovich with 16 seconds left that gave the Trojans a 45-42 come-from-behind victory.

Professional career[link]

The Detroit Lion selected Morton in the first round (21st overall pick) of the 1994 NFL Draft, and he played for the Lions from 1994 to 2001. He would go on to achieve an important secondary role on a deep Lions' receiving corps that also featured Pro Bowl flanker Herman Moore and veteran Brett Perriman. After learning the ropes as a rookie in 1994, Morton became Detroit's featured slot receiver in 1995 and a key contributor on special teams as a kickoff/punt returner. Morton was part of one of the most prolific offenses in Detroit history that year, as the Lions would rack up 436 total points (second highest in the NFL) and end up with ten victories - appearing in the playoffs for the third straight season. He contributed 44 receptions on that team for 590 yards and 8 touchdowns. Perhaps his most memorable game occurred that same season during a classic Thanksgiving Day game in Detroit against the Minnesota Vikings. Moore (127 yards), Perriman (153), and Johnnie Morton (102) all eclipsed the 100-yard receiving mark, and Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders rushed for 138 yards, and quarterback Scott Mitchell passed for 410 yards in a 44-38 Lions' shootout victory.

After the departure of Perriman, Morton became more of a featured receiver in Detroit's offense in the ensuing years. His best season statistically was during the 1999 season when he had 80 receptions for 1129 yards on a surprising Lions team that made the playoffs that year, despite the unexpected retirement of Barry Sanders. All told, Morton finished his pro career with 624 receptions for 8719 yards and 43 touchdowns. He currently ranks second on Detroit's all-time list in both receptions and yards-receiving, with 469 and 6,499, respectively.

Personal[link]

Morton's younger brother, Chad Morton, also played at USC. The Morton family ia of mixed ethnicity, African-American and Japanese.

Morton had a brief cameo appearance in the movie Jerry Maguire.

During the 2001 season, comedian Jay Leno had been poking fun at the Lions' 0-12 record. When the Lions won their first game of the season 27-24 against the Minnesota Vikings, Morton, who knew of Leno's comments, said, "Jay Leno can kiss my ass." Morton later appeared on The Tonight Show,^[1] during which Leno proceeded to kiss a donkey.

Mixed martial arts record[link]

Result	Record	Opponent	Method	Event	Date	Round	Time	Location	Notes
Loss	0-1	Bernard Ackah	KO (punch)	K-1 Dynamite!! USA	02007-06-02June 2, 2007	1	0:38

See also[link]

• List of male mixed martial artists

References[link]

External links[link]

• TSN Bio
• Article on K-1 press conference regarding June 2 event.
• Sherdog.com interview with Morton about making his MMA debut.
• Professional MMA record.
• CSAC Indefinitely Suspends Morton.

Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York City.

A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating; pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused; a generally quiet and slowly evolving music; recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also begin to explore extremes of duration.

Biography[link]

Feldman was born in Brooklyn, New York City into a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants from Kiev. His father was a manufacturer of children's coats.^[1][2] As a child he studied piano with Vera Maurina Press, who, according to the composer himself, instilled in him a "vibrant musicality rather than musicianship."^[3] Feldman's first composition teachers were Wallingford Riegger, one of the first American followers of Arnold Schoenberg, and Stefan Wolpe, a German-born Jewish composer who studied under Franz Schreker and Anton Webern. Feldman and Wolpe spent most of their time simply talking about music and art.^[4]

In early 1950 Feldman went to hear the New York Philharmonic give a performance of Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21. After this work, the orchestra was going to perform a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feldman left immediately before that, disturbed by the audience's disrespectful reaction to Webern's work.^[5] In the lobby he met John Cage, who was at the concert and had also decided to step out.^[6] The two composers quickly became good friends, with Feldman moving into the apartment on the second floor of the building Cage lived in. Through Cage, he met painters Richard Lippold (who had a studio next door), Sonia Sekula, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, and composers such as Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil.^[7]

With encouragement from Cage, Feldman began to write pieces that had no relation to compositional systems of the past, such as the constraints of traditional harmony or the serial technique. He experimented with non-standard systems of musical notation, often using grids in his scores, and specifying how many notes should be played at a certain time, but not which ones. Feldman's experiments with the use of chance in his composition in turn inspired John Cage to write pieces like the Music of Changes, where the notes to be played are determined by consulting the I Ching.

Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for Jack Garfein's 1961 film, Something Wild. However, after hearing the music for the opening scene, in which a character (played by Carroll Baker, incidentally also Garfein's wife) is raped, the director promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the startled director was said to be, "My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?"^[8]

Through Cage, Feldman met many other prominent figures in the New York arts scene, among them Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Frank O'Hara. He found inspiration in the paintings of the abstract expressionists,^[9] and throughout the 1970s wrote a number of pieces around twenty-minutes in length, including Rothko Chapel (1971, written for the building of the same name, which houses paintings by Mark Rothko) and For Frank O'Hara (1973). In 1977, he wrote the opera Neither with words by Samuel Beckett.

In 1973, at the age of 47, Feldman became the Edgard Varèse Professor (a title of his own devising) at the University at Buffalo. Prior to that time, Feldman had earned his living as a full-time employee at the family textile business in New York's garment district.

Later, he began to produce his very long works, often in one continuous movement, rarely shorter than half an hour in length and often much longer. These works include Violin and String Quartet (1985, around 2 hours), For Philip Guston (1984, around four hours) and, most extreme, the String Quartet II (1983, which is over six hours long without a break.) Typically, these pieces maintain a very slow developmental pace (if not static) and tend to be made up of mostly very quiet sounds. Feldman said himself that quiet sounds had begun to be the only ones that interested him. In a 1982 lecture, Feldman noted: "Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?"

Feldman married the Canadian composer Barbara Monk shortly before his death. He died from pancreatic cancer in 1987 at his home in Buffalo, New York, after fighting for his life for three months.

Works[link]

See: List of compositions by Morton Feldman

Notable students[link]

References[link]

• Feldman, Morton. 1968. Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Artnews Annual. Included in Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (2000), The Music of Morton Feldman, and elsewhere.
• Gagne, Cole, and Caras, Tracey. 1982. Interview with Morton Feldman. In: Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers, 164–177. Metuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press Inc, 1982. Available online.
• Hirata, Catherin. 2002. Morton Feldman. In: Sitsky, Larry, ed. 2002. Music of the Twentieth-century Avant-garde. Greenwood Publishing Group.
• Revill, David. 1993. The Roaring Silence: John Cage – a Life. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-220-6, ISBN 978-1-55970-220-1.
• Ross, Alex. 2006. American Sublime. The New Yorker, June 19, 2006. Available online.
• Zimmerman, Walter, ed. 1985. Morton Feldman Essays. Kerpen: Beginner.

Further reading[link]

• Eldred, Michael The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music, Section II.4.4 A musical subversion of harmonically logical time (Feldman) www.arte-fact.org 2010
• Feldman, Morton. Morton Feldman Says. Chris Villars, ed. London: Hyphen Press, 2006.
• Feldman, Morton. Morton Feldman in Middelburg. Lectures and Conversations. R. Mörchen, ed. Cologne: MusikTexte, 2008.
• Feldman, Morton. Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. B.H. Friedman, ed. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.
• Gareau, Philip. La musique de Morton Feldman ou le temps en liberté. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006.
• Hirata, Catherin (Winter 1996). "The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman", Perspectives of New Music 34, no.1, 6-27.
• Herzfeld, Gregor. "Historisches Bewusstsein in Morton Feldmans Unterrichtsskizzen", Archiv für Musikwissenschaft Vol. 66, no. 3, (Summer 2009), 218-233.
• Lunberry, Clark. “Departing Landscapes: Morton Feldman's String Quartet II and Triadic Memories.” SubStance 110: Vol. 35, Number 2 (Summer 2006): 17-50. (Available at http://www.cnvill.net/mftexts.htm [#105 on the list])

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Morton Feldman

• Morton Feldman Page
• Morton Feldman Photographs, 1939-1987 from UBdigit - Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries
• Jan Williams Photos of Morton Feldman, 1974-1979 from UBdigit - Digital Collections - University at Buffalo Libraries
• Morton Feldman in conversation with Thomas Moore
• Morton Feldman: Structures for String Quartet (1951) by Lejaren Hiller
• GregSandow.com: Feldman Draws Blood Village Voice, June 16, 1980
• Morton Feldman profile at New Albion Records
• The New Yorker: The Critics at Large
• Morton Feldman at Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music
• (French) A biography of Morton Feldman, from IRCAM's website.

