Working nine to five in the garmen business, Feldman proudly maintained hi independence from the professional herd. H mocked the university composers who tailore their work for fellow-analysts, the tona composers who tried to please orchestr audiences, the inventor-composers wh unveiled brand-new isms each summer at th state-funded European festivals. “Innovation be damned,” he snapped. “It’s a borin century.” In 1972, he obtained his post at SUNY Buffalo, but he continued to insist that composition could not be taught, that it should not be professionalized. He loved to challenge students’ assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic. When I visited the small archive of Feldman papers at SUNY Buffalo, I came across an exam paper in which the composer asked his students to analyze Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony alongside Webern’s Concerto Opus 24. How the would-be revolutionaries of the day must have scratched their heads over that! Another assignment was to write a piece for soprano and string quartet, using a text from the Buffalo Evening News.