Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.

A compelling portrait of composer-performer Julius Eastman's enigmatic and intriguing life and music. Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us with his obsessions. Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cage's Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, and the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. These episodes are examples of Eastman's persistence in pushing the limits of the acceptable in the highly charged arenas of sexual and civil rights. In addition to analyses of Eastman's music, the essays in Gay Guerrilla provide background on his remarkable life history and the era's social landscape. The book presents an authentic portrait of a notable American artist thatis compelling reading for the general reader as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century American music, American studies, gay rights, and civil rights. This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music inBuffalo received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence. Mary Jane Leach is a composer and freelance writer, currently writing music and theatre criticism for the Albany Times-Union.

Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde documents the collaborations and conflicts essential to the history of the post-war avant-garde. It offers a study of composer Morton Feldman's associations and friendships with artists like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Moorman, and others. Arguing that friendship and mourning sustained the collective aesthetics of the New York School, Dohoney has written an emotional and intimate revision of New York modernism from the point of view of Feldman's agonistic community.

A compelling portrait of composer-performer Julius Eastman's enigmatic and intriguing life and music. Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us with his obsessions. Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cage's Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, and the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. These episodes are examples of Eastman's persistence in pushing the limits of the acceptable in the highly charged arenas of sexual and civil rights. In addition to analyses of Eastman's music, the essays in Gay Guerrilla provide background on his remarkable life history and the era's social landscape. The book presents an authentic portrait of a notable American artist thatis compelling reading for the general reader as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century American music, American studies, gay rights, and civil rights. This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music inBuffalo received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence. Mary Jane Leach is a composer and freelance writer, currently writing music and theatre criticism for the Albany Times-Union.

Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Built in 1971 for "people of all faiths or none," the chapel houses 14 monumental paintings by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, who had committed suicide in only one year earlier. Upon its opening, visitors' responses to the chapel ranged from spiritual succor to abject tragedy-the latter being closest to Rothko's intentions. However the chapel's founders-art collectors and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil-opened the space to provide an ecumenically and spiritually affirming environment that spoke to their avant-garde approach to Catholicism. A year after the chapel opened, Morton Feldman's musical work Rothko Chapel proved essential to correcting the unintentionally grave atmosphere of the de Menil's chapel, translating Rothko's existential dread into sacred ecumenism for visitors. Author Ryan Dohoney reconstructs the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the premier of Feldman's music for the space, and documents the ways collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of art and its potential translation into religious feeling. Rather than frame the debate as a conflict of art versus religion, Dohoney argues that the popular claim of modernism's autonomy from religion has been overstated and that the two have been continually intertwined in an agonistic tension that animates many 20th-century artistic collaborations.