Listening[link]

• Art of the States: Morton Feldman three works by the composer
• UbuWeb: Morton Feldman featuring The King of Denmark
• Epitonic.com: Morton Feldman featuring tracks from Only – Works for Voice and Instruments
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 1
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 2
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 3
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 4
• In Conversation with John Cage, 1966, Part 5

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (January 2012)

Morton Subotnick (born April 14, 1933, in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer of electronic music, best known for his Silver Apples of the Moon, the first electronic work commissioned by a record company, Nonesuch. He was one of the founding members of California Institute of the Arts where he taught for many years.^[1][2][3]

Subotnick has worked extensively with interactive electronics and multi-media, co-founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Ramon Sender, and often collaborating with his wife Joan La Barbara. Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and multi-media performance and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre.

Early career[link]

Subotnick graduated from the University of Denver. In the early 60s, Subotnick taught at Mills College and with Ramon Sender, co-founded the San Francisco Tape Center. During this period he collaborated with Anna Halprin in two works (the 3 legged stool and Parades and Changes) and was music director of the Actors Workshop. It was also during this period that Subotnick worked with Buchla on what may have been the first analog synthesizer.

In 1966 Subotnick was instrumental in getting a Rockefeller Grant to join the Tape Center with the Mills Chamber Players (a chamber at Mills College with performers Nate Rubin, violin; Bonnie Hampton, cello; Naomi Sparrow, piano and Subotnick, clarinet). The grant required that the Tape Center relocate to a host institution that became Mills College. Subotnick, however, did not stay with the move, but went to New York with the Actor’s Workshop to become the first music director of the Lincoln Center Rep Company in the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. He also, along with Len Lye, became an artist in residence at the newly formed Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. The School of the Arts provided him with a studio and a Buchla Synthesizer (now at the Library of Congress). During this period he helped develop and became artistic director of the Electric Circus and the Electric Ear. This was also the time of the creation of Silver Apples of the Moon, The Wild Bull, and Touch.

[edit] Silver Apples of the Moon

Early electronic music was made using wave generators and tape-manipulated sounds. Subotnick was among the first composers to work with electronic instrument designer Don Buchla. Buchla's modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, which he called the Electric Music Box and which was constructed partly based on suggestions by Subotnick and Sender, was both more flexible and easier to use, and its sequencing ability was integral to Subotnick's music.

At a time when electronic music was highly abstract, largely concerned with pitch and timbre, with rhythm an afterthought or of no consequence and patterns largely avoided, Subotnick broke with the academic avant-gardists by including sections with regular rhythms. Both Silver Apples and 1968's The Wild Bull (another Nonesuch-commissioned work for tape; they have since been combined on a Wergo CD) have been choreographed by dance companies around the world.

In 1969 Subotnick was invited be part of a team of artists to move to Los Angeles to plan a new school of the. Mel Powell as Dean and Subotnick as Associate Dean and the team of four other pairs of artists carved out a new path of music education and created the now famous California Institute of the Arts. Subotnick remained Associate Dean of the music school for 4 years and then, resigning as Associate Dean, became the head of the composition program where, a few years later, he created a new media program that introduced interactive technology and multi media into the curriculum. In 1978 Subotnick, with Roger Reynolds and Bernard Rands, produced 5 annual internationally acclaimed new music festivals.

Approach to music[link]

Where previous electronic music had used non-traditional structures, Subotnick's electronic compositions are structured more like the classical music for acoustic instruments with which audiences are familiar, but with nontraditional timbres and pitch manipulations no orchestra could produce. He has also written for acoustic instruments, and studied with Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner at Mills College in Oakland, California.

