Education Quote by Morton Feldman

Feldman’s jab lands because it frames artistic “schools” as a kind of cheap magic trick - and then denies anyone the right to claim it. Houdini wasn’t just a great illusionist; he was an escape artist, a professional at slipping out of restraints that looked absolute. By invoking him, Feldman quietly flatters the composer’s deepest modern ambition: to get free of systems, legacies, and the polite coercions of taste. But he also refuses to romanticize that freedom into a teachable method. If there were a “Houdini school,” it would be a contradiction: institutionalized escape, a syllabus for refusing syllabi.

The subtext is Feldman’s skepticism toward compositional orthodoxy in the mid-20th century, when “schools” weren’t metaphors so much as career infrastructure. Serialism, post-serialism, Darmstadt, the academic pipeline - these were identities you could wear, languages you could be fluent in, sometimes passports you needed. Feldman, aligned with the New York School circle (Cage, Wolff, Brown) but never reducible to it, prized a sound-world that resisted argument: soft dynamics, long durations, patterns that feel handmade rather than proven.

So the line needles two audiences at once. To the system-builders, it says: your rigor can be its own set of handcuffs. To the would-be rebels, it says: don’t turn “freedom” into a brand. Real escape, Feldman implies, is solitary, situational, and unrepeatable - the opposite of a school.