Earle Brown was an American composer, producer, and teacher who worked closely with John Cage. He developed special ways of writing music and created a style called "open form." This style influenced many composers, including John Zorn and musicians in New York City during the 1980s, as well as later composers.

Some of Brown's most famous works include December 1952, a musical score that uses images instead of traditional notes, and Available Forms I & II, Centering, Cross Sections, and Color Fields. In 1998, he was honored with a John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Early life and education

Earle Appleton Brown was born on December 26, 1926, in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. He first focused on playing jazz music. He studied engineering and math at Northeastern University from 1944 to 1945. In 1945, he joined the U.S. Air Force. The war ended while he was still in basic training, and he was assigned to the military band at Randolph Field, Texas. There, he played the trumpet. The band included saxophonist Zoot Sims. From 1946 to 1950, he was a student at Schillinger House in Boston, which is now called Berklee College of Music. During this time, he also took private lessons in trumpet playing and music composition.

Career

After graduating, he moved to Denver to teach Schillinger techniques. John Cage invited Brown to leave Denver and join him for the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape in New York. Brown worked as an editor and recording engineer for Capitol Records from 1955 to 1960 and later became a producer for Time-Mainstream Records from 1960 to 1973.

Brown’s connection with Cage introduced David Tudor to some of Brown’s early piano works. This connection led to Brown’s music being performed in Darmstadt and Donaueschingen. Composers such as Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna helped spread his music, which later became more widely performed and published.

Brown is considered a member of the New York School of composers, along with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. Brown named the visual artists Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock as two main influences on his work. Author Gertrude Stein and other artists, such as Max Ernst and Robert Rauschenberg, also inspired him.

Brown’s notable students included Joe Jones, Paul Dresher, Michael Daugherty, Sarah Meneely Kyder, and George Brunner.

Formal and notational systems

Leonard Brown developed a musical idea called "open form." This style of music has inspired many composers, including John Zorn and musicians in the downtown New York scene of the 1980s, as well as younger composers who came after.

Most of Brown's compositions are written in fixed sections, though these sections often use unusual or unique types of musical notation. The order of these sections is not fixed and is decided by the conductor during a performance. The music is divided into numbered sections called "events" and organized across multiple "pages." During a performance, the conductor uses a card to show which page to use. The conductor's left hand points to the specific event to perform, while the right hand signals the start of the music with a downbeat. The speed and strength of the downbeat help set the tempo and volume.

Brown's first open-form piece, Twenty-Five Pages, included 25 unbound pages and required between one and 25 pianists. The score allowed performers to arrange the pages in any order they chose. The pages were written symmetrically without clefs, meaning they could be flipped upside down or right side up.

Because of this flexibility, no two performances of an open-form piece by Brown are the same. However, each piece still has a clear identity, and Brown's works vary greatly from one another. Brown compared his open-form approach to the way Alexander Calder created mobile sculptures and to the spontaneous choices made by Jackson Pollock when painting.

Throughout his career, Brown used traditional musical notation to write precise compositions. He also created and used new types of notation.

In Twenty-Five Pages and other works, Brown used a system called "time notation" or "proportional notation." In this method, rhythms were shown by the length and placement of notes on the page, and performers were encouraged to interpret them freely. In Modules I and II (1966), Brown used note symbols without stems more often, allowing for even more flexibility in performance.

In 1959, Brown created Hodograph I, where he sketched the shape and mood of the music in what he called "implicit areas." This style was more movement-based and handwritten than the geometric style used in December 1952. Starting with Available Forms I, Brown included this type of graphic notation on musical staffs in some sections of his scores.

Major works

Among his most famous works are December 1952, a score that uses only visual images instead of traditional musical notes, and the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, Cross Sections, and Color Fields.

December 1952 is likely Brown’s most well-known composition. It is part of a larger collection of music called FOLIO, which uses non-traditional notation methods. Some people believe FOLIO appeared without any musical history behind it, but musical notation has always taken many forms, both for creating and analyzing music. Brown studied what is now called Early Music, which had its own unique notation system. He also studied the Schillinger System, which used graphs to describe music. From this background, FOLIO was a natural and thoughtful development, especially for someone from the Northeast who grew up playing and improvising jazz.

December 1952 uses only horizontal and vertical lines of different widths, spread across the page. It is an important piece in the history of visual musical notation. The performer reads the visual elements and translates them into music. In notes about the piece, Brown even suggests imagining the two-dimensional space as three-dimensional, as if moving through it. The other works in the collection are less abstract than December 1952.

Selected discography

• The New York School (features works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff), hatART, 1993.
• The New York School 2 (features works 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 David Arden, pianist; John Yaffé, producer).
• Brown: Centering: Windsor Jambs; Tracking Pierrot; Event: Synergy II, Newport, 1998.
• American Masters Series: Earle Brown, CRI, 2000.
• Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952–1965, 2006.
• Folio and Four Systems, 2006.
• Earle Brown: Chamber Works, 2007 (DVD).
• Earle Brown: Tracer, 2007.
• Wergo Contemporary Sound Series, recorded from 1960–1973: Earle Brown – A Life in Music (3 CDs each).

Personal life

Brown was married to Carolyn Brown, a dancer who performed with Merce Cunningham during the 1950s and 1970s. Later, he married Susan Sollins, an art curator. He passed away on July 2, 2002, from cancer in Rye, New York, United States.