Morton Feldman appreciated fine things – great paintings, good food, attractive companions – and I suspect he would have enjoyed this latest addition to the Feldman fan’s library as much for the tactile and visual pleasure it gives as for its record of his verbal gifts. Since 1997 Chris Villars has edited the Morton Feldman web-page, but useful as that is as a source of Feldmania there is something so much more satisfying about having material from the site in book form. Hyphen Press approached Villars with the idea of such a book and the result is a celebration of the subtle arts of book construction. 240 pages of essays, interviews and lectures, interspersed with photographs, are printed on white paper; then there are 12 pages of score extracts from across Feldman’s output, one piece to a page, followed by a chronology of the composer’s life, a bibliography, notes on the contributors and a good index, all printed on grey paper. The book is paper-backed and beautifully bound, with a colour photograph of Feldman, intently examining an antique relief, on the front of the book jacket.

Does this matter? For a book about Feldman I think it does. He was after all a composer who said ‘I’d stop writing music unless I had a beautiful piano’ and elsewhere that ‘pitch is a gorgeous thing. If you have a feeling, a tactile feeling for the instrument’. Of course all the information in Morton Feldman says can be got from a computer screen but how much more appropriate to its subject that it should be elegantly presented on paper in a book that has a good weight in the hand. The page layout is also easy on the eye, again something Feldman would have appreciated. He describes learning from Cage how to set out his music in score: ‘It was through John Cage that I learned about a great German pen, the Rapidograph … my early graph music, three graphic pieces, he copied it … He spent the whole week copying things, showing me how to set up a page.’

There have been two previous collections of Feldman’s words, Give my regards to Eighth Street, edited by B.H. Friedman and first published by the American imprint Exact Change in 2000, and Morton Feldman: essays, edited by the German composer Walter Zimmermann and published by his Beginner Press in 1985, and there is some overlap, both between the material presented in Morton Feldman says and the Zimmermann volume, and between the Friedman and Zimmermann. Zimmermann’s book is long out of print but anyone who has both Give my regards and Morton Feldman says will have an almost comprehensive Feldman archive, since the earlier book consists of Feldman’s writings while Villars has concentrated on Feldman talking. As the bibliography in the new book shows, there are still some Feldman lectures to be transcribed and published in English, particularly the lectures he gave as part of the composition course in Middleburg in the Netherlands near the end of his life, but a reading of Give my regards and Morton Feldman says will give a very good sense of Feldman’s artistic preoccupations.

Christopher Fox, Musical Times, autumn 2006