Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown

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Acknowledgments Beyond Notation has been a project with many moving parts. Thank you to the University of Michigan Press for enabling this book to materialize in its fullest form. I was lucky to have Mary Francis as my editor, who oversaw this project with expertise and care. Thank you also to Christopher Dreyer and Paula Newcomb for handling the extensive artwork for this book, and to Mary Hashman, RenГ©e Tambeau, Kathryn Beaton, and Jenny Geyer for their assistance. The illustrations in Beyond Notation were supported by two subventions. Thank you to The Earle Brown Music Foundation and to its Trustees, Marybeth Sollins and Andrew Farnsworth, for a publication subvention toward this collection. Thank you also to Philip DiTullio and the Schillinger Society for its subvention toward Louis Pine’s chapter. Gene Caprioglio of C. F. Peters New York generously granted permission to reproduce the scores in this volume. For research materials and additional permissions, thank you to David Sanders of the National Music Council, Claudia Mayer-Haase of Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Vivian Rehman of Breitkopf & HГ¤rtel, Stefan StГҐhle of Moderna Museet, Christopher Wait of New Directions, Sally McKay of Getty Research Institute, Kevin McGee and Peggy Monastra of Schirmer, Heather Smedberg of University of California, San Diego Special Collections, and Nick Patterson and Elizabeth Davis of the Columbia University Music Library. I am grateful to several individuals who provided valuable knowledge and advice at different stages of this project: Susan Boynton, Walter Frisch, Micah Silver, William Brooks, Kyle Gann, Lydia Goehr, D. J. Hoek, Neil Dufallo, James Klosty, Amy Beal, Sarah Meneely-Kyder, Meridith Murray, Carl Bettendorf, and Hans and Gertrud Zender. My deep gratitude goes Page xii →to Carolyn Brown, who provided research materials from her personal collection and whose unfaltering knowledge I sought on numerous occasions. Richard Toop deserves separate mention here. His brilliant chapter for this volume, “Their Man in Europe, Our Man in America: Earle Brown and the European Avante-Garde,” will no doubt spur further inquiries into Brown’s work, as the essay confronts the most necessary questions about Brown’s reception. Richard’s involvement in this book was important from the start, and he urged it onward with levity and assurance throughout its development (at one point he invoked The Pilgrim’s Progress). Richard passed away shortly before the book went to print. He will be profoundly missed by many of us who have long followed his writings on postwar music with great admiration. Many of the essays in this collection were shared in their early stages at Earle Brown’s alma mater in Boston, Northeastern University, which hosted the first conference on his life and music, January 18–19, 2013, in partnership with The Earle Brown Music Foundation. I thank the authors for developing their papers into the chapters that occupy this volume. I am also grateful to Anthony De Ritis and to Northeastern’s Department of Music, Gallery 360, and the College of Arts, Media, and Design for providing an unprecedented scholarly forum for Brown. Stephen Drury and his Callithumpian Consort—an ensemble that continues to inspire—gave life to Brown’s scores in two full-house concerts for the symposium. During my time in Boston, it was a privilege to learn about “Juge” through Earle Brown’s sister, Marilyn Brown Krysil. We drove throughout Lunenburg to view their childhood home, grade school, family store, and other dwelling places of relatives and friends. Jim Larkin of the Lunenburg Historical Society and its stellar staff further located important family information. This book would not have been possible without The Earle Brown Music Foundation, which offered voluminous archival materials and unwavering support toward the study of Brown’s life and music. I first visited Brown’s studio-archive in 2003 as a graduate student, and was amazed by the materials preserved at the composer’s home, originally built in 1972 with Susan Sollins-Brown, in a lofted study overlooking a verdant millpond. Micah Silver, who studied composition privately with Brown in his final years, oversaw the archive at the time. I also met Susan during that initial visit, and she was endlessly welcoming throughout the many visits I later made during the preparation of this book. Susan tirelessly promoted the scholarship and performance of Brown’s music until her passing in 2014. My sincere gratitude to Thomas Fichter, Executive Director Page xiii →of EBMF, who has also been a steadfast advocate of this project and an immense resource. Thank you also to Jason Cady and Matthew Welch of EBMF for their assistance and erudition over the years. I have often thought back to a concert I attended in May 2000 at Alice Tully Hall when Brown co-conducted a program featuring his

works with Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Orchestra. Brown’s stage presence was striking, and the punctuated sonorities he elicited from the orchestra during the Modules (I and III that night) were just as intense as the dramatic cutoffs he motioned. At intermission, it surprised me to see Brown intermingling casually in the lobby, smile gleaming. The concert introduced me to aspects of Brown I had neither heard nor read, and have not forgotten since. Historians may observe better from a distance, but I know I missed an opportunity to meet an extraordinary artist and personality. This collection serves to capture some of that artistry. Finally, a special note to the other contributors to this project for their long commitment. My family supported this book in many ways as my research moved between Boston (thank you Mom, Dad, Jo), New York City, and Rye. Dwight, Noëlle, and Lyla: no acknowledgment can fully capture my heartfelt thanks.

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Foreword A Less “Cloistered” Music Kyle Gann I think that I am not alone in suspecting that the conference that led to this book will have marked the onset of a new era in the understanding of Earle Brown. I am probably also not alone in finding myself surprised by my rethinking of his music that this opportunity occasioned. He is a composer I thought I had understood; it turns out I hadn’t. As familiar as I had been with him, my sense of him was superficial. Of the four composers grouped together as the New York School—John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff being the other three—Brown is the one who tends to get most sucked into the group identity. Probably most of the information in print about him comes from books on Cage. In a large percentage of the places where his name is mentioned, it is between commas, and sandwiched between those of Feldman and Wolff. We read that he spent months splicing tape with Cage. The notation of his early graphic piece December 1952, along with 4 Systems and 25 Pages, is adduced as having freed the performer for a kind of controlled improvisation, but there is little mention of Brown’s own impressive performance skills, the types of musical sonority he builds up, the details of his textural proclivities. We are led to think that he emerged with his friends and did something wonderful in the 1950s, though no one can quite say what the results were, nor what he went on to do afterward. Cage, of course, was always a titan and uniquely individual. Feldman Page xvi →greatly expanded his reputation by expanding the length of his works, and by having so many important and devoted students. Wolff belonged not only to the New Yorkers, but also to a generation of political composers that included Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, and the Scratch Orchestra people. But Brown, as I am not the first to write, tends to get folded, and wrongly so, into the concepts of chance and indeterminacy; he himself emphasized choice and even the Romanticism of his music. It is time, I think, to discuss how inadequate those earlier categories are for his music, and to correct some long-standing misconceptions. There are several reasons for these. During the decades in which Feldman’s reputation took off and Cage cemented his status as a grand old man, Brown’s production and public appearances decreased; in later years, his activities were curtailed by illness. His work list includes only nine pieces written in the last twenty-six years of his life. More potent, probably, is that Brown’s music is very much a performative art. As evocative as his scores look, there is a gap between them and the sound of his music that was filled in by his own performances. I remember his long arms and fingers and his elegant performance gestures when he conducted, which were almost balletic, and with which he seemed to sculpt the sound in the middle of the stage. He had a conducting technique, a very style of moving, whose crisp gestures elicited flourishes of sound in ever surprising ways and with great exactitude. Those hands turned orchestras into huge acoustic theremins. As much as I thrilled to see him in action, I always wondered somewhat whether his music would survive his performances of it, whether they would ever seem as authentic in someone else’s hands. He himself was an amazing and seemingly irreplaceable musical instrument. Watching him was something like seeing Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies played on his own player pianos, a rare treat likely to disappear forever. One can see why, starting in the 1980s, Earle seemed to start fading into the fabric of history, and it was not the fault of the music, which was always vivid and dynamic. I first saw Earle Brown at the first “June in Buffalo” symposium in 1975, where Feldman’s invited composers were Brown, Cage, and Wolff—the great New York School in toto. Of the four figures Earle seemed the most suave and cosmopolitan, smoking away on his exotic European cigarettes. I remember two stories from the week he was featured, one of which was more about Feldman. He and Feldman got to discussing their compositional processes, and Feldman described how he picked what instruments to write for. He paused, and Brown said, “But Morty, just because you’ve Page xvii →picked the instruments doesn’t mean the piece is finished.” And Feldman replied quietly, though with perhaps his habitual mythmaking ostentation, “For me it is.”

More indicative of Brown was a line he drew between himself and Cage. The previous week, Cage had spoken about Daisetz Suzuki, and drew on the board a diagram Suzuki had used in class: a circle with two short parallel lines crossing it near the top. The circle, Cage explained, represented the ego, and the two lines were the opening out of the ego that Zen consciousness makes possible. During one of Earle Brown’s lectures, he drew the same diagram on the board, but said that he thought the whole point of Zen was to charm the ego into freedom and spontaneity, not merely to bypass it, as Cage did by using chance processes. At age nineteen I was very struck by this, partly because I thought Cage was God and couldn’t imagine him being wrong about anything, and especially couldn’t imagine his great protГ©gГ© Earle Brown taking issue with him. And yet even at the time, with what little I knew about Zen, I had a vague premonition that Earle was probably right. It is well documented that, in 1952 when Earle came to New York to join a New York School that had already been defining itself, Feldman was infamously resentful. They argued when Earle defended Pierre Boulez, not realizing that Boulez had already made some disparaging remarks about Feldman, and for many years their relationship seems to have remained cold and wary. As late as the 1960s, Feldman drew an analogy between the New York School and the Second Viennese School, claiming that Cage corresponded to Schoenberg, he himself to Berg, and Wolff to Webern. When asked whom Brown corresponded to, Feldman said, apparently rather dismissively, “KЕ™enek.”1 (And we know from other Feldman interviews that he considered Ernst KЕ™enek rather a third-rate composer.) But perhaps we can invert this perception and turn Earle’s differences from this group into a compliment and an asset. The most obvious thing separating him from the others was his expertise in jazz. In a 2002 interview with Cornelius Dufallo and Gregg Bendian that’s posted on the Music Mavericks website, Earle makes the amazing statement: [Cage] didn’t like jazz at all. I thought the best way to get John to listen to jazz and be a little interested in it would be the Modern Jazz Quartet. But he wouldn’t listen at all. Morty didn’t either. Tudor [didn’t] either. I think they’re missing so much. And it’s why I think their music is more cloistered than mine, I hope.2 Page xviii →Isn’t that sad, that Earle couldn’t get John and Morty to listen to the Modern Jazz Quartet? I’m old enough to remember when antijazz snobbishness was common among classical musicians, but Earle was stylistically omnivorous decades before it became hip. Let us make this one facet of our revisionism in this book: Earle Brown made a kind of music that was less cloistered than that of his friends in the avant-garde, more connected to what was going on elsewhere. (And I have to wonder whether that jazz connection had something to do with Feldman’s remark about KЕ™enek, who also famously wrote a jazz-inspired opera.) After all, Earle met Stan Kenton before he met John Cage. He had started out as a jazz trumpet player, and moved to Colorado to teach jazz arranging and the Schillinger system. As he recounts in the interview, he was working in a furnishings store one day when drummer Shelly Manne walked in, and that night Earle got to meet Stan Kenton, whose band was playing in town. One of the things they were playing was Bob Graettinger’s City of Glass, which was an amazingly precocious experiment in atonal jazz from 1947. Whenever he taught in colleges, Earle said, he liked to slip in City of Glass and see if the students could guess the composer. And because this piece is not discussed much these days, it’s worth seeking out and listening to so we can begin thinking about Earle’s music in relation to it. As a record producer, which was an important part of his career, Earle had fond memories of working with Quincy Jones, Count Basie, and Frank Sinatra’s arranger Don Costa, and of producing Steve Lawrence and Eydie GormГ© in the 1960 album We Got Us. Cage studied with Schoenberg, Feldman with Stefan Wolpe, but Earle’s music was grounded in a broader American tradition that many avant-gardists regrettably looked down their nose on at the time. Another source of Earle’s aesthetic was his work in Schillinger technique; he had attended Schillinger House in Boston before it became the Berklee College of Music. This was another link to mostly writers of popular music, since Gershwin, Oscar Levant, Vernon Duke, and many Tin Pan Alley songwriters also studied with

Schillinger. I don’t want to say much about Schillinger technique because I’m not an expert and Louis Pine addresses this in chapter 3 of the present book, but the general principle is that mathematics is the basis of all beautiful design, and that one can generate musical variety within unity by applying simple mathematical procedures. (Personally I was fascinated by Schillinger’s ideas before I realized they were Schillinger’s, and my music is obsessed with what his system refers to as “interference of periodicities,” whether monomial, binomial, Page xix →trinomial, and so on. So I take this stuff very seriously.) One tendency that it seems to me that Schillinger technique seems to reinforce is that each section of a piece of music will juggle the same number of elements throughout; in other words, there is rarely much gradual or cumulative change within a given section. I find this fairly true of Earle’s scores as one looks at them page by page, and wonder if that was a result of Schillinger’s type of thinking. But what I mainly bring Schillinger up for is to refer to the more structural aspects of Earle’s music that we are not yet used to talking about. I am going to skip over December 1952 (about which even Earle complained, “Everybody wants to reproduce that piece. It’s as if I hadn’t written anything after December 1952”). Instead I’ll go to Module I from 1966, and the example I am going to give comes from John Welsh’s article “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II” from Perspectives of New Music, one of the very few published articles to make an in-depth statement about Brown’s methods.3 The first page of Module I contains five chords, of which you see four in figure 0.1. The fifth chord is all of these chords played together, transposed up a perfect fourth. Each chord contains six pitches, and since one pitch, a middle Eв™-, appears in two chords, there are twenty-three pitches altogether. If we add all the pitches into one chord, as happens in the fifth chord, we find a sonority that is symmetrical around that Eв™-, the same interval pattern spreading out from that note in both directions. Welsh goes on further to point out that each chord contains three major sevenths, and is orchestrated to emphasize those major sevenths by scoring each of them in the same class of instrument (figure 0.2). Welsh does not mention, though, that each of those chords can also be analyzed as the combination of two triads, one major and one minor, with roots a major third apart, a kind of bitonal effect. We can find a similar example in Cross Sections and Color Fields from nine years later, in 1975. All of the notes from the first two and a half minutes of this work come from a single chord, shown in figure 0.3. Again, this thirteen-note chord is symmetrical by inversion, made up from a symmetrical pattern of minor thirds and perfect fourths. Again and more obviously, this pattern results in a series of triads, including major and minor triads with the same root: starting from the bottom, F minor, Cв™Ї major, Cв™Ї minor, A major, A minor, Aв™-major, Aв™-minor, E major, E minor, and C major. Note that this is not a twelve-tone collection, and that the C is tripled in the outer octaves and in the middle. This type of patterning Page xx →continues through the work; for instance, on page 9 we have a moment made up of a set of three chords all inversionally symmetrical around middle C (figure 0.4). Fig. 0.1. Chords and composite pitches, Module I (1966), page 1 Fig. 0.2. Chords as triads and major sevenths, Module I, page 1 What happens in Brown’s open form performance technique, of course, is that these chords, which are all subsets of one great symmetrical sonority, get played separately and overlap and blend, so you’re hearing various parts of that sonority emphasized at any one time. The great influence on Brown that you’ve all been thinking I haven’t mentioned yet, of course, is the mobiles of Alexander Calder. I’ve always thought that Feldman, too, Page xxii →in his late music, came up with his own effective analogue of mobile technique by having repeating figures in different instruments that come back in different phase relationships to each other. Brown does it, at least in part, by planning one large sonority within which various similar parts get disconnected from each other and combine and recombine in various configurations, differently from performance to performance. Page xxi →Fig. 0.3. Opening chord of Cross Sections and Color Fields (1975), first 2ВЅ minutes Fig. 0.4. Cross Sections and Color Fields, page 9. Copyright В© 2009 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation.

As Feldman perceptively wrote about Brown later, after he had become more sympathetic to his music, “What is unique about Earle Brown is that while he possesses a mind superbly geared toward the analytic, he has nevertheless rejected the idea of system.”4 I’m not so sure Brown entirely rejected the idea of system, but certainly any sense of system falls well into the background when the music is played. As much as Brown is the member of the New York School who was sympathetic to jazz, I’ve always felt he also inhabited a sound world that was closer to what European composers were doing at the time than his American colleagues did. (And indeed, several other chapters subsequently make the point that Brown’s music was quicker to get European performances and commissions than that of Cage, Feldman, or Wolff.) Take, for example, the parallel melodic figures that run through Cross Sections and Color Fields (figure 0.5). They are mostly in parallel chords, such as the second-inversion major seventh chords here, though the lines themselves are atonal. Their polyphonic orchestral effect is fairly similar to what Pierre Boulez does in Rituel, as can be seen in figure 0.6. Brown’s lines seem cleaner because they are mostly diatonic pitch collections moving in parallel. Likewise, the effect at the beginning of Cross Sections and Color Fields in which one bittersweet chord passes among various groups of instruments is reminiscent of the chord at the opening of Berio’s Sinfonia, made up of dominant sevenths on D and Fв™Ї, which starts in the solo voices and spreads into the orchestra. I don’t mean to speculate that Brown was influenced in these effects by Berio and Boulez, though I suppose that’s possible. I think it has more to do with the fact that, like some of the continental Europeans, he was writing orchestral music of unusual textures and great chromatic density while, like some of the Europeans but quite unlike Cage and Feldman, maintaining a sense of physical gesture, an intuitive naturalness of phrase. In addition, unlike the others of the New York School, Brown was more willing to allude to, and play off of, conventional harmonic and tonal connotations. In addition to the parallel diatonic pitch collections in Cross Sections and Color Fields one could cite the seven-note chords that run through Tracking Pierrot of 1992, each made up of two dominant sevenths a whole Page xxiii →step apart, and thus making up what jazzers call a Lydian dominant scale (figure 0.7). Fig. 0.5. Cross Sections and Color Fields, page 8, score reduction Fig. 0.6. Pierre Boulez, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna fГјr Orchester in 8 Gruppen (1974–75), VI. ModГ©rГ©, page 5. В© Copyright 1975 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE 15941. Used by permission. There is a wonderful effect in Available Forms 2 in which Orchestra 2 stops on a perfect fifth spread throughout the range of the orchestra (you can see it in the second chord in figure 0.8 following the squiggles). It sounds like Mahler for a moment, or rather like Bernd Alois Zimmermann making fun of Mahler—and this was in 1962! This playing off of atonality against tonality is something entirely uncharacteristic of Cage or usually of Feldman (though we could have a discussion about the ending of Rothko Page xxiv →Chapel). It is the kind of gesture that, a few years later, might have been referred to as postmodern. In fact, when Jacob Druckman came up with the term New Romanticism in the 1980s, Earle seemed to be envious, and in a 1986 interview claimed he had always considered his own music Romantic.5 I think this is not a comment one would have heard from Cage, Feldman, or Christian Wolff. Fig. 0.7. Tracking Pierrot (1992), page 2, event 2. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. What I am trying with this essay is to begin a new narrative about Earle Brown, and, in contradistinction to the musics of Cage, Feldman, and Wolff, I have so far pointed to his closer and more indebted relationship to jazz, his willingness to engage aspects of conventional tonality, and his greater gestural similarity to postserialist European music of the 1960s and 1970s. I think I can take the narrative to a more inclusive level. “Negation” was a word Feldman applied to his own composing technique, in the context of “canceling out” a note with a note a half step away in another register, but also, I think, in a more central sense of denying the listener anything he might expect to hear. I think there was a sense that Cage (in his post-1950 music),

Feldman, and Wolff (in his 1950s music) were attempting a kind of negative music, a music that refused to refer to the conventions of any other music, and that precluded any meaning that the listening mind could hold on to. (Some of you will remember a 1972 record set of the New York School by a group called Ensemble Musica Negativa.) Brown, I think—possibly due to his Schillinger studies, his origins in jazz, and his more analytical sense of music—was perhaps always headed toward a more constructive music, a music that had an underlying idea that the listener might begin to pick up. One way to put it is, an Earle Brown score gives me the feeling that if I look at it long enough, I’ll figure out what he’s doing. Long experience has taught me not to approach Feldman scores that way, let alone Cage. Fig. 0.8. Available Forms 2 (1962), Orchestra 2, page 3A. Copyright В© 1965 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. Page xxv →I trust I have written glowingly enough about Cage, Feldman, and Wolff in the past that no one will suspect me of any comparative value judgment here. A negative music that withholds meaningful detail from the listener is one kind of experience; a positive music that begins with a central idea and builds a meaningful structure from it is another kind of experience. Brown’s term for the difference, I think, is impossible to improve on: the musics of Cage and Feldman are “more cloistered” than his, more set away in a kind of spiritual renunciation. Not that there’s anything wrong with Page xxvi →being cloistered, I rather like being cloistered myself at times, but a music that is cloistered, whatever its novelty at a given historical moment, is not inherently superior to a more generous, extroverted music that is open to a dialogue with other musics. Brown’s music, despite the bold innovation of his open form, might be described as more ontologically conventional than theirs, and not so ascetic. It does, as he implied in 1975, attempt to charm the ego, not to bypass it. I wonder if this was the difference that Feldman intuited about Brown that made him think he was not really “one of us”—or whether it really was just that Brown had said something nice about Boulez, which, having known Feldman, I can kind of imagine. In any case, I’m glad the time has arrived to rescue Earle Brown from this New York School limbo into which he seems to have fallen. He was inspired by Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder before he met Feldman. He was into Stan Kenton before he was into Cage. He deserves as much as any of them to have his own distinctive musical worldview written about. He came into 1950s New York with his own set of ideas, and it is high time we completed the story of where those ideas uniquely led. Let this book mark the point at which musicologists quit talking about Earle Brown, one of the composers of the New York School, and start talking about Earle Brown—full stop.

