Feldman transformed atonal vocabulary into eerie distant beauty

Morton Feldman took the unearthly atonal vocabulary of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—harmonies that were prickly and alarming in their original context—and, by keeping everything quiet and spaced out, transformed them into distant, eerie objects of radical beauty that can be contemplated from a distance like Rothko's misty abstract paintings, an aesthetic of radical quietude especially appealing in moments of frenzy and chaos.