Earle Brown

Earle Brown (Lunenburg, Massachusetts, December 26, 1926 – Rye, New York, July 2, 2002) was an American composer. Among his many innovations, he near-singlehandedly re-invigorated classical music with improvisation by establishing his own formal and notational systems. He did this at a time when his peer John Cage was actively dismissing improvisation as the regurgitation of one's habits, a position incompatible with Cage's Zen leanings.

Brown was the creator of open form, a style of musical construction that has influenced many waves of composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers who seek to discover their own way through the axis of choice vs. chance vs. determinacy and the way notation and form play a role in these balances.

Among his most famous works are December 1952 with its use of a 'radical' (entirely graphic) score, the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, and Cross Sections and Color Fields.

Open form

For a great deal of Brown's compositions the music is composed as fixed modules (though often with idiosyncratic mixtures of notation), but the order is left free to be chosen during performance by the conductor. The material is divided in numbered "Events" on a series of "Pages." The conductor uses a homemade pointer to indicate which page, and with his left hand indicates which event. His or her left hand is free to control dynamics and add punctuations, etc.

Brown's first open-form piece, Twenty-five Pages, was twenty five pages long, and called for anywhere between one and twenty-five pianists. The score, however, allowed the conductor to choose whatever order they saw fit^[1].

Through this procedure, no two performances of an open form Brown score are the same, yet each piece retains a singular identity and his works exhibit great variety from work to work. Brown relates his work in open form to a combination of Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures and the spontaneous decision making used in the creation of Jackson Pollock's action paintings.

December 1952 and FOLIO

December 1952 is perhaps Brown's most famous score. It is part of a larger set of unusually notated music called FOLIO. Although this collection is also misconstrued as coming out of nowhere historically, music notation has existed in many forms—both as a mechanism for creation and analysis. Brown studied what is now called Early Music, which has its own system of notation, and was a student of the Schillinger Method, which almost exclusively used graph methods for describing music. From this perspective FOLIO was an inspired, yet logical connection to be made—especially for a Northeasterner who grew up playing and improvising Jazz.

December 1952 consists purely of horizontal and vertical lines varying in width, spread out over the page, it is a landmark piece in the history of graphic notation of music. The role of the performer is to interpret the score visually and translate the graphical information to music. In Brown's notes on the work he even suggests that one consider this 2D space as 3D and imagine moving through it. The other pieces in the collection are not as abstract. Since each is dated individually, one can see that Brown wrote the very abstract December 1952 and then moved back towards forms of notation that contain more specific musical information.

Further reading

• Dan Albertson (ed.). "Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics," in Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 26 Issue 3 & 4 (2007), Routledge (subscription access).
• D.J. Hoek. "Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series," Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 61, no. 2 (Dec. 2004): 350-60.
• J.P. Welsh. "Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967)," Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (1994): 254–90.

References

External links

• Earle Brown Music Foundation (many lengthy audio interviews and lectures in the Online Archive section)
• Art of the States: Earle Brown three works by the composer
• Earle Brown interview
• Del Sol Quartet: Tear includes Brown's 1965 String Quartet performed by Del Sol Quartet