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Preface The title of this volume is based on Max Ernst’s 1939 essay “Beyond Painting,” a text that astonished Earle Brown in the summer of 1950. Ernst’s exploratory narrative describes the artist’s conception, birth, and entry into painting, and recounts his discovery of frottage technique. Roused by the sight of a mahogany-like panel reminiscent of his childhood room, Ernst began coloring graphite on paper over the floorboards of a seaside inn. As textural grain and wooden grooves emerged on paper, Ernst shaped the images as he conjured them, generating a series of drawings from a singular objet trouvГ© and prompting a final summation: “We do not doubt that in yielding quite naturally to the vocation of pushing back appearances and upsetting the relations of вЂrealities,’ it is helping, with a smile on its lips, to hasten the general crisis of consciousness due in our time.”1 Twenty-three-year-old Earle Brown was “knocked out” by this particular statement. A similar moment of clarity had given direction to Brown a few years earlier while stationed with the Army Air Corps and playing in its bands: “I remember sitting in my bunk in Texas, holding a trumpet in my hand and saying, вЂWouldn’t it be great if I could make my entire life with just this!’”2 The act of “finding” through “making” would emerge as a constant in Brown’s musical process, as his experiments in the mobile relations of music crystallized over the next decade into what became his central structural concept, known as “open form.” In 1950, however, Max Ernst had articulated the mode of inquiry—defined by discovery, the transformation of given materials, and the tandem relation between “non-control” and the “personal conditions of control”—that would become central to Brown’s own musical poetics.3 Page xxviii →Ernst’s imperative has been a guiding principle for Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown. The twelve essays in this volume venture beyond the familiar scripts and visuals that have become hallmarks in historical accounts of Earle Brown (1926–2002) in order to ascertain the greater whole of his output and depth of musical thought. This book presents new research on his biography and the analysis of his works, drawing heavily from the composer’s archive. Topics from within and beyond Brown’s major New York period, 1952–56, are examined here, including: his foundational studies at Schillinger House from 1946 to 1950 in his native Boston; his numerous commissions and projects in Europe from 1958 into the early 1970s; his crossovers into visual art and jazz; and his later compositional, teaching, and conducting activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Brown’s historic New York scores are studied in a wider context rather than treated as token works of the New York School—its other core figures being composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff and pianist David Tudor—and thus emerge more fully into view as both extensions and challenges to the works of his peers. The New York School has been the primary lens for evaluating Brown’s contributions to twentieth-century music, and while his association with the group accounts for pivotal points in his career, the collective history of the New York School has perpetuated a very selective history of Brown’s works, emphasizing his early experiments in graphic notation, largely neglecting his broader oeuvre and career. Rectilinear markings and gestural calligraphy are iconic of Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54), Hodograph I (1959), and, to a limited extent, Available Forms 1–2 (1961–62), but in even these seminal works, experimental notation occupied a shared space with conventional staff notation. Indeed, the through-line of Brown’s sonic language was not a dominantly graphic one, but rather an integrative vocabulary that encompassed both new and established notations. Brown’s oeuvre of approximately forty-five works displays the full spectrum of this fluidity in notation. As early as 1950–51, during the same creative period in which he explored Max Ernst, Gertrude Stein, and Jackson Pollock while living in Denver, Brown used automatic drawing for the precomposition of an unpublished string quartet (prior to “punctuating” it in staff notation), a method he referred to as “action notation” and later revived in portions of his 1965 String Quartet.4 Brown had experimented with action painting directly, and several of his color paintings from the Denver period are reproduced in this volume to reveal the significant visual antecedents that rooted his notational experiments in indeterminacy with the New York Page xxix →School beginning in 1952. The copresence of indeterminate and determinate notations in Brown’s music became more overt in later works: in Nine Rarebits (1965) for harpsichord(s) a tangle of graphic skeins alternates with pitched counterpoint; and in Tracking Pierrot (1992) parallel dominant seventh chords resound

uncannily against freer “soloistic” ensemble passages. David Ryan’s essay in this volume furthermore calls attention to a collection of one-page scores composed between 1970 and 2000 that Brown identified as “Folio II,” in which experimental notation and staff notation freely intermingle, foregrounding comparable relationships in the earlier Folio and 4 Systems.5 The sectioned passagework that resulted from Brown’s notational contrasts often served as areas to be arranged variably in an open form, and he referred to these areas as “events,” “modules,” “systems,” and even “pages.” Indications in prose tended to supplement musical notation to ensure that performers would shape these areas in ways salient to the ear. Some indications are specific to a fault. “Very free semi-improvisation” is Brown’s bemusing instruction over a passage of pitched notes elongated by seismographic notation in Special Events (1999). While improvisation appears frequently in Brown’s scores, he had his concerns about how the term might be construed by the classically trained performers for whom he was writing (as did his New York School colleagues in their own works). There is a bottom-line performance ethos that emerges upon broader examination of Brown’s scores and prose, however, which drew from his formative experiences in the 1940s as a teenager playing and arranging for jazz and dance bands in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, followed by the Army Air Corps bands, and later reinforced by his work as a sound engineer at Capitol Records on a number of jazz recordings between 1955 and 1960. These experiences anchored Brown’s belief in the “synergy” of the performer-composer relationship and the complicit delight he derived from being, as Brown again gleaned from Ernst, “spectators at the birth of our own works.”6 Brown communicated this ethos magnanimously in his preface to Tracer (1985): “Let the instrumentalists be quite free and very virtuosic. Let them improvise rhythm and instrumental timbre (in page 2, event 2, for instance).” A similar rhetoric appears in Brown’s conducting guidelines for Modules I–II (1966–67): “Let all of this be very loose and natural and intuitive, but with awareness of the totality at every moment.”7 Brown was voluble and exacting when speaking about his scores, and his notes to the performer, his lingua franca, are often the most direct route into his creative mind, beyond any of his stand-alone prose. Page xxx →As Brown shuttled between America and Europe starting in 1956, achieving early success abroad and establishing lasting friendships with composers such as Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, criticism emerged among his New York colleagues with regard to Brown’s mixture of tradition and experiment. Indeed, of his peers, Brown’s place within the New York School has been the most scrutinized. While his musical inquiries demonstrated the experimentalist prerogative to investigate, test, and discover, his stylistic and cultural openness to both American experimentalism and European new music drew polemical commentary from Feldman and Cage in particular. Cage’s 1958 Darmstadt critique of Brown’s techniques as “dualistic” and concerned with “ideas of order” and “personal feelings” rather than with what William Brooks recently called the “purely observational” was widely read when published in Silence in 1961.8 Feldman’s 1966 portrayal of Brown as a “practical” and self-reliant New Englander for Brown’s BMI catalog further set him apart from his New York School colleagues, though in more backhanded language.9 Cage and Feldman in effect became Brown’s earliest historians on account of these widely disseminated publications. Brown’s reception by composers outside of the immediate New York School was less categorical. Fluxus artist Robert Filliou used Brown’s Available Forms to explain his open-duration text score Measured-Up Music, when it appeared in the 1969 anthology Notations.10 Italian composer Franco Donatoni wrote To Earle (1970) and To Earle Two (1971–72) as orchestral homages, the latter premiered at the same festival concert in Kiel as Brown’s Time Spans for the 1972 Olympic Summer Games based in Munich. Brown was also the only composer of the New York School interviewed and featured in Derek Bailey’s seminal 1980 monograph Improvisation.11 Brown defied clear categorization within the New York School narrative in a manner prescient of later American experimentalists and their more fluid relationships with musical tradition, European culture, and popular idioms.12 Brown was the last of his peers to arrive in New York, and he was also the first to venture beyond their aims and inquiries. Belonging and acceptance are therefore issues often raised when discussing Brown, and this collection grants a fuller portrait of Brown’s life and works, the identity and cultural politics of the New York School, and a reconsideration of Brown’s musical legacy.

Research on Brown has steadily increased in the past decade and a half since his death in 2002. Access to important primary sources has been crucial to this, and I highlight several of these sources in connection with two developments in postwar scholarship especially germane to the study of Page xxxi →Brown. First, historians of the New York School are now more inclined to explore the politics of difference, whereas previously it was important to establish a baseline of sameness through a comparative study of techniques, aesthetics, and other signifiers of group unity, as in Michael Nyman’s 1974 survey Experimental Music and Henry Cowell’s 1952 “Current Chronicle” report on the emergent New York avant-garde.13 While individual difference was duly noted in earlier comparative scholarship on the New York School, more recent analytical studies since the 1990s have further falsified a monolithic mode of thought, as have studies that focus on the unique technical and aesthetic positions of each figure.14 While such unity through difference offers a more compelling trope in the narrative of American experimentalism, the shift toward difference has also led to a broader definition of the New York School itself. Historians have sought to expand its identity from the traditional four composers of Cage, Feldman, Brown, and Wolff to include Г©migrГ© composers Edgard VarГЁse and Stefan Wolpe, pianist David Tudor, painters associated with the original namesake of the New York School, figures from the jazz avant-garde beginning with Charlie Parker, and artists from varied social and cultural locations.15 Such inquiries into difference have had a positive impact on Brown’s reception.16 From broader historiographical observations about his significance within the New York School to increasing documentation about Brown’s presence in Europe, historians are less prone to recapitulate a characterization of Brown as the “traditional” or “European” figure within the New York School—a perception that has often doubled as the logic for explaining Europe’s positive reception of Brown. Brown’s achievements abroad and the “practical” choices he made in his works were often viewed not as assets but rather as holdouts among a group endeavoring to untether itself from musical tradition. Feldman’s tensions with Brown were similarly ascribed to the latter’s friendships with European composers such as Boulez, who was critical of the experiments of Cage, Feldman, and Wolff, but who “opened many doors” for Brown after his first visit to Europe from December 1956 to March 1957. As late as 2010, Boulez asserted Brown’s place in the European avant-garde: “He was one of us.”17 Such recognition had the inverse effect of marginalizing Brown within the New York School, in spite of his colleagues later benefiting from his European engagements, with Feldman plainly writing to Brown in 1971: “Ich vant to gey to Berlin. Your job. Fix up. Tanks.”18 Feldman later described his DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) year as the most productive of his life. By the 1970s, however, when Brown began writing more autobiographical Page xxxii →prose, as his peers had done, he was beholden to narratives already in place that either grouped his works comparatively with the concept of indeterminacy promulgated by his American peers or portrayed him as an experimentalist interloper who ultimately defected to the more conservative concert life of Europe. Neither his work with Time-Mainstream Records, for which he curated the Cage-Wolff and Feldman-Brown albums in the 1960s, nor the rigor of his earlier experiments in magnetic tape, notation, and form have precluded historians from portraying Brown as a “disruption” or an outcast among the group, or one who was composing to the commission all too readily.19 The reality of Brown’s dual Euro-American career was, however, far more complex and worthy of exploration. Reductive treatment of Brown in the earlier historiography was partly due to the limited availability of primary source materials, but in 1994 Pamela Layman Quist offered the first in-depth study of Brown’s work and analyzed select compositions from the major decades of Brown’s career (25 Pages from 1953, Available Forms 2 from 1962, and Centering from 1973) in consultation with Brown.20 Brown was the least prolific prose writer among his colleagues (see his published writings in the bibliography to this volume), and his split career in America and Europe during the 1960s yielded biographically uneven accounts. Although Brown’s music was frequently performed in the 1960s and 1970s, with Brown often as a conductor, nearly half of his oeuvre (upwards of twenty compositions) remained unpublished or out of print during his lifetime under his main publisher Universal Edition.21 In 1996, Brown began organizing his manuscripts and personal papers. Following his death in 2002, The Earle Brown Music Foundation (EBMF) continued to offer researchers access to his studio-archive in Rye, New York, located approximately twenty-five miles from New York City, and in 2012 EBMF published a finding aid to promote further research of its holdings of over fifty thousand items, coinciding with “Beyond Notation: An Earle Brown Symposium” in January 2013 at the composer’s alma mater, Northeastern

University. Notably, while the symposium was the first to be centered on Brown, it followed a yearlong succession of conferences and festivals for John Cage’s centennial that set the tone for a timely historical reconsideration of Brown. In 2007, EBMF began a critically revised edition of Brown’s scores that are now being published by Henry Litolff’s Verlag of Peters Edition Group (also the primary publishing house of Cage, Feldman, and Wolff), which also made available the aforementioned scores previously unpublished or out of print. Several scores remain with Schirmer/AMP (Folio and 4 Systems, Page xxxiii →1952–54; Music for Cello and Piano, 1955; and Available Forms 1–2, 1961–62) and Brown’s first publisher Schott (Three Pieces for Piano, 1951; Perspectives, 1952). EBMF also supervised the digitization and remastering of Brown’s eighteen LPs for Time-Mainstream’s Contemporary Sounds Series, reissued by Wergo as a six-volume CD box set between 2009 and 2012. D. J. Hoek’s 2004 essay on Brown’s Time-Mainstream series was a forerunner to the renewed attention on Brown’s work that these sources later prompted.22 In 2007, Dan Albertson edited a double volume of Contemporary Music Review on Earle Brown with twenty-one essays by scholars and former colleagues offering analyses and historical accounts.23 Two recent studies that reflect a new tone and depth of research include Elizabeth Hoover’s study of Brown’s multimedia works in two chapters of her 2012 dissertation (University of Pittsburgh) and David Magnus’s 2013 dissertation (Freie UniversitГ¤t Berlin) on the philosophical context of Folio, published in German in 2016.24 Three additional publications have been generative of new insights and documentation on Brown in the postwar era. Carolyn Brown’s 2007 memoir Chance and Circumstance details layer upon layer of Brown’s life particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s; Amy Beal’s 2006 watershed history of postwar music New Music, New Allies frames the cultural and musical tenor of postwar Europe during the time of Brown’s visits; and Martin Iddon’s comparable 2013 study, New Music at Darmstadt, positions Brown at the ideological chiasma of the Euro-American avant-gardes.25 Second in significance to the emerging research on Earle Brown has been art history. The study of Brown’s scores by art historians has steadily intensified in past years. Folio and 4 Systems has become a locus classicus for introducing postwar phenomena such as Fluxus, happenings, and crossover media. The visual impact of Brown’s graphic scores—December 1952 and November 1952 especially—has made them as canonical to exhibitions on postwar art as Cage’s indeterminate scores, and while references to Brown’s crossover significance were somewhat pro forma in the past, art historians have begun to investigate the deeper structural significance of the New York School’s notational experiments, particularly in recent writings by Yves-Alain Bois and Julia Robinson.26 Moreover, Brown’s Calder Piece (1966) is at last receiving the attention it deserves as one of the postwar era’s most concrete and striking collaborations in music and art. The Tate Modern in London featured the exhibition “Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture” between November 2015 and April 2016 to explore the parallel concepts of mobility in Calder and Brown and it hosted performances of Brown’s Calder Piece, which requires an original standing mobile by Page xxxiv →Calder as the “Chef d’orchestre” for a percussion quartet, with musicians from the Guildhall School of Music. The two Tate concerts in November 2015 marked the first performances of Calder Piece since 1983. Two private performances followed in January 2016 at Friends Seminary in New York City with the Talujon ensemble before the mobile was returned to a private collection.27 Apart from Calder, Brown had collaborated in 1964 with American painter David Budd (1927–81) and his kiln-fired aluminum panels for the sound installation Music for Galerie Stadler in Paris (William Burroughs was their third collaborator and wrote a new poem for the event), as well as with Greek sculptor Pangiotis “Takis” Vassilakis (b. 1925) on another installation in 1964 known as Sounds of Void in New York. All of this was preceded by an unrealized multisensory project that Brown had roughly sketched for orchestra and lighting board in 1961 called Light Music. Modern art was an integral part of Brown’s work and discourse and will continue to shape his reception and legacy. Albertson had noted in 2007 that the perspectives from visual artists “would have fallen beyond the realm of a music publication” for the double issue of Contemporary Music Review. Indeed, Beyond Notation begins where Albertson’s collection left off by widening the scope of inquiry to include both art and music in examining Earle Brown’s oeuvre. The chapters in this volume are organized to follow the biographical line of Brown’s career with analytical attention to select works.

In his foreword to the volume, Kyle Gann probes our collective knowledge of Earle Brown and reveals aspects of his music and personality seldom documented historiographically. Gann explores Brown’s early interest in Stan Kenton in relation to orchestral works such as Brown’s Modules and Cross Sections and Color Fields, Brown’s later appearances as a conductor, and his neo-Romantic sensibility; and Gann expands the scope of how Brown is to be viewed historically by situating him in a more open dialogue with musical style than the negative aesthetics of Cage. In “An Overview of Earle Brown’s Techniques and Media,” Jason Cady surveys Brown’s compositional methods in the areas of twelve-tone technique, the Schillinger system, electroacoustics, notation, open and closed forms, and collage. Cady questions whether graphic notation was as important to Brown as Brown was to graphic notation, and he draws attention to the greater significance of Brown’s other compositional pursuits. As a senior researcher at EBMF, Cady assisted in preparing the recent revised edition of Brown’s scores. In “The Early Years,” Carolyn Brown describes meeting Earle Brown Page xxxv →in the summer of 1939 through her brother Parker, with whom Brown formed a local dance band, and then documents the subsequent decade of growing up in Massachusetts in the neighboring towns of Fitchburg and Lunenburg, forty miles northwest of Boston. She provides singular insights into Earle’s formative years based on her own diaries and those of her mother, Marion Rice (1904–95), through whom Earle was introduced to multiple art forms. Louis Pine’s essay, “Earle Brown’s Study and Use of the Schillinger System of Musical Composition” provides insight into a system to which Brown stated his indebtedness throughout his career. Pine provides the first major study of its technical application in Brown’s work based on the precompositional sketches of Tracking Pierrot (1992), and also outlines Brown’s studies at Schillinger House (1946–50), of which Brown was one of the first graduates. David Ryan addresses Brown’s best-known work: Folio (published in 1961 as Folio and 4 Systems). In “Energy Fields: Earle Brown, Open Form, and the Visual Arts,” Ryan journeys through less-charted areas, however, by taking the reader through Brown’s own abstract expressionist “drip” paintings from his Denver years, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. He explores the significance of line, gesture, and fantasy in Brown’s notational approach, and offers important new research on Brown’s final project, Folio II (ca. 1970–2000). Ryan worked closely with Earle Brown for a performance of select Folio II scores in London in 2000. In “Four Musicians at Work and Earle Brown’s Indices,” I examine Brown’s reception among his New York School colleagues during the 1950s, and the compositional rationale for his first large-ensemble work, Indices (1954), which prompted both criticism and opportunity. Indices underwent a long journey through Europe, and in documenting its course abroad into the early 1960s, the chapter traces the complexities of Brown’s position as an American experimentalist in European new music circles, as well as the controversies surrounding Hodograph I (1959), before Brown forged a distinct new path with his Available Forms. Richard Toop further explores Brown’s reception abroad in “Their Man in Europe, Our Man in America: Earle Brown and the European Avant-Garde” and addresses Brown’s polemic with Karlheinz Stockhausen regarding the precedence of open form. Brown first met Stockhausen in early 1957, at which time he shared scores of his open form works. Brown’s Folio (1952–54) and 25 Pages (1953) continue to be cited in the same breath as Stockhausen’s KlavierstГјck XI (1956). Richard Toop looks back at the Page xxxvi →historical debate and Brown’s reception in Europe through previously unexamined archival sources. Toop was a composer in Europe in the 1960s and became Stockhausen’s teaching assistant in 1973. Elizabeth Hoover reconstructs the compositional methods for Brown’s Calder Piece in “Collage and the Feedback Condition of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece.” Highlighting Brown’s cut-and-paste methods, she also analyzes the metaphor of collage as a surrealist mode of self-borrowing and the larger feedback loop between performer, score, and audience. Hoover documents the history of Calder Piece and analyzes its performance process through performer interviews and select philosophical concepts by Henri Bergson.

In “Imagining an Ever-Changing Entity: Compositional Process in Earle Brown’s Cross Sections and Color Fields” Fredrick Gifford brilliantly distills the creative process of Brown’s 1975 orchestral masterwork by examining over a hundred of Brown’s sketches for Cross Sections and Color Fields. He analyzes Brown’s steps toward the construction of open form in Cross Sections, while also consulting earlier examples in Brown’s oeuvre. Gifford furthermore analyzes Brown’s aesthetic and technical parameters for shaping open form. Stephen Drury’s “Then and Now: Changing Perspectives on Performing Earle Brown’s Open Form Scores” offers an experienced perspective on developments in the performance practice of Brown’s music over the last three decades. Drury explores the changing role of the conductor among contemporary musicians through examples from works including Novara (1962)—one of the most detailed of Brown’s instructions to the performer and the first work Brown rehearsed and premiered as a solo conductor (at Tanglewood in 1962)—as well as Times Five (1963), Tracking Pierrot (1992), and John Zorn’s Cobra (1984). George Brunner discusses his studies in composition and music history with Brown at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1980s. In “вЂLet’s Hear Some Sounds’: Earle Brown at CalArts,” Brunner recounts Brown’s emphasis on the sound of the score over its notation, and discusses Brown’s reception by his generation of composers. Hans Zender’s “Farewell to the Closed Form: Earle Brown and the New York School” first appeared as a memorial essay for Brown in Neue ZГјrcher Zeitung in 2002. Felix Koch has eloquently translated Zender’s essay for its first English appearance. Zender provides a unique musical and cultural perspective on the protracted historical impact of experimentalism in Europe and discusses Brown’s legacy through his treatment of musical Page xxxvii →time. During the course of their twenty-year friendship, Zender premiered the majority of Brown’s orchestral works. In 2011, Zender led a conducting workshop on Brown’s music for several guest conductors in Frankfurt with Ensemble Modern. Lastly, the coda to this volume consists of a selection of mostly unpublished writings by Brown, which several of the chapters reference. These texts have been made available through the generosity of The Earle Brown Music Foundation, the archive of Carolyn Brown, and the National Music Council of New York: “Why I Am a 12Tone Composer” (ca. 1951); a letter to Ray Grismer (April 4, 1957); “VarГЁse” (1961); a letter to Leonard Bernstein (July 9, 1963); remarks delivered to the National Music Council in New York City (1966); “An вЂOpen Letter’ to Some Critics and Friends” (October 15, 1973); and the autobiographical text “Earle Brown, Composer” (ca. 1976). Notation was a means rather than an endpoint in Earle Brown’s music. Beyond Notation offers a starting point for a new phase of research on Brown and his legacy. He is the only composer of the New York School without a scholarly monograph or collection of prose, and Beyond Notation offers a fundamental reconsideration of Brown’s place in postwar music. The history of the New York School has seldom been told from Brown’s perspective, but as postwar scholarship moves toward a more scrutinizing analysis of the stylistic and ideological positions within the New York School, there is no better figure poised for “pushing back appearances” in the complex legacy of this historic group than Earle Brown, who was at once an integral member of the New York School and its earliest critic.

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Chapter 1 An Overview of Earle Brown’s Techniques and Media Jason Cady The perception and understanding of Earle Brown’s music is disproportionately based on his early work December 1952. This masterpiece of graphic notation has had a far-reaching presence in books, exhibits, and concerts. Yet was graphic notation as important to Brown as he was to the development of graphic notation? Brown’s innovations in open form are at least as vital as—if not more vital than—his work in graphic notation. Brown was furthermore an early adopter of other modernist approaches that included twelve-tone technique, magnetic tape composition, and the Schillinger system, though these aspects are less often acknowledged historically. Scholars, journalists, and curators contextualize Brown within the New York School in general and John Cage specifically. This categorization of Brown is not off mark, but it obscures the scope of his ideas and output. This essay brings a number of Brown’s works and methods into clearer view. The publication history of Brown’s scores begins to explain some of the issues associated with understanding his output. Brown began with a handful of publishers in the 1950s: Schott, Schirmer/AMP, and Salabert. Then, starting with Novara (1962), he published his new works with Universal Edition only. By the end of the 1970s, however, Brown stopped submitting pieces to Universal and preferred to photocopy his handwritten scores and parts. He also worked directly with ensembles and conductors performing these works and, in many cases, conducted the pieces himself. Page 2 →In 2007, The Earle Brown Music Foundation (EBMF) secured a contract with Edition Peters to publish these later self-published works as well as any previously unpublished work. Furthermore, all works by Brown held by Universal and Salabert were moved to Edition Peters and published as a new revised edition. Four pieces currently remain with Schirmer, and two with Schott.1 Edition Peters has published autograph scores for those works in which Brown’s handwritten notation is essential to the interpretation of the work, such as Hodograph I (1959); other pieces such as Summer Suite ’95 (1995) for piano have been computer engraved. In 2008, I became Senior Researcher at EBMF and proofread the new Peters scores, after having done some proofreading for EBMF in 2005. With some scores, I had to look for errors only. With other pieces, however, there were larger issues. Because Brown often wrote music for friends and colleagues, and frequently conducted his own works, he often omitted details that could be quickly explained verbally. After his death in 2002, these works needed to be published with adequate performance instructions, and any decision had to be justified by the archival record. I suggested that text from Novara could be adopted as general open form instructions, and excerpts from Novara were added to every score that needed open form instructions. The work’s four-page “Directions for Performance” is more than a set of instructions, however, as it includes details about notation, conducting, and aesthetic issues that remained relevant to works beyond Novara. Novara’s preface is one of Brown’s most clear and comprehensive explanations for performing open form. Even Brown initially photocopied the Novara text for his self-published Windsor Jambs (1980). To date, Edition Peters has published over twenty of Brown’s previously unpublished scores, particularly his later works, thus allowing an overview of his oeuvre such as this one.

Twelve-Tone and Schillinger Serialized Music Brown began his music career in adolescence as a trumpeter and arranger of big-band jazz. Following two years at Northeastern University, he studied the mathematically based theories of Joseph Schillinger at Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music), while at the same time studying early music and twelve-tone composition privately with Roslyn Brogue Henning (1919–96). In some of his earliest works, Brown combined twelve-tone methods with Schillinger’s “rational” approach to derive select parameters. Brown described his first

meeting with Karlheinz Stockhausen Page 3 →in Germany in early 1957 according to this dual framework: “[Stockhausen] was talking in serial language and I was able to transpose what he was saying from what he and Boulez and others got from Messiaen directly into Schillinger terms.В .В .В . Three Pieces for Piano and Music for Violin, Cello and Piano, and Perspectives are what I called Schillinger serialized pieces; the rhythmic groups were serialized and then distributed, you know, and it was based on a twelve-tone row.”2 Brown’s serial procedures not only afforded greater control over his musical material, but also prompted him to explore the inverse approach of loosening control, which beginning in 1952 he pursued through graphic notation and open form. While Brown quickly evolved beyond the serialized approach of these early works, he never completely abandoned the twelve-tone method. He used twelve-tone pitch rows especially in later works such Sounder Rounds (1983), Tracking Pierrot (1992), and in his last published composition Special Events (1999).

