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Biography
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 & ndash; July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of Aleatoric_music#.22Open_form.22_chance_music|open form ,See a critical examination of this notational concept in Clemens Gresser, "Earle Brown's 'Creative Ambiguity' and Ideas of Co-creatorship in Selected Works", Contemporary Music Review , 26/3 (2007), pp. 377–94. a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since — notably the downtown music|downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn ) and generations of younger composers.
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 .
Life
Brown was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts , and first devoted himself to playing jazz. He initially considered a career in engineering, and enrolled for engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University (1944–5). Between 1946 and 1950 he was a student at Schillinger House in Boston, which is now The Berklee College of Music. Brown had private instruction in trumpet and composition. He claims to have been influenced by artists of New York School , such as Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder. John Cage invited Brown to leave Denver and join him for the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape in New York. Brown was an editor and recording engineer for Capitol Records (1955–60) and producer for Mainstream-Time Records (1960–73).
Brown's contact to Cage exposed David Tudor to some of Brown's early piano works, and this connection lead to his music being performed in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen. Composers like Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna heard his music, and promoted his music, so that Brown's music was starting to be published, and performed more.
Brown died in 2002 of cancer, in Rye (town), New York|Rye, New York .
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 an arrow pointer to indicate which page, and with his left hand indicates which event is to be performed while his right hand cues a downbeat to begin an event. The speed and intensity of the downbeat suggests the tempo and dynamics.
Brown's first open-form piece, Twenty-Five Pages, was twenty-five unbound pages, and called for anywhere between one and twenty-five pianists. The score allowed the performer(s) to arrange the pages in whatever order they saw fit. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/81505/Earle-Brown. Also, the pages were notated symmetrically and without clefs so that the top and bottom orientation was reversible.
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 (sculpture)|mobile sculpture s and the spontaneous decision making used in the creation of Jackson Pollock's action paintings.
Notation
Although Brown precisely notated compositions throughout his career using traditional notation, he also was an inventor and early practitioner of various innovative notations.
In Twenty-Five Pages, and in other works, Brown used what he called "time notation" or "proportional notation" where rhythms were indicated by their horizontal length and placement in relation to each other and were to be interpreted flexibly. However, by Modules I and II in 1966, Brown more often used stemless note heads which could be interpreted with even greater flexibility.
In 1959, with Hodograph I, Brown sketched the contour and character abstractly in what he called "implicit areas" of the piece. This graphic style was more gestural and calligraphic than the geometric abstraction of December 1952. Beginning with Available Forms 1, Brown used this graphic notation on the staff in some sections of the score.
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& mdash;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 System, which almost exclusively used graph methods for describing music. From this perspective FOLIO was an inspired, yet logical connection to be made& mdash;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 (music)|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.
Other activities
Fromm Music Foundation: President from 1984 to 1989. Recommended several American composers of note for commissions including Henry Brant , Ornette Coleman , David Lang (composer)|David Lang , Todd Machover , Steve Mackey , Steve Reich , William Susman , James Tenney and Joan Tower .
American Music Center : President from 1986–1989.
Time-Mainstream: Repertory director for new-music recordings between 1960 and 1973. Oversaw the label's recordings of works by 49 composers from 16 countries, among them Ives, Cage, Nono, Maderna, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis and the first commercial recordings of Scelsi, Wolff and Bussotti.Allan Kozinn, " http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/08/arts/earle-brown-75-composer-known-for-innovation-dies.html Earle Brown, 75, Composer Known for Innovation, Dies" The New York Times ( July 8, 2002). Wergo has re-issued twelve of the recordings on four box sets.Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series 3 CDs " http://www.wergo.de/shop/en_UK/3/show,261751.html Earle Brown - A Life in Music - Vol. 1"
Composer-in-residence / or visiting professor at: California Institute of the Arts, UC Berkeley, Peabody Conservatory, Rotterdam Kunststichting, the Basel Conservatory of Music, Yale University, Indiana University, the American Academy in Rome, Aspen, and Tanglewood.Amy C. Beal, "An Interview with Earle Brown", Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3 & 4 (June 2007): 341–56. Citation on p. 356.
