John Cage, Morton Feldman and Marc Rothko: a friendship in art 💫

 

In 1950s New York, noise was a way of life: jazz in village clubs, endless horns in Manhattan, late-night discussions in smoke-packed bars. And yet, amid that boom, three men found common ground on the opposite: silence. Morton Feldman, John Cage and Mark Rothko—an budding composer, a music radical, and a painter reducing the world to fields of color—forged a friendship that didn’t need too many words. They understood each other in suspension, in minimum vibration, in what happens when time stops.

The first spark erupted one night in 1950 at Carnegie Hall. Feldman, son of Russian immigrants, heard how Messiaen's monumental Turangalîla was played. On his way out, he bumped into John Cage, already an uncomfortable figure in the music tradition. Cage talked about releasing sounds, letting randomness do its thing, and Feldman, fascinated, joined in on the conversation. It was the beginning of a complicity that would turn into long walks in New York and discussions that could last until dawn. From there on, Feldman never composed the same way again: Cage showed him that music wasn't a construction of certainties, but an open space to the unexpected.

In parallel, New York was boiling with another revolution: painting. Pollock splashed canvases like he was possessed, De Kooning disfigured faces with violent brushes, and Rothko began to lift his walls of color. Feldman and Cage visited the same bars and galleries as the painters of abstract expressionism; it was not separate worlds, but a single conversation unfolded in different languages. There, between drinks and feverish discussions, Feldman discovered in Rothko a mirror. Their paintings, far from Pollock's stridence, breathed like music: they were horizons of color that did not scream, barely whispered.

For Feldman, the revelation was immediate: “With Rothko I understood that the painting didn’t have to narrate anything. It was pure time.” Rothko’s canvases seemed to expand like a sustained chord, an infinite note floating in the unresolved air. Feldman began writing music that imitated that logic: mild repetitions, weighty silences, textures that barely change and yet completely alter the listener’s perception.

Cage, Feldman, and Rothko shared the same obsession: how to make the invisible visible — or audible —? For Cage, it was randomness and acceptance of the sound environment. For Rothko, it was the suspended rectangles that absorbed the viewer. For Feldman, it was slowness taken to the extreme: compositions that seemed to have no beginning or end, as if they had existed forever and one had just sat and listened to them for a while.

Friendship became legacy in 1971, when Feldman was commissioned to compose a work for the newly built Rothko Chapel in Houston. Rothko had died a year earlier, and Feldman accepted the task as an intimate duel. The result was music that didn’t illustrate the murals, but prolongs them: voices almost still, percussions barely fluttering, a violin that murmurs as if it came from another room. In that chapel of no religious denomination, where Rothko's canvases wrap the visitor in a sea of purples and black Feldman's music becomes air, suspended time.

The fascinating thing about this triangle is not just the final collaboration, but the way in which three different sensibilities converged at one point: the willingness to create experiences that transcend the narrative, the decorative, the functional. Their friendship was, at the bottom, a silent pact to defend the inaccessible: the pause, the shadow, what remains when you renounce the stridence of the world.

New York was never a city of silence, but Cage, Feldman and Rothko managed to invent one. A shared silence that still echoes in every fading chord, in every rectangle that seems to beat in gloom, in every memory of three men who dared to turn nothing into art.