Tape and Electroacoustic Music Brown is not generally regarded as an electroacoustic composer, but intermittently throughout his career he composed for tape, beginning with Octet I (1953). In August 1952, Brown and his first wife Carolyn Brown had moved from Denver to New York City so that he could work with John Cage on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, and she could dance with Merce Cunningham. In addition to Octet I, Cage and Brown spliced tape for Cage’s Williams Mix (1953), Morton Feldman’s Intersection (1953), and Christian Wolff’s For Magnetic Tape (1952). Octet I was Brown’s first foray into tape music, which in 1952 was a new medium in the United States following the pioneering works of Pierre Schaeffer and others in Europe in the midforties—and even earlier by Halim El-Dabh (b. 1921) in Egypt. The audio for Octet I came from tape leftover from Cage’s Williams Mix. Brown followed up Octet I with Octet II (1954), which was only recently realized in 2009.3 Brown’s experience with tape splicing enabled him to work as a recording engineer for Capitol Records from 1955 to 1960, where he worked on sessions with legends such as Count Basie and Ray Charles. This experience not only expanded Brown’s recording skills, but also kept him in touch with jazz and popular music. A few years later, Brown composed Times Five (1963) for tape and an ensemble of four live instruments after receiving a commission from the Service de la Recherche de l’O.R.T.F.4 Page 4 →Times Five is significant in Brown’s oeuvre because he overdubbed himself playing piano, celesta, harp, vibraphone, marimba, and contrabass to produce the tape part.5 In spite of this and his start in music as a big-band trumpet player, Brown rarely performed trumpet publicly after 1950 and instead chose to perform mainly as a conductor. The following year, Brown created Music for Galerie Stadler (1964), a sound installation of four tape loops for an exhibit at the Galerie Stadler in Paris with paintings by David Budd and a text by William S. Burroughs written specifically for the collaboration. Four mono tracks of differing contents and lengths (approximately 22:38, 22:31, 22:36, and 21:58 minutes) were played for thirty days in continuous loops, generating a continuously shifting sonic texture.6 The music on the tapes features trumpet, piano, and percussion. There is no tape manipulation, and the sounds are seemingly improvised. There is no score for the work and no performance credits for musicians on the recording. It is most likely that Brown improvised some or all of the parts himself as he had done for the tape content of Times Five. In a letter to Budd the previous summer, Brown indicated that he would produce the music at the electronic studio of Radiodifussion TГ©lГ©vision FranГ§aise in Paris, where he had completed the tape for Times Five: “I got a pretty good idea how I can get the material on tape here with me playing everything with probably about $150 worth of technical expenses.”7 Brown did not include Music for Galerie Stadler in any of the work lists that I have come across in the archive, but there are also no records of him disowning the work.8 In 2013, EBMF added this to his work list, based on the condition and overall quality of the audio. The original reel(s) are now digitized and available from EBMF. It was a decade and a half before Brown’s next tape piece, Wikiup (1979) for six tape loops. Also a sound installation, he based the title on a Navajo word for a temporary shelter. Wikiup was designed as six tape machines suspended and manually moved on individual cables with pulleys to form a latticework within which visitors

listen and operate the pulleys to shape the soundscape. In effect, Brown expanded the temporal idea of open form to encompass physical space in Wikiup, once again invoking the Calder mobiles that inspired his music. There are two different sets of tape loops for Wikiup. The first set was installed in New York, Arizona, Ohio, Minnesota, and Colorado between 1979 and 1981, and consists of instrumental material for flute, clarinet, piano, guitar, violin, and cello. Brown did not overdub himself playing these instruments; instead, he conducted musicians in a recording studio. Page 5 →The names of the musicians who performed in the recording session, and the parts from which they read, are archived at EBMF. The second set of tapes for Wikiup was installed at the FГјr Augen und Ohren festival in Berlin in February 1980.9 The taped material for this version was recorded on one or more synthesizers at CalArts, where Brown was teaching at the time. Three tapes contain drones: low C on one tape, high Fв™Ї on a second tape, and a third tape with F and B sounding simultaneously. On the other three tapes Brown fed recordings of earlier works through a synthesizer at CalArts. The five pieces that were used as source material were Available Forms 1–2, Corroboree, Sign Sounds, and December 1952.10 Brown similarly used recordings of his own music for Tracer (1985), his final electroacoustic work, scored for winds, strings, and tape loops. Tapes from the Berlin version of Wikiup were used for the four tape loops of Tracer. While Tracer marked a return to live ensemble with tape, which Brown had previously explored in Times Five, it was also a departure because of Tracer’s unsynchronized loops, which allowed the prerecorded backdrop to be different in every performance. Brown therefore remarked that Tracer had a higher degree of “endless and unexpected transformability than most of [his] other works.”11 Brown’s compositions for tape can be divided according to their forms. Brown described Tracer as an open form score in its preface, and Octets I–II and Times Five are in closed form (the latter includes open form sections within the closed form, an overlap discussed further below). As installations, Music for Galerie Stadler and Wikiup have no strict beginning or end, and their forms are subject to constant change due to the out-of-phase relation of tracks. While it may not be accurate to call Brown’s installations open forms, they are nonetheless similar because both are nonlinear.

Graphic Notation Brown’s best-known work, December 1952, was published in a collection of scores titled Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54). The score for December 1952 is purely abstract in that it does not specify notes, staves, clefs, dynamic markings, or other elements of traditional music notation; instead, it consists of vertical and horizontal solid black rectangles of varying lengths and thicknesses on one page (figure 1.1). These shapes do not represent specific sounds and are open to interpretation. As Brown put it in the “Prefatory Note” to Folio, they are “intentionally ambiguous graphic stimuli.” Elsewhere, Brown described the shapes as representing frequency, duration, Page 6 →and dynamics, so as to suggest an improvisation, comprised of single tones and clusters—both long and brief—separated by silences.12 The work that Brown completed immediately before December 1952—November 1952—is also graphic, but it is not purely abstract. November 1952 consists of notes and a staff, but the staff has fifty lines instead of the five lines of the traditional staff. Fig. 1.1. December 1952 (1952), original manuscript. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Brown’s notation in 4 Systems is similar to December 1952, but the rectangles are only positioned horizontally, and, as the title suggests, rather than appearing in open space they are arranged in four systems. This rectilinear notation is Brown’s most widely known graphic notation, but he never used it again after 4 Systems. Brown explored other forms of graphic notation in his subsequent works, but he seldom used pure abstraction. The few instances of purely abstract notation appear in Hodograph I (1959) and a later collection of one-page scores that Brown loosely called Folio II.13 Hodograph I presents passages of graphic notation that Brown referred to as “implicit areas” (figure 1.2). Whereas the notation in December 1952 was preplanned (see the subsequent section “Random Sampling Numbers”) Page 7 →and notated in an angular style resembling geometric abstraction, the implicit areas of Hodograph I were drawn spontaneously in a gestural style. Schirmer originally printed Hodograph I with the implicit areas left blank because Brown intended to draw unique

lines for each score copy. In the revised Peters edition, EBMF included different implicit areas for each of the three players, taken from drawings that Brown had preserved among his own copies of Hodograph I. Fig. 1.2. Hodograph I (1959), page 6 (Score C). Copyright В© 2009 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. In his “Notes on the Performance” of Hodograph I, Brown discussed the interpretation of the score’s implicit areas: Page 8 →The “notations” within the “implicit” areas form trajectories through the total available range and chosen time and are intended to imply the general character of the actions to be taken by the performer. The relative thickness of the lines may be interpreted as varying dynamic (intensity) levels; the configurations of the lines may be interpreted in general to imply staccato or legato attacks, a connected or disconnected type of phrasing, large or small intervals, rates of speed, types of motion, and in general “process through time.”14 Note that this explanation does not address the most literal interpretation of the lines as glissandi. In Corroboree (1964), Syntagm III (1970), and Special Events, for instance, Brown indicated that such gestural lines were meant to be read in alternative ways and that they should not represent glissandi. After Hodograph I, Brown used this gestural notation again in Available Forms 1 (1961), but with the significant difference of notating it on a staff, which he continued to do in subsequent works that featured this gestural notation. In the preface and score of Available Forms 1 there is little explanation of how the notation should be interpreted, but in Available Forms 2 (1962), Brown listed various extended instrumental techniques next to these gestural lines in the score (figure 1.3). In the preface to Novara, Brown described his gestural notation as “a generalized way of indicating instrumental activity and non-characteristic sounds.” Brown had two overlapping reasons for using this gestural type of graphic notation. First, the ambiguity of the notation produced an infinite number of interpretations and spontaneous reactions. Second, the graphic notation could be used to convey extended instrumental techniques that otherwise could be awkward or complicated to notate. VarГЁse used a similar gestural notation in 1957 for several recording sessions with jazz musicians that Brown had helped to organize.15 Folio II is Brown’s only other work with a focus on graphic notation, and it also includes a text-based improvisation.16

Time Notation Brown’s “time notation” is a specific form of graphic notation that he first developed in Folio and 4 Systems as an alternative to traditional rhythmic notation. In time notation, rhythmic values are drawn in space rather than notated by the traditional rhythmic values that represent ratios according to a given meter. A notehead is elongated or compressed on the page to Page 9 →signify duration, and its position in space determines the approximate moment of attack. Rests are signified by the absence of notes. The interpretation of durations within time notation is, of course, subjective, and this was another way that Brown encouraged spontaneity and variability in the performance of his music. While Brown cited the internalized “time sense” of dancers as an influence in the development of time notation, his own experiences of playing jazz, wherein notated rhythms are not always meant to be performed exactly as written, were also significant.17 Fig. 1.3. Available Forms 2 (1962), page 2 (Orchestra 2). Copyright В© 1965 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. In the Schillinger system, music is also notated on a graph with the vertical ordinate representing pitch and the horizontal axis representing duration, exactly as MIDI information is shown in software such as Pro Tools. Brown was likely influenced by Schillinger graphs in creating time notation. The important difference, however, is that Schillinger was striving for a precise and objective notation free of traditional associations, whereas Brown was deliberately exploring the imprecision of such notation. Among the various ways that Brown used time notation, Forgotten Piece (1954) for four pianos represents a typical formation (figure 1.4).

In 25 Pages (1953), the time notation is similar to Forgotten Piece, except that accidentals are written both before and after each note, and dynamics are written with 180-degree rotational symmetry so that each page can be read right-side up or upside down. Brown used time notation combined with symmetric dynamics and “double” accidentals in only one other work: Page 10 →1953 from Folio, which he called “a study for 25 Pages.” Brown’s two other rotational works are December 1952 and 4 Systems. In fact, one could argue that 4 Systems is time notation with the staves and bar lines removed. Brown later used time notation as a type of shorthand in Time Spans (figure 1.5) and New Piece Loops, both from 1972. In each work, most of the performers are given only single pitches to play at various times, and time notation is used to show approximately when these pitches are to be played. Fig. 1.4. Forgotten Piece (1954), page 2. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. A final way that Brown notated rhythm was with stemless noteheads. He used black stemless noteheads in Available Forms 1 and 2 and the U.S. version of Wikiup to signify a looser interpretation of rhythm than time notation for either the conductor or performer. White stemless noteheads generally granted this flexibility to the conductor, as in the case of the three Modules (1966–69) and New Piece (1971), which feature these stemless white noteheads on staves without meter as “fermata” notes held by the conductor. Brown used both black and white stemless noteheads in several pieces: Time Spans, Centering, Cross Sections and Color Fields, Windsor Jambs, Sounder Rounds, Tracer, Tracking Pierrot, Oh, K, and Special Events. In the fifties and sixties Brown used time notation much more than stemless noteheads, but in the seventies, eighties, and nineties Brown used stemless noteheads more often than time notation. His last published work, Special Events (1999), used both. Page 11 → Fig. 1.5. Time Spans (1972), page 1, autograph score. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Page 12 →Random Sampling Numbers I described the notational appearance of December 1952 in the earlier section on graphic notation, but I did not explain how it was created. This is significant because Brown expressly stated that “it was not a visual concept.”18 Brown first drew a horizontal and vertical axis representing an abscissa and ordinate, which can only be seen in the autograph score (figure 1.1), and not in the published edition by Schirmer. Brown used a book containing tables of random sampling numbers to determine where to position the shapes.19 He described his process as follows: I would get a 3-unit number between 001 and 190 or 193В .В .В . then another number on this dimension and, with a ruler, find it. It was at that point, another random number would give me an indication of how long it was, and how thick it was, and whether it ran vertically from that point in space or horizontally from that point in space.20 Brown used the tables of random sampling numbers for several works in the 1950s: October 1952 and November 1952, 25 Pages, Octets I–II, and Indices.21 As with December 1952, Brown did not compose Indices from start to finish. He wrote out the bar lines for the entire 175-page score, and then filled it in out of sequence at precise beats determined by the random sampling numbers. The random numbers also provided values for pitch, dynamic, timbre, and other compositional parameters: I would have to find out the first sound that went into this blank 175 pages of the score with nothing in it, just bar lines. First number told me what page number between 001 and 175 so it turns out to be page 72. Then I have to go back to my program and worked at proportions, with numerical and statistical proportioning and find out what instrument will play there. Then I find out what instrument, what technique. If it is violin, for instance, is it arco, pizzicato, col legno battuto, col legno tratto? I would get a dynamic from the random sampling table, say, fortissimo and then I would have another random number indicating whether that was going to be stable or unstable which is to say, is it going

to diminuendo? Or is it going to crescendo?22

Brown also applied Schillinger density principles to shape the texture of Indices in order to avoid the static texture or “sonic wallpaper” that he believed often resulted from chance techniques. Page 13 →The question that often arises in connection with Brown’s use of these random number tables is whether his technique was comparable to Cage’s chance operations using the I Ching oracle. When asked by Volker Straebel about his method for composing Octet I, Brown said in 1995, “Well, it depends on what I want to happen. I am not a chance composer.”23 Frequently, Brown made a point to distinguish himself from Cage, particularly in his later career: See I always did the opposite of John. I composed the content and left the form open like a Calder mobile, which was the influence for open form and John worked with rhythmic structures and let the content be by chance and I did the opposite.24 What did Cage have to say about the issue? In a lecture at Darmstadt in 1958, Cage criticized Brown’s compositional method for Indices in particular: That the Indices by Earle Brown was composed by means of tables of random numbers (used in a way which introduces bias) identifies the composer with no matter what eventuality, since by the introduction of bias he has removed himself from an association with the scientific interest in probability.25 Unlike the other techniques discussed in this chapter, Brown did not use random sampling numbers throughout his career. After Indices in 1954 he never used this approach again. It seems that chance was a youthful experiment Brown tried out without being fully committed to it, and that he abandoned it and tried to distance himself from it in order to avoid being seen as a protГ©gГ© of Cage.

Open Form Open form was another innovation that emerged with Folio and 4 Systems. The single-paged scores of Folio can be realized in any order as an overall open form, but Brown did not compose each piece internally as an open form. The symmetry and ambiguity of December 1952 lends itself to being read from right to left or bottom to top just as easily as from left to right or top to bottom. Once a score can be read from any direction, it is just a small leap to read traditionally notated music out of sequence. Brown indicated in the score preface to Novara that “the concept of the elements being mobile was inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder” Page 14 →in that “there are basic units subject to innumerable different relationships or forms.” In some of Brown’s works the mobility of elements is “physical,” while in most of them it is “conceptual.”26 For example, in 1953, the page itself can be flipped and neither orientation can be considered right-side up. In December 1952, “The composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four rotational positions in any sequence.” So while December 1952 is not necessarily flipped, it can be read in any direction—as if being flipped—which implies a physical mobility compared to the more common open form arrangement of Brown’s other works. The exemplar among Brown’s physically mobile works is 25 Pages. Not only can the pages be flipped as in 1953, but the twenty-five unbound pages of the score can be shuffled in any order and performed by any of the up to twenty-five pianists. All twenty-five pages, however, must be performed. Brown’s conception for 25 Pages was similar to Le Livre, which MallarmГ© had planned as an unbound and unpaginated book that could be read in any order. Brown had read and studied MallarmГ©, and was certainly familiar with Le Livre at the time he composed 25 Pages.

Brown’s only other physically mobile work is Calder Piece (1966), scored for a percussion quartet with over one hundred instruments and a mobile that Alexander Calder made specifically for Brown’s work. Calder named the mobile Chef d’orchestre, which came to reflect the function of the mobile as a quasi-conductor in Brown’s score. The percussionists at times play on the mobile itself; at other times, they “read” the moving sculpture by glancing at the configuration of its moving petals and “visualize” this configuration superimposed over a score page to determine which passages to play. Figure 1.6 shows one such visualization of the mobile in connection with the score. The physical mobility in this score is conceptual, but it is a direct result of the actual mobile. Brown’s quintessential conceptually mobile form was Available Forms 1 of 1961. Each of its six pages consists of either four or five events. The events and pages can be combined and performed in any order. An event in Brown’s scores is a musical figure that is cued by the conductor’s left hand showing one to five fingers, while the right hand gives the “downbeat” that initiates the beginning of the event. Brown presumably wanted the conductor to be able to cue events with only one hand, so his open form works never have more than five events on a page, although sometimes these events can be broken down further into a larger number of subevents. Brown gave the conductor a placard with a movable arrow to hang over the Page 15 →podium to indicate to the musicians what page to play at a given moment in performance. Fig. 1.6. Calder Piece (1966), sketch. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Brown had felt that six pages was the maximum number that conductors could comfortably leave open on the podium, but after Available Forms 1, Brown never used that many pages again. The rest of his open form works use only four pages, with the exception of From Here (1963) and Time Spans (1972), both of which consist of three pages; and Module III (1969) on two pages. Works scored on a single page, such as New Piece and Oh, K, require no placard. In Available Forms 2 a “page” may be on more than one sheet of paper, and in Event: Synergy II and Tracer there can be more than one “page” on a single sheet. In other words, “page” is in some cases a performance distinction necessary for the sake of grouping a maximum of five events because of the aforementioned limitation of five fingers on the hand of the conductor. The option to move from page to page in any order and as many times could lead conductors to move frequently and haphazardly through a Page 16 →score; however, in a letter to Toru Takemitsu, Brown described a performance of Modules I and II in which he and Eleazar de Carvalho “did pages 1 to 4 in sequence and then ended by doing page 1 for the second time.”27 The reprise of page 1 at the end conjures jazz musicians returning to the head at the end of an improvisation. It was surprising to me that given the option to do anything, they chose the most simple. An entirely different type of open form that Brown created in the 1960s is what he called “closed form with вЂopen’ interior sections,” which I refer to as linear open form.28 Cross Sections and Color Fields (1973–75) is an example of linear open form. The twenty-two-page score begins on measure 1 of page 1 in every performance but there are seven open form sections within the piece, and an eighth open form section to conclude the work. Brown first developed linear open form in Times Five (1963). As Times Five was composed for tape and ensemble, it is likely that the strategy of linear open form grew out of the challenge of reconciling open form with the linear medium of tape. After Brown developed linear open form, he used it as much as he used open form.

Collage Collage was a technique that emerged later in Brown’s output even though aspects of collage, especially selfborrowing, were evident in his earlier works. In the preface to Tracer (1985), Brown wrote: There has always been a layering and collage process in my work; the idea of 2 or more things transforming each other by being in “flexible” relationships to one another. Musical performance allows these relationships to change from performance to performance in a kind of endless re-association of the composed elements of that piece. In 1952 I called this a “mobile

score. . . .”

Brown’s use of collage was perhaps his way of realizing open form directly while composing. In his notebooks of 1951–52, Brown had expressed his desire “to get the time of composing closer to the time of performing.” Collage was one of his novel solutions to this problem. Brown’s first demonstrable use of collage was in Calder Piece, for which he pasted snippets of String Quartet (1965) especially (see Elizabeth Hoover’s essay in this collection). In addition to using the term “collage” to describe open form, there Page 19 →were three ways in which Brown applied collage in its more conventional sense. “I sort of paralleled,” Brown said in an interview, “without knowing much about how Ives worked in a kind of attitude of collaging which would refer to other than musical influences. The collage, as in painting and visual arts, as in Kurt Schwitters and Bob Rauschenberg.”29 An example of the first way that Brown collaged is Syntagm III (1970), which included snippets from Event: Synergy II (1967–68) that Brown pasted directly into the score. In this example (figure 1.7a–b), systems 5 through 8 from the string part of Event: Synergy II are applied in the flute part of Syntagm III with the lower note of a double stop omitted. Page 17 → Fig. 1.7a. Event: Synergy II (1967–68), page 4A (strings). Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Page 18 → Fig. 1.7b. Syntagm III (1970), page 6[/3]. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Fig. 1.8. Sounder Rounds (1983), autograph score, page 9. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. An example of the second way that Brown used collage is Sounder Rounds (1983), for which he used scissors to cut shapes from his original precompositional sketches—rather than from an entirely different piece (figure 1.8). A number of Brown’s scores were in fact created in several iterations. He notated material, photocopied it, cut it up, reassembled it into a score, photocopied it again, and usually made additional notations on the new photocopy. The third mode of collage was Brown’s use of audio from previous pieces, as in the case of the Berlin version of Wikiup, discussed earlier. In Tracer, Brown repurposed his audio from Wikiup and collaged his score from his own earlier works. Rarely did Brown’s collage techniques involve quotation from other composers. The two instances in which he did quote from other composers were more accurately homages to friends. In Available Forms 2, Brown quoted the B and Fв™Ї drone of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 Number 7; and in Centering (1973) he concluded his work with the last five notes of Bruno Maderna’s Concerto per Oboe e orchestra No. 1 (1962 /1963), in memory of his dear friend.

