In 1961 a film director fired Morton Feldman on the spot for scoring a brutal assault scene with delicate, bell-like music. This episode explores the composer who worked full time in his family's children's coat business in Manhattan's Garment District until age 47, and how that paycheck gave him the freedom to ignore audiences, directors, and critics while inventing sounds no one had heard before.

The hosts trace Feldman's early lessons with a piano teacher who prized the life force of music over mechanics, his argument-filled studies with Stefan Wolpe, the 1950 New York Philharmonic walkout that introduced him to John Cage, and the abstract expressionist painters, including Pollock, Guston, and Rothko, who taught him to treat sound like paint. They explain his graph-paper notation, why he abandoned indeterminacy around 1970 when performer ...