Folio and 4 Systems (1954), for variable instrumentation
Indices Piano Reduction (1954)
Octet II (1954), for eight loudspeakers
Music for Cello and Piano (1955)
Four More (1956), for piano
The Kind of Bird I Am (1957), for orchestra
Pentathis (1958), for chamber ensemble
Hodograph I (1959), for chamber ensemble
Available Forms I (1961), for chamber orchestra
Available Forms II (1962), for two orchestras
Novara (1962), for chamber ensemble
From Here (1963), for chamber orchestra
Times Five (1963), for chamber ensemble
Corroboree (1964), for three or two pianos
Nine Rarebits (1965), for one or two harpsichords
String Quartet (1965)
Calder Piece (1966), for four percussionists and mobile
Module I (1966), for orchestra
Module II (1966), for orchestra
Event: Synergy II (1967), for chamber ensemble
Module III (1969), for orchestra
Small Pieces for Large Chorus (1969)
Syntagm III (1970), for chamber ensemble
New Piece (1971), for variable instrumentation
New Piece Loops (1972), for orchestra and chorus
Sign Sounds (1972), for chamber orchestra
Time Spans (1972), for orchestra
Centering (1973), for solo violin and ensemble
Cross Sections and Color Fields (1975), for orchestra
Wikiup (1979), sound installation for six independent playing devices
Windsor Jambs (1980), for chamber ensemble
Folio II (1982), for variable instrumentation
Sounder Rounds (1983), for orchestra
Tracer (1985), for chamber ensemble
Oh, K (1992), for chamber ensemble
Tracking Pierrot (1992), for chamber ensemble
''Summer Suite '95 (1995), for piano
Special Events (1999), for chamber ensemble
Selected discography
The New York School (includes compositions by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff), hatART, 1993.
The New York School 2 (includes compositions by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff), hatART, 1995.
Four Systems, hatART, 1995. (With Eberhard Blum, flutist),
Synergy, hatART, 1995. (With Ensemble Avantgarde)
Earle Brown: Music for Piano(s), 1951–1995, New Albion, 1996. (With http://www.newalbion.com/artists/ardend/index.htm David Arden, pianist; http://www.johnyaffe.com John Yaffé, producer)
Albertson, Dan (ed.). 2007. "Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics". http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g780693788 Contemporary Music Review 26, issues 3 & 4 (subscription access).
Hoek, D. J. 2004. "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 (December): 350-60.
Nicholls, David. 2001. "Brown, Earle (Appleton)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (professor of music)|John Tyrrell . London: Macmillan Publishers.
Ryan, David. n.d. " http://www.dramonline.org/albums/earle-brown-selected-works-1952-1965/notes Earle Brown: A Sketch". Liner notes essay. New World Records .
Welsh, John P. 1994. "Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967)". Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Fall): 254–90.
http://www.johnyaffe.com Yaffé, John. 2007. " http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a780680923~frm=titlelink An Interview with Earle Brown." Contemporary Music Review 26, issues 3 & 4 (subscription access).
External links
http://www.earle-brown.org Earle Brown Music Foundation (many lengthy audio interviews and lectures in the Online Archive section)
http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/composer.pl? comp=28 Art of the States: Earle Brown three works by the composer
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/rafiles/interviews/interview_brown.ram Earle Brown interview
http://delsolquartet.com/sampletear.html Del Sol Quartet: Tear includes Brown's 1965 String Quartet performed by Del Sol Quartet
http://www.ubu.com/sound/brown.html December 52 with original notes, and sound from the legendary Darmstadt 1964 performance
Persondata | NAME = Brown, Earle | ALTERNATIVE NAMES = | SHORT DESCRIPTION = | DATE OF BIRTH = December 26, 1926 | PLACE OF BIRTH = Lunenburg, Massachusetts | DATE OF DEATH = July 2, 2002 | PLACE OF DEATH = Rye, New York DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Earle Category:1926 births Category:2002 deaths Category:American composers Category:20th-century classical composers Category:People from Lunenburg, Massachusetts Category:Tzadik Records artists Category:Rome Prize winners
da:Earle Brown de:Earle Brown (Komponist) es:Earle Brown fr:Earle Brown it:Earle Brown ja:???·???? tr:Earle Brown
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