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Earle Brown
David Ryan on the work of Earle Brown
Anybody who has consulted or even casually flicked through a survey of modern music will have come across the spare geometric graphics of Earle Brown's score December 1952. It has become a classic visual image, an example, perhaps the example, of a radical break that occurred in the 1950s between the causality of the sonic event and score. It has also been seen as perhaps the first serious invitation to the classical musician to improvise rather than 'read' in the conventional sense, and much has been made of Earle Brown's early experiences with jazz in connection with this, as well as the impact of visual artists Pollock and Calder on such scores. But this tells only half the story of his concerns and his development as a composer.
Brown (b.1926) is a veteran of the original post war avant-garde of Cage, Feldman, Boulez, Stockhausen etc. December 1952 represents only one aspect of a complex dialectic of openness and determinacy that is initiated between different works as well as within individual ones. Folio (which includes December) of 1952-3 consists of a set of pieces which ask questions about how much information (by almost systematically removing it) the performer actually needs; at the same time as these extremely open scores we also find highly determined and complex ones (in the conventional sense) such as Perspectives (1952) and Indices (1954). After the important 25 pages for 1-25 pianos (1953), he develops more consistently a notion (but not a technique) of open form. Here, Brown attempts to find a path which embraces both extreme variability and flexibility while maintaining an identity for the piece in question, as he himself explains: "There must be a fixed (even flexible) sound content, to establish the character of the work, in order to be called 'open' or 'available' form. We recognise people regardless of what they are doing or saying or how they are dressed if their basic identity has been established as a constant but flexible function of being alive." The key work for such a conception is his Available Forms 1 of 1961-2.
It is the above quote that displays Brown's continuing emphasis on spontaneity through combining elements in different ways and these might include graphic sections, improvisational mobile qualities as well as highly-wrought passages demanding playing of great accuracy. It has been said that if Earle Brown has a signature style then it is in a "quickness of line and gesture", and this is certainly a feature of his writing for small ensembles. Such a piece is Tracking Pierrot of 1992 which takes the basic instrumental unit of the Pierrot ensemble but with voice replaced by percussion, and creates open, transparent webs of sound occasionally punctuated by languorous cascades of chordal blocks. Corroboree for three pianos of 1964 develops a different sense of openness - the form of the work is in time brackets, thus fixing the macro-form but allowing within these brackets what Brown calls a "three-way sonic 'spatial' conversation'". To this we might add the large orchestral compositions (sadly rarely heard over here but often performed in Germany and Austria), often employing massive chordal "pillars of sound".
What has become increasingly clear is the variety of methods and solutions Brown brought to compositions. He remains a vital link between the European avant-garde and the Americans, not only through important associations with Cage, Feldman, Boulez, Maderna and Berio amongst others, but also through his particular attitudes to creating new notational systems for differing situations which has had a profound effect on composition and performance techniques.