Earle Brown 1925–2002

Students of twentieth-century music, even those unfamiliar with the sound of his music, will recognise at least one score by Earle Brown: an elegant arrangement of Modrianesque rectangles entitled December 1952. A treat as much for the eye as for the ear, it assumed classic status almost as soon as it was written, and was routinely reproduced in textbooks on modern music. Today, it continues to exert its enigmatic fascination on intrepid performers unfazed by its notational peculiarities.

Yet for all its legendary allure, December 1952 is atypical of Brown’s work as a whole. Although he was an early, keen exponent of graphic notation, and a close friend and colleague of John Cage, he was reluctant to leave the creative input entirely to the whimsy of the performer. He believed each work should inhabit a precisely defined soundworld that was in the gift of the composer, however great the freedoms conceded to the players. To this end, he pioneered the concept of ‘open form’, an idea later taken up by composers as diametrically opposed to him in aesthetic outlook as Boulez and Stockhausen.

Although graphic and indeterminate notation became a pre-occupation for many significant composers worldwide during the 1960s and 70s, including the leading lights of the European avant-garde, its heartland was the New York of the 1950s and its catalyst the visual arts. As Brown himself recalled: ‘My primary esthetic influences were the spontaneity, direct contact, the "now-ness" and the in-the-moment immediacy of the Abstract Expressionist painters, especially the "improvisational" techniques of Jackson Pollock and the subtle coloristic effects of Philip Guston and Bill de Kooning’. Other important influences on Brown were the mobiles of Alexander Calder, the collage techniques of Robert Rauschenberg, and — from his early years playing jazz trumpet — the spacious, energetic big-band sound of Stan Kenton.

Born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, Earle Brown initially embarked on an aeronautical career, studying engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944—45). After two years in the US Army Air Corps — where he gained his pilot’s licence and played trumpet in the Corps orchestra — he attended the Schillinger School of Music in Boston (1946—50), while studying the trumpet and composition privately. Together with his first wife Carolyn, he then moved to Denver to teach the Schillinger method. There he painted and, even then under the spell of Pollock and Calder as well as the poetry of Kenneth Patchen and the music of Webern and Varèse, began to compose a kind of Schillinger-based serial music which exhibited remarkable though unintentional parallels with the contemporaneous work of Messiaen, Boulez and Xenakis in Europe.

A meeting with Cage and Merce Cunningham resulted in a further move, to New York, where Carolyn became leading female dancer in the Cunningham troupe and Brown worked laboriously on Cage’s mammoth Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. One result of this grand if primitive exercise in electro-acoustic music was Brown’s lively Octet I for eight channels, using the disjecta of other tape works.

For a short while, Brown continued to write serially-oriented works. At the same time he was pursuing the investigations into the relationship between performer, composer and score which culminated in the infamous December 1952. He later distanced himself from the work, saying that it was ‘an activity rather than a piece by me because of the content being supplied by the musicians’.

A more characteristic work from this period is 25 pages for 1—25 pianos (1953), in which the pitches are fully notated, the rhythms are spaced proportionally across the page, and the pages can be played either way up, in any order. But it is Brown’s open forms, influenced by Calder’s mobiles, and typified by Available forms I (1961), which has proved most influential. In this work, each of the score’s six unbound pages specifies four or five events. The conductor, who has general control over dynamics and velocity, begins with any event on any page and creates from the available materials an individually shaped version of the work.

Further permutations of these basic principles occur in Brown’s largest compositions. In Available forms II (1962) for 98 players in two groups, in which 48 ‘events’ are mobilised by two conductors. In Calder piece (1966) for four percussionists, Brown had the idea that one of Calder’s mobiles could act as a ‘conductor’. Calder himself produced a specific mobile for his piece, which also uses a battery of percussion instruments.

Through Cage and Tudor, Brown soon attracted the attention of the avant-garde in Europe, where he became a frequent visitor. He lectured at Darmstadt, and received several commissions, including those for Penthatis, Available forms I, which provoked spontaneous applause and an immediate second performance, and Available forms II. Critics were as quick to praise the joy, freshness, and musicianship of his music as were composers to appropriate his ideas.

In his later music, Brown continued to explore new ways of balancing freedom for the performer with his own clearly defined input. In Centering (1973), Windsor jambs (1980) and Tracking Pierrot (1992), the overall shape of each work is fixed, while elements within each structure remain open. In the fully notated Summer suite ’95, ‘the jazziest of my piano pieces’, Brown employed computer technology to transcribe his own performances of graphed sketches, fulfilling an early desire to ‘get the time of composing closer to the time of performing’.

Brown held many prestigious appointments, including the W. Alton Jones chair of composition and composer-in-residence at the Peabody Conservatory, Baltimore, the directorship of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, and positions at DAAD Berlin, SUNY, Buffalo, the California Institute of the Arts, Yale University, and the Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals.

He also garnered many awards and commissions both in the USA and abroad, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters Awards, and commissions from Darmstadt, Paris, Zagreb, London, Rome, Saarbrücken and Venice. Later European distinctions included appointments as composer-in-residence with the Künstler Programm, West Berlin, and the Rotterdam PO, visiting professor at the Basel Conservatory, guest conductor with the Cologne RSO and Saarbrücken RSO, and membership of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

Earle Brown: born Lunenburg, Massachusetts, 26 December 1926; died Rye, New York, 2 July 2002.