Conclusion Brown began his career writing twelve-tone music and never fully abandoned that approach. He also composed for tape and returned to the electroacoustic medium occasionally throughout his life. Upon developing open form and graphic notation, he focused on those two approaches for the rest of his life. After developing linear open form he then used that as often as open form. The evolution of his open form works shows a gradual reduction in the number of pages and events. After his landmark Folio and 4 Systems, he never used purely abstract graphic notation again, and instead explored other notations. In the fifties, he composed five works using Page 20 →random sampling numbers but then completely abandoned that approach. Collage was the last signature technique that Brown developed. With it he drew connections between his various works for a kind of meta-open form. Table 1.1 summarizes the trajectory of Brown’s techniques. Table 1.1. Summary of Brown’s techniques

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Chapter 2 The Early Years Carolyn Brown My story begins on a Sunday in August 1939 at the YMCA Camp Lawrence situated on an island in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. A twelve-year-old boy is watching the Winnetaska dock at the pier. Among the many people disembarking, he saw a little eleven-year-old girl with her parents and said to himself, “I’m going to marry her when I grow up.” The girl was never informed of this until decades later. As you’ve no doubt guessed, the boy was Earle Appleton Brown Jr. and the girl was Carolyn Rice, whose brother Parker, a year older than Earle, was also a camper that summer. The two boys did not yet know one another, but then and there Earle determined to befriend Parker, and in this he quickly succeeded. Luckily for him, he discovered that they lived in the same town and went to the same school. I need to acknowledge that I’m able to relate most of this story thanks to my mother’s diaries, which she kept for close to seventy years. My mother, Marion Rice, was a dance teacher with her own studio in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She taught Denishawn and ballet and gave ballroom lessons. Earle’s name first appeared in her diary on January 23, 1940. By this time, Earle had joined her Tuesday afternoon Ballroom Assembly. On the first day of his attendance in the fall of 1939, he appeared in a thick white wool sweater, much like the ones cheerleaders wore in those days, and was mortified to discover that all the boys were dressed in jackets and ties, and the girls in party dresses, white socks, and patent leather shoes. This was the era when youngsters learned the waltz, the two-step, fox trot, rhumba, Page 22 →samba, cha-cha, and jitterbug. This was also the era when parents gave formal sit-down dinner parties before the evening-dress assembly balls where manners and proper deportment were instilled in the youngsters. Earle was a natural on the dance floor, and a year later, October 15, the diary states that “Parker and Earle are teachers.” Actually what was meant by this was that they were helpers. Eventually, they graduated to the Saturday ballroom classes. In the next ten years Parker and Earle became as close as brothers: they played touch football, basketball, tennis, pingpong; skied, swam, sailed; slept over at each other’s house. One night they slept in the hay loft of our barn and practiced backflips off the beams three stories high and survived to tell the tale, although Earle got the wind knocked out of him when he landed flat on his back. They hunted together. Earle had learned to hunt and fish from his Nova Scotian grandfather Freeman, who lived in a small cottage on Whalom Lake, but he soon learned he didn’t like killing animals; what he enjoyed about hunting was being in the woods and fields with his beloved cocker spaniel, Penny, so although he took the gun along, he rarely used it. But some years later his hunting skills came to good use. In Sedona, Arizona, where his Uncle Carl lived, he was called upon to shoot a rattlesnake in Max Ernst’s house. Unc handed the gun to Earle and said, “Here, you do it.” And he did. Carl Brown Jr., or “Unc,” as we always referred to him, was the nonconformist rebel in the Brown family, and Earle idolized him. Throughout Earle’s childhood Unc would appear from who knew whence and disappear just as quickly to who knew where. There was a mystery and romance about him, and he was extremely handsome, and thus intriguing to men and women alike. I confess I was smitten! Within a year of Earle befriending Parker, he became almost a member of our family. Eventually he was included in family ski trips, summer vacation jaunts; my parents took him to the theater and the ballet and to the country club for tennis, dinner, and dancing. He helped my mother backstage at her dance recitals and aided my father in putting up storm windows, among the many dozens of things he contributed to the welfare of the family. All of us went to a lot of movies together. No TV, no social media, no computers to sap our energies! Thank heaven for

that! So where, you might well ask, did Earle Brown the composer come from? His musical interests started early. Both Earle and Parker played in their high school band. Parker played drums. At a very young age Earle performed with a local professional dance band. When the Rices left the Page 23 →farm in Lunenburg after more than twelve years and moved into Fitchburg, where we had a playroom in the basement, Earle and Parker would play jazz records and “jam” for hours, driving the rest of us in the house crazy. In January 1943, Earle started his own orchestra, playing lead trumpet. He’d just turned seventeen. He had two saxophone players, a second trumpet player, a young woman on piano, and, in the beginning, Parker on drums. When Earle couldn’t find a proper place to rehearse, my mother let him use her studio or would find a hall for him that he could afford (three dollars an hour!). By March, his orchestra was playing for my mother’s Ballroom Class—and, in her written words, “very well, too!” Throughout that year and the next, his orchestra played in many venues in the surrounding towns. Dance bands came to Lake Whalom each summer. A mile or two from Earle’s house, Lake Whalom is a fairly good-sized lake with several beaches and bathhouses, rental canoes, and, back then, a passenger steamer that circled the lake. It also boasted a large dance hall, a professional summer stock theater (where my family had season tickets), a roller-skating rink, and a big amusement park with a wonderful old-fashioned merry-go-round and a scary rollercoaster. Earle worked there in the summer setting up pins in the bowling alley, working with the dodgems and in the roller-skating rink, and doing other odd jobs. It was here that Earle first saw some of the big bands like Harry James (a role model of course), Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller with Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton. (It wasn’t long before Earle bought himself a Stan Kenton–type suit to lead his own band.) When the big bands came to Boston and Worcester, we would be there, listening and, yes, dancing! But for Earle it was also an important self-directed musical education. December 1941. Our idyllic world was suddenly radically shaken. Pearl Harbor, December 7. U.S. declaration of war against Japan, December 8. We listened to FDR’s radio speech. It was the only time I ever saw my father cry. Although he knew he was too old to serve, he understood that Parker would soon be the perfect age. As would Earle. Then came the U.S. declaration of war against Germany on December 11, and things got serious. My dad became an air raid warden. Parker practiced fireman duty in a mock invasion and eventually took an airplane spotters course in Boston. Earle joined the National Guard. Soon there were oil shortages, food rationing, blackout requirements. We set up a “Refuge Room” in the cellar of the barn. Both Earle and Parker were passionate about flying. Earle had taken Page 24 →lessons and flown solo even before he graduated from high school. My first time ever to be in an airplane was with him, although the instructor had to be there because Earle was not yet allowed to take passengers. There was no question what these two young men would do. Parker enlisted in the Navy Aviation Cadet Program as soon as he graduated from high school in 1943 and was sent to College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. There he was amused to be the “official bugler” to play “Taps,” and assigned to the band as the lowest-level bugler. The trumpet he played was a hand-me-down from Earle—Earle’s first. When Earle graduated in 1944, he immediately enlisted in the Army Air Corps, but because he would not be eighteen until December 26, he had to wait until the spring of 1945, which explains why he spent a year at Northeastern University studying engineering. At this point in his life he had made no firm decisions about what he would pursue after the war. He even toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist and went off to visit Dartmouth to consider the possibility. We saw each other every weekend: hiked, went horseback riding, biked, skied, went to lots of movies and to Boston theater, a passion of mine, and when Parker was home on leave they returned to their old pursuits and spent hours in the basement “jamming” along with the popular music of the day on the Victrola. 1944–45: Fitchburg streets were overrun with service men in uniform, on leave between assignments to Europe or the Pacific. Many former ballroom students of my mother’s stopped by to see her. Too many of them never returned home. Parker was secretly moved around—to Williams College in Massachusetts, to Chapel Hill in North Carolina, then to Glenview, Illinois—we never knew where he was until he was allowed to phone. Despite V-E Day on May 8, Earle left for the army in June. V-J Day happened about three months later. Still, Earle

expected to be shipped overseas, but a July 29 entry states Earle had written to say he’d been made leader of the Army Air Force swing band at his base in Louisiana. From there he was sent to Texas and spent his brief time in the service mostly playing music in the Army Air Corps band for an Esther Williams water ballet extravaganza and other such entertainments for the troops. Not a bad gig for a wartime soldier. In Texas, he met many professional jazz musicians, among them Zoot Sims. One of their escapades was to plant marijuana in front of their barracks. The sergeant complimented their gardening skills. He hadn’t a clue! With the end of World War II, Parker, having seen too many buddies killed in pilot training, chose to leave the navy and go to the University Page 25 →of Maine to study forestry. When Earle’s tour of duty ended, he too chose to leave the service, having decided the path he would follow. His music experiences in the army were apparently pivotal in his decision to go to Schillinger House on Newbury Street in the Back Bay area of Boston as well as to study early and classical music with Roslyn Brogue Henning in Cambridge and to continue his studies with Kenneth MacKillop. Suffice it to say that in its first years it was primarily a school for jazz musicians. However, Schillinger’s book, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts, would have a profound influence on Earle’s work. During his studying years he also began to play again with local dance bands, and re-formed his own orchestra. During the four years I was in college and the three summers in between when I was a camp counselor, Earle spent more time with my parents, especially my mother, than I did. He played tennis with both of them; helped my dad with chores; went to the summer stock theater and the movies with them. He was apparently happy to help in a myriad of ways. He drove my mother and her students to Boston, or to buy costumes, or just to shop, and worked backstage at her recitals. He would even help her clean the studio if the handyman was unavailable. Once when she was sick, he picked up her prescription and sat with her until my father came home from work. Still, his relationship with my parents was formal—they were always Mr. and Mrs. Rice—just like my relationship with his parents, who were always Mr. and Mrs. Brown. His own family—good, kind, conventional people—were not involved in cultural or artistic pursuits, although Unc became a fine photographer. Of course my parents were also relatively conventional in their thinking, but they had a broad range of interests, especially my mother. She kept abreast of the arts, kept many extraordinary scrapbooks filled with clippings of current news events, dance and theater reviews, art exhibitions, fashion articles, stories about her favorite dancers and actors. She attended dance performances of all kinds, went to museums, the theater, and during all those hours that Earle spent helping her with various tasks, they talked and argued. She was really curious about his emerging artistic interest, as she always was about mine. Earle had begun to haunt the bookshops on Newbury Street, discovering magazine articles about Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, John Cage, and the works of Gertrude Stein. Here’s a May 1948 diary entry: “Earle is all overboard for [poet Kenneth] Patchen—вЂsexy and terrific,’ says Earle.” Another entry from August 1948: “Parker and Earle & Sonny [a friend] talked Plato, Aristotle and sex until 3 a.m.” She wrote, “They are young, eager, bewildered at this strange world and who can blame them?” Alas, Page 26 →what the diary does not reveal is any information about Earle’s musical life in the late forties, with these few exceptions: Parker and Earle were at the piano downstairs composing. Parker on the piano. Earle on his gorgeous new golden trumpet. (January 17, 1947) Parker spent the day with Earle. They composed a song for piano and trumpet. (January 18, 1947) Carolyn choreographed a dance called Home Burial at Wheaton College [in her junior year] to Earle’s music. (April 1949) [Both were inspired by a Robert Frost poem. I believe this was the very first piece of Earle’s ever performed for a live audience. The original score has only recently been discovered.] On December 24, 1948, Earle and I became engaged and were married on June 28, 1950, two weeks after I graduated from college. In my mother’s diary she wrote: “Mr. and Mrs. Earle Appleton Brown Jr.! Well,

he made it! Earle has wanted Carol since she was eight years old and he was nine when he saw her for the first time.” Well, my mother had our ages off by two years, but it seems to have been the truth of the matter. Jump ahead forty years. 1995. Parker and his wife Mona were hosting a gathering after my mother’s funeral in their home in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Earle, in offering his condolences to their daughter Rebecca, said, “You know, if it wasn’t for your grandmother, I wouldn’t be a composer.”

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Chapter 3 Earle Brown’s Study and Use of the Schillinger System of Musical Composition Louis Pine Over the years, Earle Brown often mentioned the Schillinger system as one of the influences on his compositional style.1 In an interview with David Ryan in 1999, Brown explained how his musical background helped to develop his compositional practice. Well, I started off my musical life in a very small town; there were no string quartets or orchestras close by that I could listen to except on the radio, but my first influences and musical engagement was with jazz and popular music. I started playing the trumpet at about ten years of age, and so I was drawn to people like Louis Armstrong and Thad Jones. When I was [in] high school I formed a dance band, and later I played with large jazz orchestras. I also got involved with making arrangements for jazz orchestras, but I got bored and felt I needed something else. I studied engineering and mathematics before joining the Air Force—but they didn’t need any pilots at that point, so I said “put me in the band.” So the combination of the predilection for mathematics and the experience of jazz created a kind of “schizophrenic” situation for me. These were partly brought together by the highly mathematical rules of the Schillinger system; Schillinger was a Russian mathematician and composer based in New York, who was very influential upon composers. I worked deeply with this; it was a very good mental preparation for what I would do. So there Page 28 →was this concern with system, together with the spontaneous aspect that I admired so much in jazz. I blocked those two things together—calculation and spontaneity—and that’s how I relate to structuralism, structuring, spontaneity, improvisation: each of these are valid and it’s important for me to bring them together.В .В .В .2 In the 1930s and 1940s, composers, arrangers, and performers influenced by and engaged with jazz and popular music were eager and open to new ideas, especially if they had little or no academic music background. Many of these musicians were performers. Their practical experience with music may or may not have provided them with anВ understanding of the theory of music. However, had they attended a music school, their academic studies would have trained them in this area. Like these musicians, Brown had practical experience and no academic theoretical background when he began at Schillinger House in 1946. Unlike many of these musicians, Brown had a predilection for mathematics and engineering, in which scientific analysis and synthesis are used for practical ends. Thus, his background created for him the ideal intellectual hothouse where the seeds of the Schillinger system, which is a scientific theory of music, could grow and come to fruition. In order to gain more understanding of the influence that the Schillinger system had on Brown, I give a brief history of the System and Schillinger House, where Brown studied. I present information about the course of study he would have followed, as well as the requirements he would have met in order to be authorized as a teacher of the Schillinger system. In Brown’s later years, he wrote and spoke of the continuing influence of the Schillinger system on his work, and his own words are given to illustrate his thoughts on the importance of the System to him. This influence can be seen in his 1992 piece Tracking Pierrot. In the past, some writers have criticized the lack of published studies detailing how and to what extent Schillinger’s theories were actually used by composers who studied the System and claimed to have used the theories.3 As a result of these criticisms, I explain Schillinger techniques used in Tracking Pierrot, and show in detail the ways Brown used them.

Schillinger and His System of Musical Composition Joseph Schillinger’s system of musical composition has not been rightfully acknowledged for its role in

influencing twentieth-century music. Schillinger was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1895. He entered the St. PetersburgPage 29 → Conservatory in 1914 and graduated with a degree in composition in 1917.4 He lived in the Soviet Union, where he taught music and was an award-winning composer, during the 1920s. Of particular note, in regard to his professional activities, was his involvement in the first jazz orchestra in Russia. In 1928, at the invitation of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, he came to the United States to lecture on contemporary Russian music.5 In America, Schillinger collaborated for a short time on different scientific projects in music with Dr. Leon Theremin. Theremin, a noted Russian physicist, invented one of the first electronic musical instruments—the theremin—an instrument that has had a resurgence of interest since the 1990s. Schillinger also lectured at various American schools and universities. His topics included mathematics, music, and the spatial arts.6 Since his years in Russia, Schillinger had been studying musical composition using scientific analysis and conceiving a scientific theory of art production.7 From his analysis, he came to the following conclusion: With the adoption of an engineering technique, the entire approach to musical patterns becomes mathematical. Scientific analysis of musical composition reveals that all the processes involved in the creation of a musical composition may be represented by elementary mathematical procedures.8 He explained the premise for his use of mathematics: For a number of centuries philosophers have suspected that there are unconscious mathematical procedures behind conscious musical intentions. Music becomes “the mathematics of the soul.” The raw material of the mathematics of music begins with atomic structure and the life of living cells.9 He also explained how the science of music can assist the art of music: Music makes one believe it is alive because it moves and acts like living matter. Even Aristotle had observed that “rhythms and melodies are movements as much as they are actions.” Everything that moves is a mechanism, and the science of motion is mechanics. The art of making music consists in arranging the motionPage 30 → of sounds (pitch, volume, quality) in such a manner that they appear to be organic, alive. The science of making music thus becomes the mechanics of musical sounds. The technique of this science enables the art of music to serve its ultimate purpose: the conveyance of musical ideas to the listener.10 In his “Overture to the Schillinger System” (1946), Henry Cowell described what Schillinger provided in his system of musical composition: The idea behind the Schillinger System is simple and inevitable: it undertakes the application of mathematical logic to all the materials of music and to their functions, so that the student may know the unifying principles behind these functions, may grasp the method of analyzing and synthesizing any musical materials that he may find anywhere or may discover for himself, and may perceive how to develop new materials as he feels the need for them. Thus, the Schillinger System offers possibilities, not limitations; it is a positive, not a negative approach to the choice of musical materials. Because of the universality of the esthetic concepts underlying it, the System applies equally to old and new styles in music and to “popular” and “serious” composition.11 Schillinger wrote about different areas of the arts, but his system of musical composition was the most developed aspect of his mathematical approach. The System was considered very controversial during his lifetime. According to a 1972 article written by Arnold Shaw, one of the coeditors of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, Schillinger’s system created a firestorm for the following reasons:

His [Schillinger’s] mixing of mathematics and music, his graph method of musical notation and his system of composition based on rhythm rather than harmony all seemed to raise questions not merely of aesthetics but of morality.12 Despite this controversy, when word spread that George Gershwin had studied Schillinger’s theories, composers, arrangers, and musicians of all sorts flocked to Schillinger’s apartment to study.13 Among those who sought to learn from him were Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey, along with film composers and many radio composers, Page 31 →such as Lawrence (Larry) Berk, founder of Schillinger House, which is known today as Berklee College of Music. By the time of his death in 1943, Schillinger had become famous and was highly paid for his services. He would spend considerable sums of money to buy only the best equipment for whatever he thought he needed for his research and experiments in music and art.14 When Schillinger died unexpectedly, Mrs. Schillinger was left with little income and, to resolve this situation, she turned to what she had of value to earn some money.15 According to her memoir, she had twenty-four loose-leaf binders of lessons of Schillinger’s system for musical composition, which he had tested on his students and which she had helped him compile.16 These lessons were the basis for the eventual published material.

The Two Volumes of The Schillinger System Mrs. Schillinger lost little time in finding a publisher for this material. In May 1944, she signed a contract with Carl Fischer for the publication of Schillinger’s system.17 At that time, the country was still in the thralls of World War II and paper was in short supply; thus, there was a delay in publishing it. The two volumes of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition were finally released in March 1946, exactly three years after Schillinger’s death.18 At first, the two volumes sold well. This was due, in part, to Carl Fischer’s hiring Dr. Merle Montgomery in 1945 to promote sales by lecturing on the System around the United States. Because the sales of the volumes had already shown a substantial profit by 1947 and the publishing firm didn’t see any further need to exploit them, Fischer promoted Montgomery to be its national educational representative.19 However, by 1951, the sales had dropped. Mrs. Schillinger stressed this in a November 1951 letter in which she complained that the “sale of the books has enormously decreased.”20 One reason the books didn’t continue to sell well might have been because, in a number of places, Schillinger criticizes the great masters of music, comments that many have found shocking. Traditionally, musicians and the general public hold these masters and their works in high esteem, and Schillinger’s criticisms may have made him seem arrogant and uninformed. However, according to Dr. Yuri Tyulin, who was a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the same time as Schillinger, students were taught by their professors to criticize the masters. Thus, I propose that, due to this teaching, Schillinger would not have been restrained in making his judgments. Page 32 →“Purity” of style or voice leading was raised to the greatest height and served for the single criterion of compositional achievement.В .В .В . It was felt that Bach “still did not understand harmony.” (As late as 1926, A. K. Glazunov was demonstrating this to me, supported by the opinion of his entire faction.) Beethoven’s voice leading was considered quite sloppy and careless, something Lyadov never tolerated. [Lyadov] even played Chopin in “his own version, ” i.e., with corrected voice leading.В .В .В .21 Certainly, a major reason for the decline in sales was Schillinger’s use of nontraditional music vocabulary. In addition, labels are inconsistent; in places, explanations are missing or lacking in detail and clarity; also, there are enough mistakes in the musical examples and text that they hinder the understanding of certain basic concepts needed to grasp the System. In the introduction to Volume I, coeditors Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling wrote, “By the time of his sudden

death in March 1943, Schillinger regarded his theories as sufficiently formulated to have incorporated them in two significant works: Mathematical Basis of the Arts and the present publication.”22 Due to Schillinger’s premature death, however, we do not know to what extent he had completed the lessons that became the final edited manuscripts for the books, whether he intended the lessons to stand on their own, or if he expected them to be used in conjunction with a teacher who would explain the material in detail. We do know that, at the end of Volume II, Book XII, the editors wrote in a note that the original lessons on orchestration were incomplete and that Schillinger had planned to include a section on the theory of interpretation.23 We can see that, after he completed his studies of the System, Earle Brown himself saw difficulties in the two published volumes. In letters to Mrs. Schillinger, Brown wrote, in a very diplomatic way, of his frustrations with the books. In September 1962, he wrote that “contextual misdirections” had kept the material from assuming its “rightful place as the only creative and totally relevant theoretical work in the last 20 years.” He mentioned that in 1953 or 1954 he wrote to the Schillinger Society to try to get it to authorize him and another colleague of their choice to collaborate on a book that would present the Schillinger techniques in a more advanced (not so lesson-like) and culturally sophisticated way. He wanted to write an additional presentation because the Schillinger material was not having the effect it should have had. He concluded that the Carl Fischer volumes created misconceptions and isolated the Page 33 →Schillinger system from both the academic and the nonacademic, avant-garde worlds. This was “very disturbing to me,” wrote Brown. He added, “Schillinger is still the best way to cover the вЂserial’ possibilities but in it[s] present form it will be bypassedВ .В .В . and has already been by-passed by the leading composers.” He hoped Mrs. Schillinger understood that his comments came from a great concern with having the System finally recognized and utilized.24 In an August 1967 letter, Brown wrote to her that Schillinger’s work had been tremendously important to his life and music. He mentioned again his earlier request to write a book. He reiterated his continued frustration with the published Schillinger books. I see as clearly now as I did in 1953, that the materials in the “System of Musical Composition” and “The Mat[h]ematical Basis of The Arts,” are more and more “where art is today, and going,” and it is appalling to me that more people don’t know more about it. Serial music, electronic music, computer music, “statistical” composition, mixed-media arts, kinetic arts, “total environments,” .В .В . all of those things are in those books; and no one, to this day, has formulated the “control and generation,” rationally and intelligently, and with the vision, of Schillinger. He also stated there was a problem: “otherwise the name Schillinger would not be missing from a book such as the recent, вЂTwentieth Century Music,’ by Eric SalzmanВ .В .В . (part V, in particular, at least)В .В .В . or the book of the same title by Peter YatesВ .В .В . or innumerable other important sources for material on today’s music.” As he closed his letter, he offered, “IfВ .В .В . you have ever entertained the thought of cooperating with a book such as I have suggestedВ .В .В . a book which would вЂplace’ Schillinger within the context of his timeВ .В .В . and within the context of this time, and the future, .В .В .В I would be extremely happy to work on it.” He added that this book would place Schillinger as “shockingly visionary and relevant.”25 From the preceding information, we can see that the Schillinger texts are, at best, supplemental material, because they lack Schillinger’s explanations that tied together the concepts he taught. When the two volumes were first published, this void was filled by the handful of students whom Schillinger had personally authorized to teach his system. Larry Berk of Schillinger House was also an authorized teacher, but it was Mrs. Schillinger who authorized him after Schillinger’s death.26 Page 34 →

Schillinger House and Earle Brown

Schillinger House in Boston was where Brown learned the Schillinger system. When Brown studied there between 1946 and 1950, the school was in its early stages. The founder of the school, Larry Berk, was like Brown in that he had an interest in engineering, and Berk graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an engineering degree. Berk had worked his way through college playing piano at nightclubs and writing arrangements. When he graduated in 1932, the Great Depression was at its lowest point and he couldn’t find a job in his chosen profession. Opportunities for a job were better in music than in engineering during those years, so he went to New York City to pursue a career in music.27 According to Larry Berk’s son Lee, his father worked as a pianist and arranger in New York during the mid1930s. Larry first learned of Schillinger through conversations with New York music professionals, many of whom were discussing Schillinger and his mathematical theories that related music and art.28 Berk was attracted to the idea of studying with Schillinger because of their common interest in the relationship between science and music. He studied with Schillinger, learning his system, for three years before returning to Boston in 1940. By that time, World War II had begun in Europe, and he went back to Boston to work as an engineer, yet he continued his music activities there as a pianist and arranger. Because of his reputation as an established New York music professional, local professional musicians sought him out as a music mentor to broaden their skills.29 Gradually, Berk’s teaching career took precedence over his work in engineering. In 1945, Berk opened Schillinger House in Boston. Due to its integrated curriculum, “[which] was designed to go beyond the traditional concept that musical knowledge consisted solely in learning the forms of the past,” Schillinger House became known as the “Jazz School.” It filled a void that traditional institutions did not address at that time. That is, it trained musicians in contemporary harmony.30 Berk opened his school at an opportune time. Many professional musicians had been in the armed forces during the war. When their term of service was over, these musicians were entitled to use the GI Bill, which provided them money to pay for tuition and living expenses while they attended college, high school, or vocational school. A number of these musicians didn’t want to attend a traditional music school or conservatory; they wanted to study jazz and various popular traditions. Schillinger House filled their need.31 Page 35 →A chance encounter while he was in the military service led Brown to Schillinger House. When he was in an Army Air Force band in Texas, he met a man who showed him the newly published two volumes of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. In a 1995 interview with John YaffГ©, the composer described this encounter: In the band at Randolph Field, I had met a guy from New York who had been studying the Schillinger system. I saw the books, a kind of mathematically oriented system, and it intrigued the hell out of me. When I got back to Boston, the Schillinger House was just opening.32 When Brown was released from the service, he returned to Boston to continue his studies in mathematics and engineering at Northeastern University. However, after being so involved in music in the service, his enthusiasm for those subjects had diminished—he wanted to study composition—and so he soon left the University.33 He considered attending the New England Conservatory to study music, but according to Brown, “People I spoke to, there, said, вЂAw, don’t come here. It’s such a bore. The only way to be a composer is to study privately with a composer’.”34 He didn’t follow their advice, because at that time he was considering a career as a film composer: At that point, I thought I was going to be a Hollywood composer, because that was about the only orientation I had. My father used to listen to the New York Philharmonic broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. But basically, there was no classical music in Lunenburg, Massachusetts to coax me in that direction. So I thought of the Schillinger thing. A lot of film composers had studied with Schillinger.35 In 1946, using the GI Bill, Brown entered Schillinger House, where he was in a class of about twenty-five other