In addition to music in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions. His "staged tone poem” The Double Life of Amphibians, a collaboration with director Lee Breuer and visual artist Irving Petlin, utilizing live interaction between singers, instrumentalists and computer, was premiered at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

The concert version of Jacob’s Room, a mono drama commissioned by Betty Freeman for the Kronos Quartet and singer Joan La Barbara, received its premiere in San Francisco in 1985. Jacob's Room, Subotnick's multimedia opera chamber opera (directed by Herbert Blau with video imagery by Steina and Woody Vasulka, featuring Joan La Barbara), received its premiere in Philadelphia in April 1993 under the auspices of The American Music Theater Festival. The Key To Songs, for chamber orchestra and computer, was premiered at the 1985 Aspen Music Festival. Return, commissioned to celebrate the return of Haley's Comet, premiered with an accompanying sky show in the planetarium of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles in 1986. Subotnick's recent works—among them Jacob's Room, The Key to Songs, Hunger, In Two Worlds, And the Butterflies Begin to Sing and A Desert Flowers-- utilize computerized sound generation, specially designed software Interactor and "intelligent" computer controls which allow the performers to interact with the computer technology.

All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis (1994) was an interactive concert work and a CD-ROM (perhaps the first of its kind), Making Music (1995), Making More Music (1998) were his first works for children, and an interactive 'Media Poem', Intimate Immensity, premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival in NY (1997). The European premiere (1998) was in Karlsrhue, Germany. A string quartet with CDROM, Echoes from the Silent Call of Girona (1998), was premiered in Los Angeles by Southwest Chamber Music.

Subotnick was commissioned to complete a larger version of the opera, Jacobs Room. This premiered in 2010 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.

Subotnick is developing tools for young children to create music. He has authored a series of six CDROMs for children, mounted a children's website and he is developing a related school program.

Subotnick is working with the Library of Congress as they are preparing an archival presentation of his electronic works. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer. Morton Subotnick is published by Schott Music. Students of his include Ingram Marshall, Mark Coniglio, Carl Stone, Rhys Chatham, Charlemagne Palestine, John King^{[disambiguation needed ]} and Lois V Vierk.

Personal life[link]

Subotnick is married to Joan La Barbara, a singer and composer. Subotnick's oldest son, Steven Subotnick, is an animator; his youngest son, Jacob Subotnick, is a sound designer and his daughter, Tamara Winer, is a psychiatric social worker.

Awards[link]

• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Rockefeller Grants (3)
• Meet the Composer (2)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award
• Brandies Award
• Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Künstlerprogramm (DAAD), Composer in Residence in Berlin
• Lifetime Achievement Award (SEAMUS at Dartmouth)
• ASCAP: John Cage Award
• ACO: Lifetime Achievement
• Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts

Selected works[link]

• Sonata for viola and piano (1958)
• Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)
• The Wild Bull (1968)
• Touch (1969)
• Sidewinder (1971)
• Four Butterflies (1973)
• Until Spring (1975)
• A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur (1978)
• An Arsenal of Defense for solo viola and "electronic ghost score" (1982)
• The Key to Songs (1985)
• Jacob's Room (1986)
• and the butterflies begin to sing (1988)
• All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis (1991)
• Gestures (1999–2001)

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (January 2012)

• MortonSubotnick.com
• Morton Subotnick's Creating Music
• CalArts Faculty: Morton Subotnick
• Subotnick at The International New Music Consortium
• New Albion Artist: Morton Subotnick
• European American Music Distributors LLC: Morton Subotnick
• Morton Subotnick at Schott Music
• Malaspina Great Books: Morton Subotnick
• From Moog to Mark II, to MIDI to MAX By Kyle Gann for American Public Media
• Interview
• Interview with Peter Shea at the University of Minnesota

Listening[link]

• Interview with Dublab
• Mars Millennium Project 2030: Artist: Morton Subotnick
• Morton Subotnick interview
• Art of the States: Morton Subotnick Echoes from the Silent Call of Girona (1998)
• Subotnick's The Double Life of Amphibians at the Internet Archive Avant Garde Project has FLAC files made from high-quality LP transcriptions (originally from the Avant Garde Project) available for free download.