Daily Inspiration Quote by Morton Feldman

Living with the minor second is Feldman admitting, in the plainest intervallic terms, what his music has always staged: the ache of closeness that never resolves into comfort. A minor second is the smallest Western “problem” interval, the half-step that grinds, hovers, and refuses to be neutral. For a composer who distrusted teleology and big rhetorical payoffs, it’s the perfect emblem of a life spent inside micro-tensions rather than on the hunt for catharsis.

The line is funny in that dry Feldman way: as if dissonance were an unruly roommate or a chronic condition. But it’s also a manifesto. “Handle it” doesn’t mean “fix” it. Feldman’s late breakthrough wasn’t taming the interval into consonance; it was building an environment where the minor second can just be itself, sustained long enough that our ears stop demanding a conventional resolution. In pieces like Rothko Chapel or the late, hour-plus canvases, friction becomes texture. The half-step stops behaving like plot and starts behaving like light.

Context matters: postwar American composition was crowded with systems that promised mastery (serialism, total control, the moral seriousness of complexity). Feldman, orbiting the New York School and Abstract Expressionism, chose a different kind of rigor: attention, scale, and patience. The subtext is a quiet rebellion against the idea that music’s job is to “solve” dissonance. Feldman’s solution is acceptance turned into form: let the tension breathe until it becomes a place to live.