students.36 According to Brown, Kenneth MacKillop taught him the System there.37 Brown’s Schillinger House student records show he also received instruction in the System from other members of the faculty.38 A school catalog, copyrighted by Berk in 1949, lists the courses offered while Brown attended Schillinger House and explains how a student could become an authorized teacher of Schillinger’s theories. It also has information about a self-study course. Although the catalog provides brief descriptions of the courses offered on campus, the self-study lessons are the best Page 36 →indication we have at present showing what was presented in those courses at Schillinger House.39 Information in the catalog substantiates the System as the underpinning of all its instruction at that time. Underlying all instruction in theory is the Schillinger System, a comprehensive and universal method covering every phase of musical theory and practice, coordinating each with exact mathematical principles. Firmly based on a logical foundation that leaves nothing to chance, the Schillinger System explores completely, and in a consistently and practical manner, all the materials of music to their utmost boundaries, going far beyond all other theories in its development of technical resourcesВ .В .В . in the realm of new harmonic, contrapuntal, and compositional devices which are unavailable elsewhere in the entire scope of musical thought.40 According to the 1949 catalog, to earn a degree from Schillinger House, the student applied for the Professional Diploma Course program that was “divided into four phases, each separated from the other in classification, yet each mutually dependent on the other to produce the completely trained musician.”41 Basic to the entire curriculum are the courses in the Schillinger Theory of Composition and Arranging in which the student learns the fundamental aspects of musical structure. The basic components of rhythm, scales, melody, harmony, counterpoint, and composition are treated from both the theoretical viewpoint and their practical applications to the individual student’s problems in scoring and arranging for the modern dance band, radio orchestra or symphonic group. Allied closely to the department of theory are instruction in scoring and arranging. Starting with the simple four-part reed or brass section, the student learns the use of chords, melodic improvisation, rhythmic anticipation, and other basic devices from the early courses in Schillinger Theory. Analysis of illustrations of each point is made in a modern projection room, where examples of student scores, together with a recording of these scores made in ensemble sessions, are examined by the class.42 Page 37 →The third phase of the course was twofold; that is, it consisted of laboratory and applied music courses. Students learned how to play in an ensemble on their instruments. In addition, the scores the students wrote in the theory and scoring classes were played and discussed in the laboratory session, thus providing them with important feedback to help them gain a practical perspective of their work.43 The last division consisted of classes in musicianship. Taste, judgment, and style were discussed to round out the Schillinger House graduates, preparing them to be leaders in their field.44 Consequently, during the first two years of the Professional Diploma program, each student took the same series of courses in theory (“Theory I: Rhythm” and “Schillinger Problems I”; “Theory II: Pitch Scales & Geometric Projection,” with “Schillinger Problems II”; “Theory III: Harmony I” and “Schillinger Problems III”; and “Theory IV: Harmony II” and “Schillinger Problems IV”), scoring and arranging, applied music, and musicianship. In the third and fourth years, the student was allowed to specialize in one of three major departments: arranging and composition, performance, or teaching. If the student chose to become a teacher, he or she prepared to become an authorized teacher of the Schillinger system.45 A letter of recommendation for Brown written by MacKillop, dean of the school at that time, dated June 13, 1950, certifies that Brown completed the course of study at Schillinger House as of June 1, 1950.46 According to his student records, he took the appropriate classes to be an authorized teacher.47 The Schillinger Institute, a department run by Carl Fischer, the publisher of the two volumes of The Schillinger System, was the entity that

granted the authorizations.48 According to the Schillinger Institute’s instructions, authorization consisted of two types: temporary and full authorization. The following were the requirements necessary to receive a temporary certificate of authorization: 1.Complete the study of the first 6 books of the SCHILLINGER SYSTEM OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION. 2.Write to the Schillinger Institute, 62 Cooper Square, New York 3, New York, expressing your desire to become an authorized teacher of the Schillinger System, including a picture, a letter of recommendation from your teacher, and outlining carefully: (a)your educational and musical background; (b)the nature and extent of your teaching experience. 3.Pass a written examination on the material contained in the first 6 books, Volume I. This examination must be given by the SchillingerPage 38 → Institute or by an examining committee designated by the Schillinger Institute. 4.Submit to the Schillinger Institute, along with the examination paper, a thesis of approximately 2000 words in which some phase of the Schillinger System is discussed. The title or subject matter should be designed to demonstrate the applicant’s ability to teach and should be approved by the Schillinger Institute. 5.If a temporarily authorized teacher—who represents himself as a teacher of the Schillinger System—does not fulfill the requirements for full authorization within a period of two years, the Institute reserves the right to revoke its Temporary authorization publicly. Then, to receive a certificate of full authorization, the requirements were: A.Fulfill the requirements for temporary authorization. B.Pass a written examination on the material contained in books 7–12 inclusive. This examination must be given by the Schillinger Institute or by an examining committee designated by the Schillinger Institute. C.Submit an original composition utilizing Schillinger techniques with a detailed, written explanation of the techniques used.

Brown Explains the System By 1950, when Brown graduated from Schillinger House, only a handful of the approximately twenty-five in his class graduated with him.49 In a 1996 interview, Brown explained why he was successful in completing the course of study when others weren’t: Well, I started as a GI, and I started at Schillinger House with about 25 people in my class, and I was one of two who graduated. I studied engineering and mathematics at Northeastern University before I went into the Air Force. So I was able to see things, I think, in Schillinger that a lot of other people couldn’t. I mean, if they couldn’t get an immediate melody that was really going to knock them out, they didn’t want to fiddle with it anymore. I saw the construction principles of it, and the sensibility of pre-compositional planning, and all Page 39 →of that. I could see that it was very important, and I stuck with it. But it’s because of my background, I think.50 In other words, Brown believed his studies in math and engineering helped him learn not to expect an immediate result. He was trained to analyze the component parts of an object to determine how they worked, or didn’t work, together. He learned that it takes persistence to solve a problem to get a result or product. Thus, by applying these skills to studying the System, which teaches various techniques of composition using elementary mathematics, Brown could understand Schillinger’s theories when his classmates couldn’t. Brown wrote a twelve-page paper titled “The Schillinger System of Musical Composition: A Co-ordinated System of New Musical Resources,” which was probably the thesis he was required to write to meet the abovelisted requirements for temporary authorization to teach the Schillinger system. In this thesis, Brown expressed his

thoughts about the System. Theory is notorious for lagging far behind actual practice and as we can see, there was a definite need for a system of composition which would fill this need and give us an analysis of music after Wagner and a statement of the musical techniques prevalent in that music. In much searching for the answers to these questions:—how contemporary composers speak; the language of modern music; the techniques of their expression;—I have never found a more complete, logical and fully applicable presentation than is found in the Schillinger System of Musical Composition. Not only is it a basis for composing music and understanding the contemporary idiom, but it gives us an understanding and a knowledge of music of the past. Through a study of the Schillinger System, we obtain not only a cold, “this was done this is done,” but Mr. Schillinger has given us the underlying, logical reasoning behind the uses of these techniques.51 Brown went on to explain the System. The Schillinger System is a system of learning harmony, counterpoint, rhythm principles, scale structures, melodic principles, harmonization, melodization, the principles of variation techniques, and the semantics of music as well as many smaller divisions and Page 40 →more advanced theories of each. Only the first two of the above have ever been previously expounded upon to any extent, but their importance cannot be denied. The Schillinger System of Musical Composition is by far the most complete and advanced presentation of the theory of music yet brought forth.52 He also rebutted some of the criticisms of the System: I have met and talked with people who, with a superficial knowledge of the Schillinger System, consider it a radical and not too applicable splurge of math[e]matical formulas. They think that it is a cold and mechanical system of writing music which does not allow talent and creative ability its undeniable due, or even need these talents in order to produce good music. This idea, as well as being false in relation to the Schillinger System, is false in relation to any system. Anyone who needs and is looking for a system of composition to supply what his intuitive and creative talents do not give him, and can only give him, will search forever. Mr. Schillinger had the utmost respect for individual talent and creativeness and did not try to replace it with math[e]matical or mechanical devices.53 He went on to refute the claim that Schillinger’s techniques were mechanical: “They are no more mechanical than the classical teachings of harmony and counterpoint or the technical knowledge of instrumentalists.”54 Toward the end of his thesis, Brown summarized what the System can do for a composer: As long as there have been composers, they have inherited from past composers a certain accumulation of theory as the result of analysis, and have used this knowledge to advance and develop their own craft, which is what anyone who considers being a composer today must do. Anyone who accepts this statement as true, cannot, with a knowledge of the Schillinger System, deny the timeliness and importance of Schillinger’s work. Through a study of the System, a composer has an insight into past and present musical techniques and a basis for more extensive analysis. The composer is equipped to compose in whatever idiom he chooses. The idiom chosen by the individual will be the one which will fit his personality and will best express what he feels. No one is dogmaticall[y] instructed to write in Page 41 →any specific manner or idiom. The techniques are there to be mastered and used as the composer sees fit. If program music is desired he will be able to create any mood or situation that his talent and the limits of musical realism will allow.55 In addition, he stressed what the System can do for a teacher of composition: Conscientious teachers of musical composition must have a thorough knowledge of all aspects of

music of the past and present and their applications, in order to be fair to students and produce students who are capably equipped to enter the field of commercial music or express themselves in any idiom that their creative needs dictate. The Schillinger System of Musical [C]omposition is a very significant and major means to this end and a definitely important contribution to the theoretical literature of music.56

Continued Influence of the System on Brown After he graduated from Schillinger House in 1950, Brown moved to Denver, where he taught the System. According to his business card from that time, he advertised himself as an authorized teacher.57 Although in 1963 Brown wrote that, in the early 1950s, he went in a direction opposite from Schillinger’s system, in his later writings, lectures, speeches, and interviews he claimed that he still taught Schillinger, and that the Schillinger techniques continued to influence him.58 Though Brown was known mainly as a composer during his life, he clarified for Mark Alburger in 1996 that he never gave up teaching the System. Alburger: How did you get from Denver to New York. Did you one day decide, “I’m not going to teach [the] Schillinger System, anymoreВ .В .В .” Brown: No, I wouldn’t say that at all. I still teach Schillinger—aspects of Schillinger, because it’s very valuable. In fact, even today, a lot of people don’t realize the implications of it.59 Because Schillinger’s theories were considered too controversial because he mixed mathematics and music, some composers avoided publicly acknowledgingPage 42 → their study and use of the System. Brown was not that way. For Brown as a composer, the Schillinger system was important, and he did not shy away from admitting that fact. The following statements highlight his acknowledgment of his study of the System and its influence on him. Brown published an edited version of lectures he gave in Darmstadt in 1964 under the title “The Notation and Performance of New Music” in a 1986 issue of Musical Quarterly. In the article, he wrote: “As a student of music in Boston between 1946 and 1950, there was very little of musical interest to keep one occupied more than academically. I will not go into the bleakness of the self-consciously вЂAmerican’ music of that time, but it had managed to make VarГЁse and Webern cultural outcasts (if not downright unconstitutional) and the possibility of knowing and being influenced by their work was virtually nil. While enjoyable and valuable, the studies [with Roslyn Brogue Henning] in polyphony and counterpoint, including twelve-tone counterpoint, were very academic and sixteenth-century oriented. The Schillinger studies were tremendously interesting and the only connection with a really new and exciting creative line of thought.”60 In his 1966 speech at the general meeting of the National Music Council in New York City, entitled “The Promotion and Performance of American Music Abroad” when printed in the National Music Council Bulletin (see “Select Texts by Earle Brown” later in this book for the complete transcription), Brown said: “Part of the thing that makes my music acceptable in EuropeВ .В .В . is that I had training in the Schillinger system of musical composition, and that is a great background to understanding and creating sympathy to the music of Europe, which grows out of We[b]ern’s work and the work of Olivier Messiaen, and is generally termed вЂserial music.’ This is very close to Schillinger.”61 Kyle Gann reported in an April 28, 1992, article that Brown, as the honoree of that year’s North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, talked about the influence the Schillinger technique still had on his work.62 In a 1995 interview with John YaffГ©, Brown replied to Yaffé’s question concerning the allure of the Schillinger methods on him by saying: “Being in Boston, I was bored with people like Walter Piston. I wasn’t going to go study with him. So I studied privately with Page 43 →Roslyn Brogue

Henning, who was a terrific teacher. Her doctorate was in twentieth-century polyphony. She started me in the ninth century, working all the way through the different styles, up to Bach. Then we jumped to Berg. You see, she was a twelve-tone composer. That was very, very important to me. But Schillinger was even more important, because it kept me from getting academic.”63 In response to a follow-up question by Yaffé on whether the Schillinger system appealed to his scientific orientation, Brown said: “To a certain extent, yes. But Schillinger was truly a mathematician and composer. . . . I’ve always credited them [Brown’s family] with my being able to choose not to study with Walter Piston at Harvard, but rather to study Schillinger. It [the Schillinger system] intrigued me a hell of a lot more. I used to read Piston’s book on harmony, counterpoint and such. But Schillinger was really involved in some heavy stuff. There were four species of harmony: diatonic, diatonic-symmetric, pure symmetric, and atonal.64 I mean, that’s really something! Then, binomial periodicities and coordination of time structures; all that stuff was very interesting.”65 And in a 1996 interview I had with him, Brown explained: “In my own work . . . the Schillinger techniques have always been an influence on me. I’ve never given them up, and I believe in them still.”66 These statements by Brown over a thirty-year period demonstrate the importance of the Schillinger system to him, and his use of it throughout his career.

Using the System in Tracking Pierrot In order to see that a composer is actually using the techniques about which he or she writes or speaks, it is necessary to analyze the music composed. When analyzing a piece of music, it can be difficult to verify if Schillinger techniques were used to compose the piece. This task, though, is made easier if the composer leaves behind sketches or notes about the piece showing use of the System. In a 1996 interview, Brown explained that Schillinger emphasized precompositional planning, and that Brown taught the technique to his own students.67 He also said he saw “the sensibility of pre-compositional planning” and that he “could see that it was very important, and [he] stuck with it.”68 He said, “I still do a great deal of sketching and pre-compositional planning.В .В .В . That is an influence from Page 44 →Schillinger.В .В .В .”69 Fortunately, Brown kept some of his plans and sketches for his pieces, which show how he used the techniques as tools to compose. One of those pieces for which there is evidence of his use of the System is Tracking Pierrot, a late work from 1992. Tracking Pierrot is a “closed-form piece with вЂopen’ interior structures” for six players with solos interspersed with chordal sections. It is an excellent example that demonstrates how Brown used Schillinger techniques to create the essential musical material for one of his compositions. The title of the work suggests a connection to Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 melodrama Pierrot Lunaire. Brown wrote in the program note for the score of Tracking Pierrot the following: “The title comes from the closeness of instrumentation and my admiration for the instrumental writing in Arnold SchГ¶nberg’s PIERROT LUNAIRE. I do not refer to the angst or вЂmoon madness.’”70 Elena Dubinets and I coauthored a paper she presented in 2005. In it, we presented some historical perspective on Schillinger’s work and showed sketches of Tracking Pierrot.71 Dubinets identified the parts where she saw Brown’s use of the System and concluded his sketches showed that most of the major components of Pierrot were composed using the System, but her discussion of which Schillinger techniques Brown used and how they worked was brief. Two years later, in 2007, Dubinets published an article about Brown’s compositional process based on her 2005 paper with me.72 While Dubinets’s article restates conclusions from our earlier paper, there are additional details and new findings concerning the Schillinger techniques that Brown specifically used, which I present in this chapter. On a sheet of graph paper, dated “Aug 1992” in the lower right-hand corner, Brown wrote out his plan for Tracking Pierrot. It included the following steps. Write 3 or 4 pgs. of very dense rhythm + pitch material—for “Pier[rot]” ensemb[le].

Use “Corrob[oree]” technique to collage final score. Cut and splice to make “Av[ailable Forms] I” kinds of events. In full agreement with Schillinger’s scientific approach to composition, where each main musical element is developed separately and then assembled into a coordinated whole—an engineering-like method of production—Brown worked on two main parameters of musical sound individually.Page 45 → That is, he developed rhythmic structures (figure 3.1) and pitch (or tone) rows (figures 3.2 and 3.3).73 In figure 3.3, at the top of the page, Brown labeled his rows “Schillinger harmonic progressions.” Fig. 3.1. Sketch of rhythmic cellules for Tracking Pierrot. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. All archival compositional material for Tracking Pierrot hereafter reproduced courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. In brief, Brown selected the pitches of his original pitch row, “A” (figure 3.2), using a Schillinger technique (see the numbers в€’3, +3, в€’3, +5, and so on, notated above the original row) and then he created the row’s retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion forms. For additional material, Brown used another Schillinger technique and transposed this row to start on predetermined pitches (see 3T transp. and 4T transp.). After generating the rhythms and pitches he wanted, Brown synchronized them. Figure 3.4 shows how he combined two bilateral symmetric rhythms with all four versions of row “B.” Page 46 → Fig. 3.2. Sketch of “A” pitch rows for Tracking Pierrot. Box and arrows have been added for clarity. The box indicates the Schillinger technique Brown used to create his original tone row. The arrows point to another Schillinger technique he used to transpose his row. Page 47 → Fig. 3.3. Sketch of “B”—“ALL” Interval pitch rows for Tracking Pierrot. Boxes, ovals, and arrows added for clarity. The arrow at the top of the page points to Brown’s label of his rows as Schillinger harmonic progressions. The boxes and double-ended arrows point to Brown’s use of the same pattern of numbers to compose two of his three Schillinger harmonic progressions. The ovals and single-ended arrows show how Brown designated a minor second in two different ways. Fig. 3.4. Sketch of bilateral rhythms synchronized with “B” row pitches for Tracking Pierrot. Page 48 →As planned, the final score to Tracking Pierrot consists of “Available Forms I kinds of events” ranging from one to five events per page. Most of them incorporate, at least partially, Schillinger techniques. Brown acknowledged that the chord progression, known as event 2, on page 2 (figure 3.5) “is an option through much of the work (it is based on a Schillinger concept).”74 Brown repeated this progression as event 5 on page 3. However, as stated earlier, Dubinets and I found more of Brown’s use of the Schillinger system in the score than just this single repeated event. I do not know why Brown didn’t acknowledge using additional Schillinger techniques. Fig. 3.5. Final score for page 2, event 2 chord progression of Tracking Pierrot. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. All published pages of Tracking Pierrot hereafter used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Event 4 on page 3 is completely constructed from the rows that were determined by using the Schillinger system. Figure 3.3 is a sketch of the rows used for this event. On the top of figure 3.6 is a draft of the event without proper instrumentation, and at the bottom of figure 3.6 is the final score. The rows went from the sketch to the draft and then to the score virtually unchanged—only the spacing of the pitches was sometimes restructured. Thus, one can see that the entire final version of this event was built from the rows. Page 49 → Fig. 3.6. Draft and final score for page 3, event 4 of Tracking Pierrot. Boxes, labels, and arrows have been added for clarity. In the draft, arrows point to the rows that were combined to produce the final score for each instrument. The boxes in the final score enclose the notes that come from the tone rows, and the labels refer to the rows in the sketch (see also figure 3.3).

Page 50 →In figure 3.7, one can also see that Brown used a similar procedure on page 8 of his score in all five events. That is, the rows went from the sketch (figure 3.2) to the draft and then to the score. Note that in the draft Brown has indicated the rows from the sketch he used by writing in and circling the number of the row. Also, first in the draft and then in the final score, Brown included the rhythms he wanted to use. On page 4 of Tracking Pierrot, there are two events. The first event, which Brown labeled as “virtuosicsoloistic,” was built in a way similar to the previous examples, contrary to its quasi-improvised nature. The second event consists of chords, which were constructed by means of combining notes of the rows. Figure 3.8 shows how the first three chords of event 2 were derived from the original “ALL” Interval row (see figure 3.3) by dividing the row into groups of four notes and arranging each group vertically. Then the chords were inverted and written into the final score as whole notes instead of quarter notes. Additional chords were made for this event by using the same procedure with the other versions of this row. From our findings, Dubinets and I demonstrated that aspects of Schillinger’s system are surprisingly similar to those of serialism in its ways of achieving conscious control and balance of the music material. We concluded that balance and control were the most important aspects Brown derived from the System, and he made them serve his own ideas of proportion and organization. At the 2013 Earle Brown symposium, I discussed portions of our 2005 paper that referred to Schillinger techniques Brown used in composing Tracking Pierrot. I explained in detail these techniques and showed how Brown used them, as well as additional Schillinger techniques not included in the 2005 paper. I stressed the importance of understanding that patterns are the key to Schillinger’s theories by quoting from Shaw and Dowling’s introduction to The Schillinger System. Beginning with the assumption that great music mightВ .В .В . make use ofВ .В .В . basic patterns [of growth, motion, and evolution in the universe], Schillinger subjected the works of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and other immortal composers to intensive analysis. After such tests, he concluded that these great musicians had intuitively employed these patterns in their works. Through their [sense] experience, he concluded, they had realized the mathematical logic of structure.75 Page 51 → Fig. 3.7. Draft and final score for page 8 of Tracking Pierrot. Boxes and labels have been added for clarity. In the draft, Brown’s arrows point to the rows that were combined to produce the final score for each instrument. The boxes in the final score enclose the notes that come from the tone rows, and the labels refer to the rows in the sketch (see also figure 3.2). Page 52 → Fig. 3.8. Sketch, draft, and final score for page 4, event 2 of Tracking Pierrot. Boxes, ovals, arrows, and labels have been added for clarity. The notes in the ovals in the sketch are vertically aligned in the boxes in the draft and final score. The labels in the draft and final score refer to the rows in the sketch. Page 53 →In the following discussion, I will show specific patterns used by Brown.76 Brown utilized his adaptation to create the twelve-tone pitch rows for the solos and chordal sections in Tracking Pierrot. Subsequently, I explain this Schillinger technique and Brown’s use of it. To understand Brown’s technique, it is important to understand Schillinger’s terminology for describing, and then creating, root movement of harmonic chord progressions. In the glossary of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, the term “harmony” is defined as follows: The foundation of Schillinger’s harmony is General Harmony, which is the technology of all possible systems of harmony. A special variety of General Harmony is the kind of harmony usually (but not exclusively) found in Western music. Special Harmony in turn consists of four main types: Diatonic Harmony; Diatonic-Symmetric Harmony; Symmetric Harmony; and Chromatic Harmony.77 To clarify, Schillinger’s special theory of harmony is restricted to chords built in thirds, whereas his general theory also includes chords built in fourths, fifths, and so on.

In his discussion about diatonic harmony, Schillinger explained how chords are constructed and how they move from one to another to form progressions. He defined diatonic progressions in terms of root movement of chords. All diatonic root movements were described by using only three intervals (thirds, fifths, and sevenths) and two directions (up or down). These movements were called “cycles.” In The Schillinger System, “diatonic harmony” is defined. The definition includes Schillinger’s unique way of discussing root movement. Figure 3.9 illustrates this explanation. Root movement in diatonic harmony takes place in positive (reckon downward) or negative (reckon upward) cycles, the cycles being: C3 (“cycle of the third”), downward by diatonic thirds; C5, downward by diatonic fifths; C7, downward by diatonic sevenths—which is the same as upward by diatonic seconds, of course. Negative forms of these cycles [Cв€’3, Cв€’5, Cв€’7] are measured upward instead of downward. Selection of these cycles, and the proportions and pattern in which they are used influence profoundly the harmonic style of the resulting music. Terminal roots in the cycles constitute Cadences.78 Page 54 → Fig. 3.9. Schillinger’s cycles of root movement in diatonic harmony Fig. 3.10. Schillinger’s cycles of root movement and their inversions in diatonic harmony Fig. 3.11. Brown’s technique used in Tracking Pierrot Page 55 →Note in figure 3.9 that the quality of the third, fifth, or seventh is not indicated. Therefore, a C3 or Cв€’3 can be a major third or a minor third, a C5 or Cв€’5 can be a perfect or diminished fifth, and a C7 or Cв€’7 can be a major or minor seventh. Also note that, whereas the definition above assumes the reader understands a downward diatonic seventh is the same as an upward diatonic second, it doesn’t ensure the reader that he or she can apply this thinking to the other intervals. However, one can infer from the statement that a downward diatonic third is the same as an upward diatonic sixth, and a downward diatonic fifth is the same as an upward diatonic fourth. In addition, one can assume the inverse of these intervals is correct (see figure 3.10). That is, a downward diatonic second is the same as an upward diatonic seventh, a downward diatonic sixth is the same as an upward diatonic third, and a downward diatonic fourth is the same as an upward diatonic fifth. In application, composers mix together positive and negative root progressions. According to Schillinger, “The style of harmonic progressions depends entirely on the form of cycles employed. No composer confines himself to one definite cycle, yet it is the predominance of a certain cycle over others that makes his music immediately recognizable to the listener.”79 Instead of using Schillinger’s technique as previously described to derive root progressions for Tracking Pierrot, Brown adapted this technique as a method for determining the pitches for his tone rows. Like Schillinger, Brown used the numbers three and five to designate cycles and the plus and minus signs to denote the intervals he used. But unlike Schillinger, he substituted the number two for the number seven, dropped the use of the letter “C” to designate cycles, and changed the meaning of the plus and minus signs. Figure 3.11 illustrates Brown’s technique. Page 56 →For Brown, the plus sign meant either a major interval or a perfect interval. The negative sign meant either a minor interval or a diminished interval. Thus, a +2 represents a major second; a в€’2 is a minor second; a +3 is a major third; a в€’3 is a minor third; +5 is a perfect fifth; and a в€’5 is a diminished fifth or a tritone. When it came to all the other intervals—that is, a major or minor seventh, or a major or minor sixth, or a perfect fourth—he just thought of them in terms of inversions. Thus, a major seventh inverted is a minor second and was labeled a в€’2. A minor seventh inverted is a major second, or +2. A major sixth inverted is a minor third or в€’3. A minor sixth inverted is a major third or +3, a perfect fourth inverted is a perfect fifth or +5, and an augmented fourth inverted is a diminished fifth or в€’5. By using these numbers in this manner, Brown covered the gamut of all the intervals he wanted to form. Fig. 3.12. The numbers show that Brown used the same pattern for each original transposed “A” row in Tracking Pierrot.

Looking back at figure 3.2, we see Brown’s sketch of his original basic set, labeled “A” rows, and its four forms. Starting on the pitch G, Brown used the pattern of в€’3, +3, в€’3, в€’5, в€’3, в€’2, в€’3, в€’5, в€’2, +3, в€’2 to determine the other eleven pitches of the row. Applying what Schillinger called “quadrantPage 57 →rotation” to the original form, Brown created the other three forms of the set (R = retrograde, I = inversion, RI = retrograde inversion).80 Then, instead of making a traditional twelve-tone matrix to show him all the various transpositions of the set available for his use, such as that used by Schoenberg, Brown skipped that step and employed another Schillinger technique (indicated by the circled “3T transp” and “4T transp”) called “tonics.” This technique would dictate the beginning pitch for each transpositionPage 58 → he wanted, and he labeled them O1, O2, O3, O4, and O5. Though he didn’t specifically notate in his sketch that these transpositions were made from the same pattern of intervals as outlined above, figure 3.12 verifies it. Fig. 3.13. Schillinger based his system of tonics on the five ways an interval between one tone and its octave can be symmetrically divided. Schillinger’s system of tonics is based on the possible symmetrical divisions of the twelve notes of the equal tempered scale. Figure 3.13 shows the five ways an interval between one tone, for example C, and its octave can be symmetrically divided. When an octave is divided into two equal parts, each part is made up of an interval of six half steps, that is, a tritone. For example, six half steps above the pitch C is Fв™Ї, and six half steps above Fв™Ї is the octave C. These two notes, C and Fв™Ї, can be used as individual pitches, or “roots,” on which to build chords, or roots on which to build scales. In his system of musical composition, Schillinger calls these roots “tonics,” meaning “axis-points,” not tonics in the sense of diatonic harmony. Because the octave C belongs to the same pitch class as the beginning pitch, there are really only two tonics, C and Fв™Ї. Thus, Schillinger called this a “Two-tonic system,” or “2T,” with the capital “T’s” representing the corresponding tonics. Following suit, when an octave is divided into three equal parts, each part consists of four half steps; that is, each one consists of a major third. Schillinger called this a “Three-tonic system,” or “3T.” Therefore, the “Four-tonic system,” or “4T,” divides an octave into four equal intervals of a minor third. The “Six-tonic system,” or “6T,” divides the octave into six equal intervals of a major second, and the “Twelve-tonic system,” or “12T,” divides the octave into twelve equal intervals of a half step. Thus, Brown’s notation of “3T transp” and “4T transp” means he transposed up his original row “A,” first, by the interval of a major third (3T), creating transposition O1 and then up another major third, creating O2. Then, he created O3, O4, and O5 by consecutively transposing up his original row by the interval of a minor third (4T) to create each of these transpositions. Consequently, by using Schillinger’s tonic system, Brown developed a process where he could systematically decide which transposition of row “A” to use, and, in addition, he created another way to relate the transpositions to the original set. Figure 3.3 shows Brown’s preparation of five more tone rows and all their forms for Tracking Pierrot. He labeled them “B” row, “C” row, “D” row, No System, and “ALL” Interval. The patterns of plus and minus numbers Brown notated between the pitches in his “B,” No System, and “ALL” Interval rows make it evident that he created each original set of them using his adapted technique of Schillinger’s cycles. Page 59 →How he composed rows “C” and “D” isn’t apparent at first. However, upon closer inspection of figure 3.3, we see that the patterns of numbers on the right-hand side of the page indicate that these rows, too, were composed using Brown’s technique. A possible reason why he set the patterns of numbers apart is given by the note he made in parentheses at the top of the page stating, “3 diff[erent] Schill[inger] harmonic progressions, very related but starting notes transposed to 3T.” This means that he composed rows “B,” “C,” and “D” as he did his “A” row O, O1, and O2, in that he selected their beginning pitches (C, E, and Gв™Ї) using Schillinger’s Three-tonic system. (Note the “T’s” above each row’s name that Brown has circled. This notation is just another way Schillinger designated each

tonic in his symmetric systems.) However, unlike the three “A” rows, he didn’t use the same exact pattern of intervals to compose “B,” “C,” and “D,” but he did use patterns that were related. From figure 3.3, several things can be concluded. First, Brown sometimes interchanged the number “1” for his designation of a minor second (в€’2). Compare the top row of numbers Brown wrote between the pitches in the “B” row with the numbers he wrote to the right of this row that begins with “+3.” Notice how he also used the number 1 in the “D” row pattern for a в€’2. Because a minor second is a half step and because Schillinger used the number one to designate a half step, this interchange still maintains the pattern Brown wanted to use. Second, these patterns of numbers do coincide with the intervals he notated, thus verifying he used his technique to compose them. Third, using brackets and asterisks to point out the same pattern he used in both rows, Brown showed how very related rows “C” and “D” were. Actually, Brown used the pattern twice in both rows, as shown by the added boxes in the figure. Therefore, “C” and “D” are more related than he showed. As stated earlier, in our 2005 paper Dubinets and I pointed out Brown’s acknowledgment that the chord progression labeled event 2 on page 2 in Tracking Pierrot was based on a Schillinger concept, but we didn’t explain it, and Brown did not name it. At the 2013 workshop I explained the technique in detail, showing how Brown had used Schillinger’s system of tonics to construct it. Figure 3.5 shows that chord progression from page 2 of Tracking Pierrot. Underneath the first measure of the progression, Brown wrote “Parallel Dom 7ths.” As seen, event 2 consists of a pattern of thirteen pairs of parallel dominant seventh chords for the piano. Creating a progression using chords of all the same type is a concept Schillinger taught, and this concept was the one to which Brown was referring in the program note published Page 60 →in his final score. Schillinger had taught this as one of his techniques in his symmetric system of harmony. It is a way to create harmonies and sonorities different from diatonic harmony. From figure 3.5, one can see how the pairs of chords are voiced. Instead of stacking both chords in thirds, Brown voiced the first chord in an inversion and the second chord in thirds, that is, in root position. This was in accord with the instructions he wrote above his note about parallel dominant sevenths. That is, he wrote “3 top” for the first chord of each set and “7 top” for the second chord of each set. With the first chord of each pair written in second inversion, the third of the chord is in the top voice. Writing the second chord of each pair in root position places the seventh of the chord in the top voice. Underneath the asterisk and the big black arrow pointing down, Brown left an instruction for the pianist. He wrote “single attack,” and he bracketed together the two chords in each measure to show how he wanted each pair of chords played as a tone cluster voiced as previously explained. From Brown’s original sketch of these parallel dominant seventh chords (figure 3.14) much information can be gleaned. For example, at the top of the page, written at an angle, Brown made a note to himself, “superimposed 2 Dom 7ths,” and in parentheses he wrote “2nd a 2nd below first.” Under this information, he included in parentheses “6 Tonic.” This information details Brown’s thinking when he first considered using a progression of parallel dominant seventh chords. It shows he wanted the root of the second chord of each pair of chords to be an interval of a second below the root of the first chord. On the bottom half of this page, Brown sketched out and labeled his idea for all thirteen pairs of chords. From the pairs of chord names—A, G; Gв™Ї, Fв™Ї; Fв™Ї, E; and so forth—two things are apparent. First, he used the interval of a major second in accordance with his notation of “6 Tonic,” which in Schillinger’s Six-tonic system divides the octave symmetrically by major seconds. Second, while he was working on this sketch, in each measure he was placing the root position, higher-pitched chord ahead of the second inversion, lower-pitched chord. In the final score, Brown reversed the order. One could conclude he did the reversal so the pianist could easily read the score. Figure 3.14 also indicates how Brown planned to voice each pair of chords in the progression. On the right-hand side of the page, he wrote some numbers vertically to indicate how they would be joined. Figure 3.15A shows these two columns of numbers enlarged. The column of numbers on the left represents the higher-pitched chord of

each pair. The column of numbers on the right represents the lower-pitched chord of each Page 62 →pair. Notice that Brown bracketed the two patterns of numbers together and wrote “6 Tonic” in the lower left-hand side of the page. On the right-hand side of the page, he wrote “Auto Couple.” Page 61 → Fig. 3.14. Brown’s sketch of dominant seventh chord pairs and his instructions for creating page 2, event 2 and page 6, event 1 of Tracking Pierrot. N.B.: The black rectangle in this image reflects a cutout of the manuscript paper made by the composer. Fig. 3.15. Coupling the pairs of dominant seventh chords for page 2, event 2 of Tracking Pierrot. (A) Enlargement from figure 3.14 of number pattern for coupling the dominant seventh chords using Schillinger’s Six-tonic system (6 Tonic). (B) Shows how the first pair of chords in measure 1 of event 2 are coupled at the root and third by a major second, which is the Six-tonic system. (C) Shows the four whole steps created in the middle of each pair of chords from figure 3.15B when the chords are played as a single attack. (D) Shows how the pairs of chords from figure 3.15B could have been stacked in thirds and are actually thirteenth chords. Coupling is another technique Schillinger taught. It comes from medieval organum dating back to around the tenth century, when harmony was first being used to embellish plainsong, or chant, at intervals of perfect fourths or fifths.81 Schillinger taught that a sequence of tones could be added to another sequence of tones, which is usually a melodic line, to Page 63 →form a parallel sequence either at some diatonic interval or at an absolute interval. With diatonic coupling, the diatonic scale controls the coupling interval. With absolute coupling, the interval of coupling is measured in semitones and remains constant throughout. In figure 3.15A, Brown has placed the third and root of the chords side by side. This indicates that those two pitches of each set of chords were to be coupled. With the chords voiced this way, the interval that couples the third and root of the chords is a major second (see figure 3.15B, where the number “2” represents two semitones or a major second), which is again the Six-tonic system. Note that these chords appear as written in Brown’s score. Coupling each pair of chords as he did, Brown created a tone cluster with a unique sound of four whole steps in the middle of each pair of chords when played as a single attack (see figure 3.15C). As mentioned above, Brown could have stacked in thirds the resultant chord made up of each pair of chords in his chord progression. Figure 3.15D illustrates how the first pair of chords in event 2 on page 2 of Tracking Pierrot would have looked had it been written as an extended chord in thirds. From this, it is evident that these extended chords were actually thirteenth chords (with a doubled root) in each measure. Brown learned about thirteenth chords when he studied the Schillinger system. A thirteenth chord made up of major and minor thirds is formed by using every other note in a seven-unit scale. Schillinger called each of these thirteenth chords a “master structure” and used the Greek letter sigma (ОЈ) to denote it. From the master structure, chords of different levels of tension can be generated. In Tracking Pierrot, Brown wrote the same sigma throughout his chord progression (see figure 3.5, measure 12 and figure 3.16). Looking at the scale produced by each thirteenth chord in figure 3.16, one can see it is made up of a flatted seventh and a raised eleventh. In jazz, this chord/scale plays a major role and is known as a “Lydian dominant.” Since Brown Page 64 →was influenced by jazz, he would have been familiar with this sigma. His sketch does not show if he consciously thought about using it when he created this chord progression. As part of his system, Schillinger wrote about what he called the ОЈ (13) families, which composers and arrangers can use in symmetric harmony. The sigma Brown used is one of thirty-six sigmas Schillinger said were available to create symmetric harmonic continuity. The Lydian dominant sigma happens to be ОЈXIII in Schillinger’s table of ОЈ (13) families.82 Fig. 3.16. An example of how the pitches of each pair of dominant seventh chords in the chord progression on page 2, event 2 in the final score of Tracking Pierrot form a Lydian dominant seventh scale when arranged in a scale-like fashion. When the pitches of this scale are stacked in thirds, they form a Lydian dominant thirteenth chord, which is Schillinger’s “Sigma #13” (ОЈXIII) out of thirty-six possible sigmas. This example uses the notes from figure 3.5, measure 12.

A side note to my discussion of Brown’s parallel dominant chords was my discovery of a mistake in page 2, event 2 of the final score. In measure 6 of the progression (figure 3.5), Brown wrote an Eв™-major seventh chord (Eв™-, G, Bв™-, D) instead of an Eв™-dominant seventh chord (Eв™-, G, Bв™-, Dв™-). He had written the Eв™major seventh chord first in his sketch (figure 3.14, measure 6) and then transferred it to his final score. Because of Brown’s notation that he wanted the progression to be all dominant chords, and because he wrote an Eв™dominant seventh chord three measures later, measure 9, in both the sketch and in the final score (figure 3.14 and figure 3.5), I concluded that Brown simply forgot to write a flat next to the D in the chord, which would have made it a dominant seventh. Written underneath his note about superimposing two dominant sevenths in figure 3.14, Brown notated and then circled such a chord in treble clef, showing how he planned to orchestrate for violin, flute, bass clarinet, and cello his chord progression from event 2 on page 2. To the right of the circled chord, he outlined which chord functions he planned to use from the G7 and A7 chords (see figure 3.17). This became the first measure that would become event 1 on page 6 in Tracking Pierrot. From the numbers to the right of the circled chord that he labeled “top” and “Btm” (or bottom), it’s obvious he was still thinking about the seventh, fifth, and third chord functions of the higher-pitched chord of the chord pair being on the top Page 65 →and the third, root, and fifth of the lower-pitched chord being on the bottom. Notice how Brown bracketed the top numbers (7, 5, and 3) together and how he bracketed the bottom numbers (3, 1, and 5) together. The interval created between the two sets of bracketed numbers (that is, between the “B” and “C♯”) is a major second. Though he didn’t label it as such, it is again the Six-tonic system. Thus, Brown coupled the two chords in each measure by 6T. When orchestrated (see figure 3.3), the major second interval couples the flute and clarinet. Fig. 3.17. Enlargement from figure 3.14; ovals, arrows, and label added for clarity. Shows how to orchestrate the specified chord functions of the superimposed dominant sevenths from page 2, event 2; the orchestrated version becomes page 6, event 1 of Tracking Pierrot. The sevenths are coupled using Schillinger’s Six-tonic system (6T). Vln = violin; Fl = flute; Bcl = bass clarinet; and Vlc = cello. Fig. 3.18. Absolute coupling used on page 6, event 1 of the final score of Tracking Pierrot From figure 3.18, one can see the patterns of numbers, designated by semitones, verifying that Brown used absolute coupling to voice the instruments within each measure. The only exception to this is in measure 13, where Brown exchanged the lower violin’s pitch with the flute’s to create fourths and fifths between the pairs of instruments. Page 66 →

Further Analysis Since my 2013 workshop, further analysis has shown that each of the eleven pages of Tracking Pierrot contains a Schillinger-created event. Of the thirty events Brown used in his score, twenty-three, that is, slightly more than three-quarters, were created using the Schillinger system of musical composition. At this time, I have not seen evidence of Schillinger techniques in the other seven events (page 1, event 1; page 3, events 1, 2, and 3; page 9, events 2 and 3; and page 11, event 3). Table 3.1 summarizes this informationPage 68 → and shows that Brown’s use or nonuse of Schillinger techniques creates an approximate symmetry. Page 67 →Table 3.2. List of events Brown adapted and used later in the final score of Tracking Pierrot Event Original Material in How revised event reused which reused

Page 67 →Table 3.2. List of events Brown adapted and used later in the final score of Tracking Pierrot Event Original Material in How revised event reused which reused Music for violin, vibe, Page 1, event Page 4, Same music and instruments, with eight counts added to the beginning of the marimba, 2 event 1 cello part; new music for flute and piano added to this event clarinet and cello Music for flute, Page 2, event clarinet, Page 6, Only piano and vibe parts used 1 piano, vibe, event 2 violin, and cello Page 9, Only flute, clarinet, violin, and cello parts used from page 2 event 5 Page 11, only second appearance of violin and cello parts used from page 2 event 1 Page 2, event Dominant 2 (figures sevenths for Page 3, 3.5, piano that Same music for piano with vibe and marimba added, but starts at measure 5 event 5 3.14–3.17, begin at 3.21) measure 1 Page 6, event 1 (figures Dominant sevenths orchestrated for violin, flute, clarinet, and cello begin at 3.14, measure 1 3.17, 3.18) Page 9, Same music for piano, vibe, and marimba, but starts at measure 10 event 4 Music for Page 4, event Page 6, Same music for piano used from page 4; new music for flute and violin added piano in this 1 event 3 to this event event Chords in Page Page 4, event whole notes 11, 2 (figures for flute, event 2 Same chords and instruments as on page 4, but chord tones distributed 3.8, 3.19, clarinet, (figures differently for the instruments within each chord 3.20, 3.22) violin, and 3.19, cello 3.20) Dominant sevenths orchestrated Page 6, event for violin, 1 (figures Page 9, flute, Same music and instruments as on page 6, but begins on measure 7 3.14, 3.17, event 1 clarinet, and 3.18) cello begin at measure 1

Page 67 →Table 3.2. List of events Brown adapted and used later in the final score of Tracking Pierrot Event Original Material in How revised event reused which reused Page 8, Page 6, event Music for event 5 Same music for violin as on page 6; new music for cello and flute added to 3 violin (figure this event 3.7) Of these twenty-three Schillinger-created events, ten have been shown in figures 3.5–3.8 and 3.14–3.18. Table 3.3, discussed subsequently, and figures 3.19–20 show additional events in the final score that were constructed using all, or portions, of a row or rows from the sketches Brown created using his technique. His technique, described earlier, was adapted from a Schillinger technique. This high percentage of Schillinger-created events in Tracking Pierrot can be explained in part by Brown’s adaptation of certain events he used again in his final score. Brown repeats event 2, page 2 on page 3 as event 5 and again on page 9 as event 4. Table 3.2 shows the events Brown used more than once and how he adapted them to add variety. When Brown later repeated two of the above events—event 2, page 2 (figures 3.5, 3.14–17, and table 3.2) and event 1, page 6 (figures 3.14, 3.17–3.18, and table 3.2)—he varied them by using a mathematical procedure called permutation, which Schillinger promoted as a fundamental compositional technique. Permutation is the process of rearranging the members of a group’s sequence, and it is one of the first techniques taught in the System for composers and arrangers to use. As Schillinger explained in The Schillinger System: There are two fundamental forms of permutations: first, general permutations; second, circular permutations (displacement). The quantity of general permutations is the product of all integers from unity up to the number expressing the quantity of the elements in a group. For example, the general number of permutations produced by 5 elements equals the product of 1 Г— 2 Г— 3 Г— 4 Г— 5, i.e., 120. The number of circular permutations equals the number of elements in a group. Thus, five elements produce five circular permutations. When an extremely large amount of material is used, general permutations become very practical. But in cases where limitations are imposed by a certain type of esthetic necessity, circular permutations may solve the problem better than a vague selection from the entire number of general permutations.83 Event 2 on page 2 is the chord progression of dominant sevenths that begins on measure 1 and can be played through measure 13. When Brown repeated this same chord progression to create event 5 on page 3, he varied the progression using circular permutation by beginning it on measure 5 instead of measure 1, which altered the sequential order of the measures Page 69 →to the following: 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 1, 2, 3, 4. As seen in table 3.2, Brown also created event 4 on page 9 by using the same chord progression again, but he began the event on measure 10, thus changing the order of the measures to 10, 11, 12, 13, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Table 3.2 also shows how Brown used event 1 on page 6 to create event 1 on page 9 by using the same technique of circular permutation. An implied use of circular permutation is found in Brown’s “Program Note” to the Tracking Pierrot score. In it, he wrote: “Event 2 on Page 4 is a chord progression—1 2 3 4 5 are alternative starting points, indicated by [the conductor’s] right hand with down-beat.” As seen in figures 3.8 and 3.19, Brown divided event 2 into five parts, which he designated with numbers that he circled. Except for part 5, each part is made up of five chords. Again, from a Schillinger perspective, according to Brown’s instructions, if the conductor would choose to start this event with part 2, then the order of the progression would be parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 1. If the

conductor would select part 4 as the starting point, the order would then be 4, 5, 1, 2, 3. When this progression is repeated as event 2 on page 11 (see figure 3.19 and table 3.2), it is unclear if Brown offered this same option of alternative starting points to the conductor. The question arises because Brown restated his instructions from the program note directly above event 2 on page 4, but he did not include them when he adapted this event to create event 2 on page 11. Brown also implied another use of circular permutation in his final score when he wrote in the program note the following instructions for solo lines: “All solo lines are to be considered вЂloops’—if the musician is interrupted before the end of the line, he/she begins after point of interruption on next entrance cue and continues вЂloop’ until stopped or changed to another event.” Thus, if the musician is interrupted before the end of the line, and if the musician is cued to continue after the interruption, he or she begins the sequence of pitches at a starting point other than the first note written for his or her solo. And if the soloist is allowed to play long enough to “loop” back to what Brown had written as the original first pitch of the solo, the order of the pitches is then permutated. The use of general permutation can be seen in Brown’s assignment of the chord tones for the instruments he used on page 4 for event 2 and page 11 for event 2.84 As shown in figure 3.19, these two events are the same progression of chords played by the same four instruments—flute, clarinet, violin, and cello—but the four chord tones in each chord are distributed differently among the instruments from one event to the other. Figure 3.20 shows how the two events were analyzed to discover which permutations the composer used. Page 70 →Table 3.3. Transposition errors and discrepancies in the events composed of Schillinger-created rows in the final score of Tracking Pierrot. Note: sk = sketch, fs = final score. Instruments are abbreviated as follows: cello (Vlc); clarinet (Bв™-clar); flute (Flt); marimba (Marim[b]); piano (Pno); violin (Vln). SchillingerPage, Transposition created rows Discrepancies event errors used “A”: O1, O2, RI1; “B”R; Cello = two 1, 2 “ALL” from sk to fs Interval: R & I “B”: Cello = two from sk to fs O, R, RI; 2, 1

3, 4

“C”: O, I, R, RI; “D”: O, I, RI; No System I “B”: O, I, R, RI; “C”: O, I, R, RI; No System: O, I, R, RI; “ALL” Interval: R & RI

Vln = two from sk to fs

Vibe = reversed two pitches from sk to fs

Vlc = three from sk to fs Bв™-clar = used a different pitch from sk to fs Marim = one from sk to fs

Pno = reversed two pitches between hands, and used a different pitch from sk to fs

Vlc = one from sk to fs

Marim = reversed two pitches from sk to fs, and used three different pitches from sk Vlc = left out three pitches from sk to fs

4, 1

4, 2

“A”: O, O1, O2, O3, I1, RI, RI1

Flt = inserted a new pitch in fs for two pitches in sk Vlc = three from sk to fs

Piano = in right hand of fs, skipped a pitch from sk Vln = added a new pitch in fs not in sk

Vlc = four from sk to fs “ALL” Interval: O, I, Bв™-clar = R, RI two from sk to fs

“B”: O, I, R, RI; “C”: 5, O, I, R, RI; unnumbered No System: O, I, R, RI; “ALL” Interval R “B”: Page 71 O, R, RI; →6, 2 “C”: O, RI “A”: 7, O, I, R, RI, unnumbered O1, I1

Marimb = one from sk to fs Flt = substituted one pitch in fs for one in sk Vlc = one from sk to fs

Vibe = reversed two pitches from sk to fs Flt = order of two pitches reversed from sk to fs Bв™-clar (third stave) = Vlc = added accidental to pitch in fs not used on same pitch in sk one from sk to fs Flt (second stave) = substituted one pitch in fs for one in sk Cl = substituted a different pitch in draft for a pitch in sk. When transposed for Cl, pitch in draft used.

“A” O5 “A”: 8, 3 RI1, I5 “A”: 8, 4 O3, I5 “B”: O, RI; “C”: Cello = two 9, 5 O, I R; from sk to fs “D”: O, I “C”RI; 10, “D”R; unnumbered No System: O, I, R Vln = two “B”RI; from sk to fs 11, 1 “D”RI; No System I Vlc = three from sk to fs 8, 2

Bв™-clar = order of two pitches reversed from sk to fs

Vibe = skipped a pitch in fs that was used in sk Pno = skipped a pitch in fs that was used in sk

Flt = order of two pitches reversed from sk to fs Pno = accidental on pitch in sk not used on same pitch in fs

11, 2

Vlc = four “ALL” from sk to fs Interval: O, I, Bв™-clar = Vlc = substituted one pitch in fs for one in sk R, RI two from sk to fs

Page 72 → Fig. 3.19. Draft and final score for page 4, event 2 and page 11, event 2 of Tracking Pierrot. Boxes, ovals, and labels added for clarity. Brown’s draft shows that event 2 on page 11 is the same chord progression as is event 2 on page 4. In the final score, he varied the two events by assigning each instrument on page 11 a different chord tone from page 4. Page 73 → Fig. 3.20. Sketch and final score for page 4, event 2 and page 11, event 2 of Tracking Pierrot. Ovals and labels added for clarity. The notes in the ovals in the sketch, A, are vertically aligned as the first three chords in each event, B and C, in the final score. Each chord tone has been assigned to one of the four instruments Brown used to orchestrate both events. In this figure, each instrument has been assigned a letter (a = flute; b = clarinet; c = violin; and d = cello) to show the different combinations, or permutations, of these four instruments Brown used. Chords 1, 2, and 3 are the same chords in both events; only the chord tones have been distributed differently from one event to the other. As seen in figure 3.19, each event consists of twenty-four chords. The different permutations used to orchestrate all forty-eight chords are shown in D. Page 74 →To determine the different instrumental permutations, I assigned a letter to each instrument on page 4 and page 11: a = flute; b = clarinet; c = violin; and d = cello. Using the order of the pitches in each group of fournote chords Brown created from his sketch of his “ALL” Interval rows, I noted under the pitches in the sketch which instrument he assigned to play each pitch in the final score in both events. Once all the forty-eight permutations were determined, they were gathered together to see which ones Brown used and to see how often he used them. The general number of permutations produced by four elements, or in this case, four instruments, equals the product of 1 Г— 2 Г— 3 Г— 4, that is, 24. In figure 3.20D, one can see that Brown used eighteen out of the twenty-four possible permutations available to him. Of those, he favored the permutation of abdc (flute, clarinet, cello, violin) the most, using it seven times. The other permutation he favored was cdba (violin, cello, clarinet, flute), which he used six times. These two permutations create a palindrome. The remaining sixteen permutations were used four or fewer times. The events listed in table 3.3 show which rows Brown used to create them. In addition, the table reveals a number of changes consisting of errors and discrepancies he made to his rows when he transferred them to his final score.85 Any researcher analyzing the final score to determine how much of each row was created using Schillinger techniques may be confused when encountering any of the changes. It is necessary to continue beyond these changes because they are simply an interruption to his use of these techniques. One kind of error and five kinds of discrepancies are evident in table 3.3. The error concerns questionable notes in the final score, the result of Brown apparently misreading a pitch in a clef other than what he used in his sketch. The discrepancies consist of the five following situations: (1) Brown reversed the order of two pitches in the row; (2) he left out a pitch or pitches in the row; (3) he substituted one pitch for another, or he substituted several pitches for others in the row; (4) he added a pitch to the row; (5) he didn’t transpose a pitch for the clarinet when he wrote it for the final score. In total, Brown made fifty-eight changes when he transferred his rows to the final score. Of the six ways in which he changed the rows, the change he made most often was when it appears he misread a pitch in a clef other than what he used in his sketch or he wrote a pitch in a clef other than what he used in his sketch. These changes happened thirty-six times and account for more than half of the changes in the final score.В Had Brown used the pitch in the same clef in the final score that he used in the sketch, he would not have deviated from the row. As discussed earlier, a notable error concerns the chord progression Page 75 →of parallel dominant sevenths in page 2, event 2, and which is repeated as event 5 on page 3 and event 4 on page 9. As seen in figure 3.21, Brown

has used absolute coupling in constructing each chord. However, in measure 6, beginning with an Eв™-seventh, Brown altered the coupling because he forgot to add a flat to the seventh of the chord. That is, in notating the pitches, Brown wrote an Eв™-major seventh chord (Eв™-, G, Bв™-, D) instead of an Eв™-dominant seventh chord (Eв™-, G, Bв™-, Dв™-). When he wrote an Eв™-dominant seventh chord in measure 9, the coupling is correct. Note that the coupling in figure 3.21 refers to the coupling of the pitches in each chord, whereas that shown in figure 3.15 concerns the coupling of each pair of chords. Fig. 3.21. Absolute coupling of the pitches used in page 2, event 2 of the final score of Tracking Pierrot. Numbers represent half steps between the pitches. Arrow points to the asterisks that show Brown’s error. This error is repeated in page 3, event 5 and page 9, event 4. As stated earlier, when analyzing a piece of music, it can be difficult to verify if Schillinger techniques were used in any way to compose the piece unless the composer of the work leaves behind sketches of or notes about the piece showing his or her use of the System. When we look at the last twelve chords in Brown’s draft of event 2, page 4 (figure 3.22), it appears he created a new original row and its related row forms not included in the extant sketches for Tracking Pierrot, which presents a difficulty for the Page 77 →analyst. However, when one understands how Brown created these chords, one suspects that Brown was certain that one day someone would look at this draft and enjoy the joke he left to be discovered. Page 76 → Fig. 3.22. Sketch, draft, and final score for page 4, event 2 of Tracking Pierrot. Boxes, ovals, circles, squares, lines, triangles, and labels added for clarity. In Brown’s draft of this event, it appears he used the “ALL” Interval rows with a new row and its forms, labeled OR, IR, RR, RIR, to create event 2. However, Brown used the same rows throughout the event, but gave new names to the rows for the second half of the event: circle OR = circle R; square IR = square RI; oval RR = oval O; and triangle RIR = triangle I. In his draft of event 2, page 4, Brown labeled the first three of these last twelve chords “ALL” Interval OR, the second three IR, the third three RR and the last three chords RIR. Upon closer inspection of the pitches of the original “ALL” Interval row and its forms used in the first twelve chords of this event, we see that Brown simply gave alternative names to the rows he used to create the last twelve chords. That is, OR means the original row played in reverse, which is usually designated as the retrograde (R) of the row. IR is the inverse row played in reverse, which is usually designated as RI. RR is the reverse row played in reverse, which is usually the original (O) row. And RIR is the retrograde inversion played in reverse, which is usually the inversion (I). Thus, the pitches used in the last twelve chords are the same as those used in the first twelve chords.

Summary The use of the Schillinger system of musical composition can be seen throughout Tracking Pierrot. This piece would not be the same piece without the use of techniques Brown learned from the System. These techniques are highlighted in what follows. Precompositional Planning, Individual Development of Musical Parameters, and Synchronization Brown began the process of composing Tracking Pierrot by writing a precompositional plan, a concept Schillinger promoted. In agreement with Schillinger’s scientific approach to composition, Brown used the technique of sketching out separately rhythmic structures and pitch rows, and then, using another Schillinger technique of synchronization, he coordinated them into a whole to form various events throughout the piece. Cycles and Quadrant Rotation To create his pitch rows, Brown adapted a Schillinger technique called cycles. Schillinger used cycles to describe root movements of chord progressions, whereas Brown utilized it as a methodical way to select the eleven pitches for each of his six original rows. Brown’s adaptation of this Schillinger technique demonstrates a level of understanding of the cycles techniquePage 78 → that enabled him to use it in this unique way. Then, applying what Schillinger called quadrant rotation to the original rows, Brown derived the retrograde, inversion, and

retrograde inversion rows for each one. Tonic System Another instance where Brown used a Schillinger technique as a means by which to make a decision was in his application of Schillinger’s tonic system. Tonics provided Brown with a way to limit methodically the pitch material available to him from the forty-eight versions of his “A” pitch row by predetermining which transpositions he would use. He also employed this technique to determine the beginning pitches for his “C” and “D” rows. Coupling Furthermore, Brown utilized Schillinger’s system of tonics in deciding how to voice the chord progression of pairs of parallel dominant sevenths that appear in the work several times. In his program note to the final score, Brown said the progression was based on a Schillinger concept but did not name it;В this concept consists of using chords of all the same type in a progression.В He voiced the lower-pitched chord of each pair in second inversion and coupled it together with the higher-pitched chord in root position using the tonic system. Coupling was another technique Schillinger taught as a way of adding a sequence of tones to another sequence of tones at a diatonic or absolute interval. Upon Brown’s instructions, the coupled chords were to be played as a single attack. Sigma in the Symmetric Systems When the previously described pairs of chords are played as a single big chord, the result is a thirteenth chord. In Schillinger’s symmetric systems, there are thirty-six different kinds of thirteenth chords. Each one is called a master structure and is denoted by the Greek letter sigma (ОЈ). He termed all these master structures the ОЈ (13) families and labeled each one with a Roman numeral. The master structure Brown used exclusively in his chord progression of parallel dominant sevenths was ОЈXIII. Permutation When Brown repeated the chord progression of parallel dominant sevenths in his score, he varied the repetitions by permuting the order of the Page 79 →measures. Permutation is one of the first techniques taught in the System, as it is fundamental to Schillinger’s development of all the musical parameters. Brown also used permutation when he repeated the orchestrated chord progression.

Conclusions From analyzing Tracking Pierrot, one can conclude that Brown was profoundly influenced by the Schillinger system. While we know that, over the years, Brown attributed his compositional technique to the Schillinger system, this analysis substantiates that the System was significant and pervasive in his thinking, his writing, and his composing. Even though it was written decades after he was authorized as a Schillinger teacher, Tracking Pierrot could be seen as an exemplary illustration of an original composition using Schillinger techniques that Brown could have submitted in order to receive a certificate of full authorization to teach the System. It clearly demonstrates that he understood and accepted the basic premise of Schillinger’s philosophy: that the great masters of music had intuited the mathematical logic of structure to the basic universal patterns they had employed in their works. In addition, Tracking Pierrot shows that Brown had studied and used the techniques Schillinger discovered from his analysis of the great masters, codified, and further developed in his system of musical composition. During my 1996 interview with him, Brown said the Schillinger techniques had always influenced him and he’d never given them up. Tracking Pierrot is Brown’s only piece thus far analyzed in detail for his use of Schillinger techniques. Because of this lack of information, I strongly encourage further research on

Brown’s works to determine whether he used Schillinger techniques throughout his career or whether Tracking Pierrot is an anomaly. However, in order to have a deeper, fuller, more complete understanding of his music, it is essential also to have an understanding of the Schillinger system. One way to get a good sense of what Brown would have studied is to explore The Schillinger House School of Music Supervised Self-Study Course in Arranging and Composition. Lawrence Berk, Lyle Dowling, and James McInerney authored these twelve lessons using aspects of the Schillinger system to teach arranging and composition. The lessons are in a typescript form and are available through the Library of Congress. At this time, this is the only place where I have found them.86

Page 80 →

Chapter 4 Energy Fields Earle Brown, Open Form, and the Visual Arts David Ryan Late in 2000, for a London performance of his unpublished collection of graphic scores, Earle Brown provided me with a handwritten set of hints and directions.1 These consisted of specific and general indications for each graphic score, but one directive stood out especially: “RESPECT—in all cases—the look and structure of the Graphic.” What was striking was Brown’s wish for complete attentiveness to what might appear as rather abstract or even enigmatic graphic notations. He had arrived at these pieces through a spontaneous calligraphy, which often jettisoned particular details and yet mapped out densities and knots of interacting sounds. In 1999, Brown described the centrality of gesture and drawing to his practice, and with regard to these pieces in particular: I very often “sketch” the beginning of a piece, graphically. I guess you have to remember that John [Cage], Morty [Feldman], and I used to know very well Bill de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Philip Guston.В .В .В . So it seems natural to me that I draw—it’s my fantasy, and some of the fantasies have a direct sonic reality to them.2 Many of the graphic sketches bearing this “direct sonic reality” formed the basis of a collection Brown occasionally referred to as Folio II. However provisional, the composer felt confident that these drawings could communicatePage 81 → a creative bridge between the “fantasy” of the composer and that of the performer(s), resulting in a creative dialogue. This lay at the heart of Brown’s project, whether utilizing graphic, open, or closed notational systems. As with the painters he mentioned above, gesture and the convincing articulation of gesture, were also a key to the composer’s approach. While Brown’s strong connection to abstract expressionist painting is well known, and despite the fact we can listen to his compositions with this in mind, Brown was quick to quell any suggestion that his interest was simply a translation of one art form into another: “The differences in realizing and perceiving works in the вЂtime arts’ and in the вЂspace arts’ is extremely significant and it is not possible, nor desirable, to make any 1 to 1 equivalence.”3 Brown instead referred to Baudelaire’s vision: “The arts aspire, if not to complement one another, at least to lend one another new energies.”4 This new energizing force was uppermost in Brown’s mind as he developed a new means of thinking about form and, indeed, “open form.” The purpose of this chapter is to examine how visual art lent new energies to the particularities of Brown’s music and aesthetic purpose. In comparisons of this kind, there is always a tension between general metaphor and actual mechanics, and addressing Brown in this light is no exception, as his own writings freely alternated between the two. My discussion endeavors to show that the visual arts were a catalyst that shaped the notation as well as the form of Brown’s music, especially in his early years. While he adopted strategies from his experiences with the visual arts, he always sought musical solutions and respected the specificity of the musical medium. However much he kept a keen eye on developments in painting, sculpture, and the arts in general after the 1960s, the important catalysts of Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder came very early on, in the 1940s, and remained with him throughout his career. We might also cite other extramusical influences: Buckminster Fuller, Max Ernst, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Patchen, and artist friends such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. Brown’s approach remained at heart a synthetic one, and to draw out one aspect of the complex mix of influences is both difficult and dangerously one-sided. This is important to bear in mind, as Brown’s artistic predilections and references were wide and often compound. I discuss two collections that bookend Brown’s output: Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54) and the collection

now known as Folio II (ca. 1970–2000). I see these pieces as a potential frame from which to view many of his other works. The first set is what I would refer to as a controlled Page 82 →experiment in new notational form, while the second is a much more informal retrospective collection of fragments, gift sketches, and graphic sketches. While the increased activity in analyzing Brown’s compositions in a musicological light is to be warmly welcomed, we must remember his own avoidance of this perspective and the stress in his writings of a more “poetic” reading that points to something broader, an outlook that ties his music most readily to abstract expressionism and its critical history. While no doubt he welcomed analyses of his various pieces, as with the painters, Brown’s own emphasis was on the “creative act”—the situation of making, rather than analyzing: “I’ve always been more informed by my ears. I have no patience to analyze.”5 Articulating Brown’s “poetic” position is not as easy as it might first appear, but it is important for a full understanding of his work and grasped only through his view of a cross-pollination of the arts. Brown’s own early experiments with painting illuminate his thinking about the close relationship between visual art and music, and I analyze several of these paintings, many of which are reproduced for the first time here. I was fortunate to have had several discussions with Earle Brown before his death, and my discussion also draws from these interviews from 1995 and 1999.

December 1952: Sculpture and Physical Mobility Folio is Brown’s best-known early work. Consisting of seven loose-leaf pieces, it presents an investigation into the problems of notating sound and the open structuring of time. It provides a glimpse into a composer’s workshop rather like a folio of prints or drawings might be for a visual artist. Folio was an active sourcebook for Brown; he would return several times to the problems raised therein, refine them, and cite his notes for the work as much as the pieces themselves. In Brown’s words, this was the work in which he was “searching for a notation.”6 While Folio appeared to be a new start for Brown, the work belonged to a trajectory of earlier experiments that originated during his Denver years, 1950–52, when he was teaching the Schillinger system and studying visual art and literature. Art and literature had been important during his student years in Boston, but in Denver they crystallized into potential catalysts for composition. To draw out this context, it is worth looking briefly at works that Brown completed before Folio, both for piano: Perspectives and Actomy. Perspectives (1952) was based on a response to a small sculpture entitled Objects on a Table that Brown viewed at the Denver Art Museum by Hans Page 83 →Arp, the Swiss Surrealist sculptor and collagist. Brown wanted an aural experience similar to that of physically moving around the sculpture—of seeing something from an entirely different perspective, with foreshortened and diverse angles of perception, or it being obscured by something else. Musically, this was realized by taking the twelve-tone row and the rhythmic groupings that structured the work, and allowing free interactions and perspectival trajectories to overlap and collide. “It occurred to me that,” Brown later remembered, “like the objects on a table, I could turn [a rhythmic group] and make it appear as if an edge, much shorter. How I did that was to [set in] diminution that same rhythmic group.”7 Sonically, the resulting sound world of Perspectives has some stylistic kinship with the abrupt and nontransitional shifts in dynamics and density of Boulez’s first two piano sonatas (the second of which Brown had seen during his first meeting with Cage in Denver in April 1951, and then heard Tudor play in Boulder in July 1951). As in most of Brown’s early piano music we sense a play of different “weights” that is occasionally aggressive and heavy, and at other times lightened by delicate touches to create the impression of an object with overlapping and intersecting planes. Perspectives also forecasts the gritty, disjointed harmonic combinations that would characterize 25 Pages (1953); it was only a small step for the rhythmic groupings of Perspectives to function as disassembled units that could be freely recombined in performance. In fact, a key to the future development of the open elements of his work was this idea of the mobile spectator and the static object. The complexity of Brown’s early piano works (which also included Three Pieces for Piano, 1951) foregrounded some of the problems of notation that were to occupy Brown when he first moved to New York in 1952. This is apparent in a pencil draft for a 1952 piece entitled Actomy, which recently surfaced among Brown’s papers. Although not precisely dated, it shares the feel of October 1952 and the “MM” or metronome-marked pieces made the next year and included in Folio. After the dense textures of Perspectives,

Brown explored a more open musical space with Actomy, favoring spatially overlapping sustained sounds, often sevenths, with interjections of short but rapid figurations (rather like MM - 135 in the Folio set), in addition to extreme juxtapositions of dynamics. The score is intriguing because the notation seems to collapse into suggestiveness toward the end—noteheads become dashes, and their rhythmic framework becomes a network of interconnected pitches both vertically and diagonally. At the center of the score, a very rapid figure appears accompanied by a ppp marking with a forward arrow, and a fff with an arrow in the opposite direction. This is more than Page 84 →likely an accelerando/ritardando marking (Brown indicates a dynamic envelope moving from ppp to fff and back differently) but it also demands the question of the figure’s reversibility: notated ppp one way and fff backward? These issues, together with the mobile interconnectedness of the phrases within the bottom staves of Actomy, prefigured the notational experiments of the Folio pieces. If Perspectives shows Brown responding to visual stimuli, Actomy suggests that Brown was moving toward a reconception of the score itself. In this light, December 1952, the most open, ambiguous, and visual score of the Folio set, was a key step in the works to come, as a culmination of diverse influences. The notation of December 1952 consists of thirty-one markings: twenty horizontal and ten vertical rectangles, and one square floating on a white field (figure 4.1). In later years this same piece frustrated Brown due to its ubiquity and the misapprehension that he was simply a designer of graphic scores—or even of this one graphic piece. Yet it must be pointed out that within his writings and lectures December 1952 often occupied a central role in explanations of his aesthetic position. When December 1952 appeared, it broke the semantic link between notation and the resulting sound and, as Brown suggested, the next step was simply a blank piece of paper to let musicians freely improvise. This was not an interesting proposition for him: “This is the next step (the blank page). But everybody’s got a blank piece of paper, they don’t need me.”8 If December 1952 was just one step away from totally free, unscripted improvisation, how do we assess it as a composition? Many have seen the piece as the first instance of “open form” and this is in some ways true because of the flexibility of reading the score, but Brown often pointed out that December 1952 was not, in fact, in “open form” because of its extreme open content. This meant for Brown that the piece had no real identity from one performance to the next: “вЂDecember 1952’ raises the question of whether a work whose form and content are different in each performance can be called, вЂopen form.’ My personal answer is no; that to be called open form, a work must have an identifiable content which can then be formed.”9 Simply put, he had no control over how this piece would be realized.10 Graphically, Brown was very aware of the writer Kenneth Patchen and his work around this time. The visual layouts featured in Sleepers Awake from 1946 may well have been suggestive of the “opaque” notation featured in December 1952. Patchen’s text used various scales of typography, and the fluid translation of literary description into drawings and diagrams created a “trans-literary” situation (figure 4.2). As a break from literary tradition, Patchen wanted to invent a new kind of book made by a new Page 85 →kind of “total” artist. He believed that the author had to embrace “the unknown,” and this involved an exploration of the constraints of the typographic event, the page, and the architecture of the book itself as a creative space that provoked the reader. Patchen’s map in figure 4.2, for instance, with its floating rectangles and arrows, sits somewhere between the score and the explanatory diagram Brown provided for December 1952 (figure 4.1). Patchen’s diagram gives us a space-time map of movement between objects. It is not hard to see why Brown expressed an interest in such texts and their exploration of nonlinear reading. Fig. 4.1. December 1952 from Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54) and prefatory note. Copyright В© 1961 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. The overt visuality of December 1952 was sometimes problematic for Brown as it became an iconic image separate from its original conception. It was often used as a graphic to illustrate “contemporary” music (numerous festival posters in the 1960s, etc.), and was increasingly more seen than heard. Boulez, recalling his first impressions of the Folio pieces when visiting New York in 1952, dismissed them (with a clear reference to

December 1952): “These sketches seemed to be art of a post-Mondrian style, closer to paintings than music, and I was not convinced.”11 Christian Wolff later offered an opposing view, arguing that “it is visually elegant but intended simply to be functional musically. Unlike any painting it might recall, it neither has nor implies a frame, and there’s no visual tension between surface and possible depth (even though Brown had a three-dimensional scheme for the resulting sound). The notation indicates a musical reading that floats in time.”12 In 1995, I asked Brown about the misapprehensions of December 1952 Page 86 →and Mondrian’s geometrical abstractions, specifically with regard to Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean series in which an image is broken down into horizontal and vertical relationships. Brown’s response is worth quoting at length here: Fig. 4.2. Kenneth Patchen, Sleepers Awake (1946), p. 221. Used by permission from the Kenneth Patchen Estate. EB: That’s interesting because a lot of people have commented upon this. I knew Mondrian’s work very well but it never entered my mind while making the piece. Do you know how December 1952 was made? It was produced by using random sampling tables of numbers. I wanted to activate only three parameters: relative frequency, relative loudness, relative duration. So it was not a visual concept.В .В .В . But concerning my conception of December 1952, one thing I knew before I ever wrote or “drew” it, was that it could be played from any point to any other point, in any direction—multi-ordinal. What occurred to me was the question, you know, of writing something from left to right, if it’s not going to be performed from left to right. So I set up a programme—which I still have—which found a random sampling number on the abscissa and one on the ordinateВ .В .В . where the point falls, something occurs. Then I have another random sampling number to tell me whether it falls to the right or to the left [of that point], whether it expands or contracts, whether it is a single line or five [and so therefore] whether it is a thin line or thicker line. How long it is, how vertical it is, how short it is. So you can see, this is a completely UN-Mondrian-like creation.В .В .В . [However,] the Page 87 →precursor of December 1952 was under the influence of Alexander Calder before I ever met John Cage or Morton Feldman or anyone like that, Calder was a big influence upon me. I had picked up a booklet from the Museum of Modern Art about Calder’s work,13 and discovered that a lot of the early work was motorized, so the origin of December 1952 was to be a box that was to sit on the piano. It was going to be a series of bolts and pulleys that moved objects through spaceВ .В .В . DR: So it was a kind of kinetic score? EB: Right. A kinetic score. Before this I designed [another] pieceВ .В .В . Buckminster Fuller influenced, it was to be a globe about this size [a bit bigger than a soccer ball]В .В .В . and it would have strips of music paper interacting with the circumference; the globe with these musical items on it was going to sit in a bowl [or tank] of water [laughs].В .В .В . And the pianist would play whatever came up closest to himВ .В .В . this was very earlyВ .В .В . and quite wild!14 In a 1970 statement, Brown recalled that the conception of the globe in the water tank would be mobilized by “the performer, [who] by blowing on it, would make it revolve and turn.”15 In that same text, Brown remarked on the box with pulleys: “I never did realize this idea, not being able to get motors and not really being all that interested in constructing it.”16 While the box piece became the score December 1952, the second example seemed to prefigure November 1952 (“Synergy”), also part of Folio. Two points can be highlighted from Brown’s remarks. First, Brown’s intention was primarily sonic rather than visual (which Wolff also emphasized above), although the impetus for December 1952 came from visual sources: his spatial experience of Calder’s work as a changing ensemble of elements and Patchen’s blurring of language, typography, and drawing. Second, Brown’s concern with mobility and its transposition from physical movement to “virtual” motion in December 1952 points to the Mondrian “problem.” We can see, in fact, why Brown refers to this as “un-Mondrian” in its outlook. In Mondrian’s classic phase, his paintings proposed an idealized Ur-structure of what exists invisibly behind the flux of nature: a proportioned balance of opposites, deduced and “reduced” through the process of painting.

Brown’s “graphic concept” would appear to be the opposite of this: a snapshot of relations, a randomly developed module of relations to be set in motion, this being simply one “fixed” snapshot of pictorialPage 88 → mobility. Brown wrote, “It was like a photograph of these elements at one moment. But one should consider them constantly in movement in all dimensions.”17 Brown inverts Mondrian’s position, in that the proposition of the score is a generative fragmented module that must be activated into movement. Its visual mapping is essential for the performer to generate material extrapolated from the relations given on the page. It is not an image of harmonic balance, but a randomly determined template for further action, for stepping into the flux of movement rather than out of it.18 In James Johnson Sweeney’s essay for the exhibition catalog of Calder’s 1943 Museum of Modern Art retrospective (revised and published as a book in 1951), which Brown referenced during my 1995 interview, he discussed Calder’s early mechanical sculptures: “For them [Calder] had worked out a technique of simple mechanical devices for controlling a patterned rhythm of moving objects within a fixed frame.” Further on, in relation to Calder’s later innovations of nonmechanical mobiles, Sweeney wrote: Calder soon began to find a restriction: without complicated mechanisms, such controlled patterns ran the risk of becoming monotonous in their repetitions. A free natural movement would be more desirable in many ways. What might be sacrificed in formal patterns, would be made up for in rhythmic variety. Unpredictability of movement would give a greater sense of life.В .В .В . Why should the wind not be enlisted to please the eye with rhythmically swinging sculptural forms.19 This passage resonates with Brown’s sketches for Folio and the utilization of mechanical and “natural” motion: the frame with motorized objects and the globe in water, each harnessing both mechanical and wind motion. A connection with Calder’s concerns can be made between the mechanism of pulleys, for example, steering the relationships between horizontal and vertical events, or the pianist initiating motion by blowing into the tank in order to move the musically inscribed globe. Calder’s mechanized pieces exhibit an often slow but eccentric movement, as in pieces like Pantograf and Two Spheres, both from 1931 and made after an epiphany in Mondrian’s studio that led Calder to embrace abstract form. Pantograf (figure 4.3) has a series of spooled pulley mechanisms—like a cinematic projector—but with motion that is extremely delicate and slow. Was Brown thinking of something like this with his mechanized box? Fig. 4.3. Alexander Calder, Pantograf, 1934. Wood, wire, sheet metal, motor. 132 Г— 137 Г— 36 cm. Donation 1961 from Louisa and Alexander Calder. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Used by permission. Page 89 →Perhaps Brown felt he was moving too close to sonic sculpture rather than composition with his early concepts for Folio. Calder’s work pointed to a tension between mobility and immobility that stayed with Brown. Calder’s statement about form stemming from the movements of the universe perfectly matches the experience of Brown’s early work up to the late 1950s: “The idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densitiesВ .В .В . some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form.”20 By the mid to later 1950s these ideals of motion and kinetic possibilities, in the wake of Calder, exploded into a surge of kinetic art proposed by a younger avant-garde, as Pamela M. Lee has argued: Almost all of the work was abstract or largely non-representational.В .В .В . Some of the movement was actual.В .В .В . Strips of metal shuddered and bowed, producing their own quavering and resonant music. Surfaces seethed and receded as if caught in mid-breath. Objects whirred above magnetic fields. Cybernetic towers twinkled and beeped.В .В .В . Another kind of movement presented by and within kinetic art was virtual. In these instances, the literal movement of the spectator animated the virtual (and internal) dynamics of the work, seeming to alter the space of the object as one passed around or before it.21 This sense of literal movement animating virtual movement could certainly be related to Brown’s early

experiments, which prefigure something Page 90 →of this spirit, and he remained interested in the discourse around kinetics (the Venezuelan optical and kinetic artist JesГєs Raphael Soto, among others, was part of his art collection). Circumscribing this explosion of kinetic art was the development of information theory and cybernetics, which also marked Brown’s thinking (allusions appear in his 1965 Darmstadt lecture on form, for example).22 This “scientific” dimension of Brown’s thought was no doubt inculcated by his studies of Schillinger. Brown found the mechanical motion of his earlier sketched experiments too limiting, as Calder had also discovered in his own work. Brown soon realized that virtual and conceptual motion could be activated from its diagrammatic representation to yield a more spontaneous and “natural movement” in time than the predictable patterns of mechanical movement. In his later Calder Piece (1966), however, Brown brought together the mechanical and the conceptual with the physical presence of a Calder sculpture operating both as an instrument for the musicians to play and as a conductor (see Elizabeth Hoover’s chapter in this volume). One directive of Calder Piece presents an idea clearly with its roots in the globe piece. Brown instructed the percussionists “to look at the moving mobile, take a mental snapshot of the outline of its petals, imagine superimposing that outline on the written score, and choose to play the music that was encircled by the imaginary petals on that page.”23 The implication of physical space can be found in the layout and instructions of many of Brown’s other scores. For more fluid spatial and spontaneous possibilities, Brown looked elsewhere.

Painting: Space and Time While still in Denver, between 1950 and 1952, Brown produced several drip paintings “to get the feel” of Jackson Pollock’s technique. These works are small in scale, usually on cardboard, with open layers of dripped industrial or enamel paint—modest exercises maybe, but clear explorations of how materials behave and create space. One such piece is a small drip painting Brown later referred to as Pierrot (plate 1), which took on the form of a central figure and recalled the style of Klee or Surrealism as much as Pollock. Another painting from 1951, and more typical of this set of works by Brown, uses household paint on square cardboard. “Denver (1)” in plate 2 is more resolutely abstract and constructed in three distinct layers: the first layer is a thin black armature; the second, a silvery white; and the third, a glutinous red surface with varying qualities of thickness and stability, creatingPage 91 → a bleeding effect. Brown created a dialogue and open quality between each of these layers. This piece also reveals certain key choices: the tonal color of the card ground, for instance, and the limited tonality of colors interacting with this ground (black, red, and white). With these restricted materials, the focus becomes the spatial behavior of both line and color as events on the ground and might recall Hans Hoffman’s approach to form (who also made drip paintings, independent of Pollock) and his view of gesture as “space makers”—that is, each gesture functions spatially within the coordinates of both linear surface and illusionistic depth. In Brown’s piece, density of mark and layer accrue as a field, only slightly differentiated or alleviated by accentuating the bottom edge as a more open space. Other paintings explore a sparser design, such as “Denver (2)” (plate 3). By opening the space and allowing interplay between line and the accidental blotches that accompany them, Brown explores a much shallower space. Again, as in most of these works, there is an implicit formal scheme underpinning the gestural field. The elongated “portrait” format naturally creates a relationship between above and below—here accentuated by the implication of two stacked repeated blocks of gesture (the bottom block consisting of a third of the whole surface). Sharing this format, “Denver (3)” (1951–52) (plate 4) attempts a different kind of balance, with a horizontal fragment of black calligraphy over yellow at the bottom, sitting within the width of the card support in calligraphic autonomy as a horizontal tracery; and above, loosely dripped horizontal and vertical demarcations: not a fixed rectilinear grid, but rather floating blocks in dialogue. These formal “condensations” of gestural areas—that have “form” and yet appear liltingly formless—create spatial dialogue prophetic of what Brown would soon realize more fully in his musical works.

In “Denver (4)” from 1951 (plate 5), Brown explored only two colors, black and cadmium yellow/ochre, each developing the implication of circular concentric motion that persists as an overall gesture, more formally unconstrained than its companions. Again, there is a sense of working with the edges, the boundary and shape of the paper—of finding ways to articulate, intuitively and spontaneously, the whole space while acknowledging the bounded space as a constraint that influences gestures and their interplay. The space of the support and the contact of the material as a kind of energy field is one way to see these experiments in relation to Brown’s music. “Denver (4)” produces a space that brings to mind Man Ray’s “space Page 92 →writings, ” which use light to form a fugitive abstract calligraphy (actually based on the artist’s signature) in the space of his studio in 1938. Ray’s work is made by a repeated contingent gesture that forms an illusion of space, similar to what Brown had explored in his paintings. Unlike the Pierrot painting, the gestures of “Denver (4)” do not so much produce figures as they articulate space; and as with Pollock and Ray, the gesture is not about direct contact with the surface. The path of the gesture is traced in space, and the gesture is the residue of that tracery in the air. Again, we are brought back to movement in space, the virtuality of this gesture that both is and is not the actual residue on the page. Surely this also brought to mind music, and the fragile connection between the notated score and the resulting performance (temporally inverted in the painterly process: the traces that form the painting being the “ghosts” of the actual performed gestures or actions, as opposed to the set of information that will generate, implicitly in the future, musically performed ones). It also brings into question a division that Brown maintained (typical, we should add, of mid-twentieth-century thought) between the “space arts” and the “time arts.” He used this division, sensibly, to accentuate the medium-specificity between art forms despite his interest in crosspollination—that there is neither a “1 to 1 equivalence” nor a desire for such a situation. But ideas sparked in one medium can be applied to another, at a fundamentally conceptual, or what Brown would call a poetic, level, operating within the specifics and particularities of the adopted medium. As we have just seen in Brown’s paint studies, the complex relationship between gesture, trace, and mark prompts questions about space as well as time; and between the instantaneous gesture and the fixed, unchanging image of that motion. As John Berger pointed out in the late 1970s, painting’s power had long been a mediation between the ephemeral and the timeless, and by the mid-twentieth century, “The mediation of timelessness became more and more problematic, more and more difficult to sustain [with] the ephemeral becoming briefer and briefer.”24 I see Brown’s paintings and earlier musical works exploring this dichotomy, just as Pollock had, whereby the field with its aggregation of motion results in a field of immobility, of vast timelessness, which in turn invites the mobility of the eye. Brown’s paintings are, of course, far more modest in scope and ambition than Pollock’s major works. Yet they point to the need to explore the spontaneous mapping and creation of space from a similar perspective. This aspect, the performative Page 93 →and improvisatory drive of Pollock, was a key to Brown’s development. Notably, while Brown often cited Pollock’s influence on Folio, the kind of gestural activity explored in the paintings as a musical potential remained in reserve until his later open form works. This dichotomy between performance and notation was exacerbated by his experience of visual art: I was once very envious of painters who can deal with the existent reality of their own work without this indirect and imprecise “translation” stage. I would ask them if they could imagine sitting down and writing a set of directions so that someone else could paint in all details. I thought about this problem from this angle of direct contact with oneself and sounds, and it had an effect on my notation and performance concerns—the latter most obvious in Folio.25 While we can see a nascent spontaneity explored in the “metronome” pieces of Folio—MM - 67 and MM - 135 (in that they are written almost as a “stream of consciousness”)—they are also written out with the traditional means of staff notation, which limits the possibility of actual spontaneity in performance. Hence, these works are a document of what might be seen as a more or less improvisatory compositional process that does not engage the performer in its spontaneous conception. In opposite terms, December 1952 may invite a spontaneous reading by avoiding conventional notation, but it is perhaps even less spontaneous in its making as a highly constructed field. Likewise, November 1952 (“Synergy”) is also a constructed field, but as with December

1952, it is a “snapshot” that should be seen as generating an expansive field spontaneously realized in performance. Again, we might find parallels with Pollock here.26 Pollock’s luminous patchworks created an unprecedented relationship between the detailed incident and the “orchestration of the whole”—and this was achieved through the conception of the field. Charles Cajori, a younger abstract expressionist and founder of the Downtown Tanager Gallery in New York, stated the following to Irving Sandler: “It was not the вЂdrip’ that made Pollock importantВ .В .В . but the вЂnew’ space he had created, the open, flowing, unending space without climaxes. This space was to our time what perspectival space was to the Renaissance.”27 Brown’s earlier works explored this open, endless space. This consciousness of the ground, of the bounded space of the field, opened the way for a nonrepresentational, autonomous approach to form. The pieces in Folio point not only to later possibilities Page 94 →but also to the problems of construction and spontaneity, notation, space-time relations, and the role of the performer. Brown sought to explore all of these issues more fully in subsequent works.

Synergy ARTnews of September 1952 featured an essay on the architect Buckminster Fuller by artist Elaine de Kooning, who had worked with Fuller at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948. Brown recalled the crucial influence that her article would have on his musical thought: An article came out in 1952 in ARTnews on Buckminster Fuller [and] synergy. By Buckminster Fuller’s definition, [synergy] is two or more forces which, in collision, lead to a third (or fourth or fifth etc.) result that cannot be foreseen in the original energies that brought them aboutВ .В .В . my imagination is the first energy.В .В .В . I come up with a notation for a scoreВ .В .В . that’s a second energy. I give this ambiguous notation to David Tudor, for instance, who is a third energyВ .В .В . every stage in the game is a step forward in the unexpected.28 Brown does not go so far as to attribute Fuller’s theorization of collective energies as the catalyst for his reformulation of November 1952 and December 1952 in terms of a conceptual mobility, but his reference does reveal the extent to which Fuller’s concepts facilitated his approach to these works. De Kooning’s article did not mention “synergy” by name to describe the sum of these different energies, but rather an “energetic geometry” exploring the compound energies of different configurations: He began with “an absolute of nature,” the tetrahedron, which is the geometric form enclosing the least volume with the most surface, and the sphere, which is the form that encloses the most volume with the least surface. He observed that each of these have a particular motion: the tetrahedron tends to resist external pressure; the sphere tends to resist internal pressure. He liberated these two tendencies in a mechanical construction of a compound geometric form.29 Fuller’s later definition in Synergetics (1975) shows how this pragmatic analysis of geometric energies and motion had been extrapolated to a broader, abstract set of principles: Page 95 →101.01 Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. 102.00 Synergy means behavior of integral, aggregate, whole systems unpredicted by any of the behaviors of any of their components or subassemblies of their components taken from the whole.30 Energy—or the combination of energies in this synergetic sense—became a key concept for Brown and underpinned his compositional inquiries. Fuller’s propositions gave license to creative fusions and amalgamations, and if Brown saw his own leanings pointing in somewhat contradictory directions (as he later explicitly stated), then synergy proposed a dynamic model that could accommodate diverse inputs. One of the beauties of Fuller’s idea was the integration of “whole or aggregate systems” working in tandem to

produce difference. This was not a dialectical synthesis but the unpredictability of contradictory or contrasting structures working together to produce something beyond the individual informing structures themselves, recalling Baudelaire’s notion of the arts aspiring “to lend one another new energies.”31 Brown described his connection with the painters and visual artists from the earlier 1950s as “an important meeting of minds.”32 This meeting of minds and his own experiments in painting enabled Brown to get closer to his own musical material and narrow the distance between the notated score and its performance. American abstract painting had developed a new means of handling its raw materials alongside a loosening of compositional rules. Brown certainly felt that “a real revolution” was under way in the conception of the artwork in New York.33 At that time there was no real “theory” as such, apart from certain existential attitudes and a highlighting of the medium itself. Meyer Schapiro noted in his 1957 essay “Recent Abstract Painting” that “the attitude to the medium has become much freer” and that “painting and sculpture contribute qualities and values much less evident in poetry, music and architecture.”34 The explicitness that painting possessed was expressed more boldly by Clement Greenberg, in talking of painting as the spearhead of modernism: “It was painting that had earliest in the course of modernism to dig into its вЂmechanisms.’. . . None of the other arts on their way to modernism had that early to dig into their entrails. Certainly not sculpture, not music, not dance, not even literature.”35 So it could be argued that the avant-garde of American painting by the 1950s had provided a visual demonstration of a radical approach Page 96 →to form and form-making. Schapiro summarized in a famous passage what those approaches were: The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the [new] painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation—all signs of the artist’s active presence. The work of art is an ordered world of its own kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming.36 We should find no problem in mapping those characteristics onto Brown’s compositions: a heightened materiality of production; the coloristic quality of sounds in itself; processing, surfacing, the making of the piece as a field of operation; the emphasis on the form of the piece “becoming” or being “found” through performance. Synergy became a key to allowing these various influences—whether the architectonic concepts of Fuller, the painting of the abstract expressionists, the mobile form of Calder, or other sources—to act in mobilizing the other. As he made clear in his 1965 Darmstadt lecture, synergy was not an illustration of one medium aping another, but rather operated on a deeper “poetic” level in which diverse approaches from other media can energize form. On a more specific level, the notion that the various energies mobilized by a particular notation can form an amalgam of potentially unpredictable forces was fruitful for the formulation of each of the notations that formed the final version of Folio. Space/time, frequency, and duration are explored flexibly in these diverse notational systems. Working toward a largely unforeseen whole (as in December 1952) also suggested that the removal of information was a potentially positive rather than negative step. The minimization of conventional information provided an impetus for synergy, a situation of “creative ambiguity” in which the musician(s)—with their background, responses, choices, and so on—become a key energy. Brown viewed his early engagements with jazz (and work from the mid-1950s recording jazz artists for Capitol Records) as an important element in his process of composition: “Jazz, of course is one of the original modes of improvisation, of the musician having an independence in relationship Page 97 →and responsibility to a set of directions. So it was completely natural for me to do the early Folio stuff that provided a minimum of information.”37 In November 1952 (“Synergy”), for instance, Brown created an expanded field that necessitated active participation on the part of the musician—a superstave of fifty lines—by drawing additional lines between the “given” staff paper, as he explained in 1970: November 1952 (“Synergy”) is intended for the performer to perform in a very spontaneous manner, very quickly. Where the eye falls, it sees a certain duration or group of durations. And then

the performer is to perform them. The eye can move from any point to any other point on the page so the piece could be realized—improvised through, worked through—for any amount of time. . . . I was considering and had conceived of the idea of two kinds of mobility: one the physical mobility of the score itself, and the other the conceptual mobility—which is to say the performer’s mental approach to the piece—holding in mind the considerable number of different ways of moving, moving the mind around a fixed kind of graphic suggestion.38

This passage articulates the transition from the kinetic-sculptural globe object (mentioned previously) to the more fluid and virtual medium of notated time. The variability of spatial relationships becomes the expansion or contraction of time—here, governed by the mind: the performer as protagonist, “moving the mind around a fixed kind of graphic.”39 Jane Alden’s study of the sketches for November 1952 (“Synergy”) reveals that Brown removed all rests in the final version.40 This was not just a visual design improvement, however, as their inclusion would have also inhibited the potentially “infinite” space on which the events were spread, “locking” the temporal space too much, so to speak. The less information, the more fluidly and spontaneously the performer could move from one event to another, mapping the form in performance—a key concern for much experimental music of the mid-1950s—Stockhausen’s KlavierstГјck XI (1956) and Feldman’s Intermission 4 (1953 /54), being the most famous examples. Brown included a sketch for “Synergy” in the published Folio, which showed the sculptural analogy that had guided Folio: a sixteenth note could be either a quarter note that was spatially “closer” or a half note that was “far away.” Gradations of dynamic indications were also suggestive of space and perspective. A handwritten note to the bottom left Page 98 →described Brown’s spatial technique: “It is possible to solidify these elements into a single beginning-to-end-illusion. . . . Composition could still be by spatial technique but [the] result on 5 line paper would tend to suggest LINE which is beside the point (spatial technique would [then] only be one dimensional).” On the contrary, this expanded field, to be read in all directions, and the idea of closeness and nearness—sound in the round, so to speak—is a crucial part of interpreting November 1952 (“Synergy”). It is, in Brown’s words, a “picture of this space at one instant which must always be considered as unreal or transitory—[the] performer must set this all in motion.”41 Reading Brown’s score becomes akin to the way one moves around the space of a painting, of how one might connect details and the whole (which is not provided by the score, as it is a “picture of this space at one instant”), and how one might get lost, in fact, in the space of a Pollock.

Folio II: Drawing Musical Space Though highlighting the spontaneity of the performer, Folio still presents its materials in a “constructive” manner. The use of grids and tables of random sampling numbers are far from, in themselves, spontaneous. It was in the synergetic relationship between these constructions and the performer that provided a model for action, which increasingly interested Brown. Yet Brown also occasionally used a freer drawing technique, as with Hodograph I, written in 1959 for a presentation at Darmstadt given by Luigi Nono. Here, in Brown’s wish to revisit the possibility of indeterminate aspects in this piece and for the occasion of Nono’s lecture, he instigated a dialogue between sections in fixed notation and others that explore a graphic drawing inviting the performer to freely interpret in an improvised manner.42 This simple gestural notation, which was drawn afresh by the composer for each performance, exposed Brown’s belief in the validity of spontaneous notational and musical action, and what we might call the synergetically spontaneous, in which one energy can directly influence another (why else draw these afresh in the given sections with each performance?). This points to an “authenticity” that Brown sought to capture in a mark or trace, which in Schapiro’s view are “all signs of the artist’s active presence.” Drawing in this way also denoted what Brown referred to as the “nowness” of the event. Drawing functioned in different ways for Brown, but it mainly transmitted spontaneous “first thoughts”

without the baggage of overly conscious Page 99 →thinking and convention. He mentioned this approach in relation to a “Pollock-inspired” string quartet of 1951, the whole of which was sketched extremely rapidly.43 Speed, in this sense, was essential to an unblocking of an intuitive creative flow, an immediate visualizing of the shapes of sound. Brown once suggested it was also partly his frustration with a slow “punch and hunt” approach at the piano that led him, after Pollock’s example, to compose directly with drawn gesture, as in the early quartet.44 In his open form works especially, a more spontaneous gestural approach rubs shoulders with more conventional notation, as in Available Forms 1–2 (1961–62) and From Here (1963). Increasingly, Brown sketched out his works with a free approach to drawing: Fig. 4.4. Untitled (1990) from Folio II, 9 Г— 12 inches. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Before I start an orchestral work I draw in color—brass is red; woodwinds are blue; percussion, black; strings are greenВ .В .В . these are arbitrary associations but useful notations. I sketch out blocks, sections, densities, which might later be translated into more precise and specific configurations.45 Fig. 4.5. Notebook sketches, ca. 1972. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 100 →One such sketch, dated June 7, 1972 (figure 4.5 and plate 6), depicts a broad calligraphy coordinating and connecting various floating horizontal lines in different colors. If Brown’s description of instrumentation is applied here, these gestures would represent percussion joined by strings and brass, although I think it is fair to say that there would be variations in these color/timbre associations from drawing to drawing and piece to piece. Other drawings in the same notebook are more open—lines drift across the surface almost like ripples on a lake (figure 4.5 and plate 6)—quivering verticals going from red at the top through green to violet blue at the bottom, suggesting a shifting time-space of block chords. Evident in Brown’s sketches and drawings are various stages of articulating a mental picture of the total sonic event or composition. These gestures constituted an important shorthand that slowly transformed according to more traditional notational means, although Brown later became intrigued by these sketches as things in themselves, as a direct route to performance, as Folio II would propose. Unlike the original Folio, the works that constitute Folio II are rather Page 101 →difficult to determine, as Brown had a much more informal approach to this collection. At the time of writing, Folio II has not yet been published. Brown referred to the existence of a “Folio II” both in a letter to Roger Johnson in 1976 and in an interview with Vivian Perlis in 1996.46 In the latter, and also in conversation with me, Brown suggested that Folio II was a catchall for the gift pieces and sketches that he felt could be realized by the right performers. In the 1976 letter, Brown stated that one such piece (One to Five, discussed further subsequently) would “eventually be published with 5 or 6 other вЂsonic events’ as a вЂFOLIO II.’” It is clear, however, that the selection grew in time—through the 1980s and 1990s pieces were added. In conversation with Perlis in 1996, Brown described Folio II as “one-page sketches. Sometimes I do them in a continuous way, sometimes I do them as if they can be read from four directions.В .В .В . I will put them together as Folio II and add to it. There are a lot of them.” Some pieces written in 1994 for Berlin flautist Eberhard Blum (1940–2013) were clearly referred to as Folio II and featured on CD recordings under this name as well as on a series of concerts in Berlin dedicated to the “New York School” in the mid-1990s.47 Many of the pieces were written for friends and consist of informal visual play or allusion (one of the pieces for Blum is a series of musical notes hanging in space from a line as if a mobile). Others are crafted miniatures complete with pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and specific time structures. There are also homages—to Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Boulez, or his second wife, the late Susan Sollins-Brown. Some explore a first-stage sketched “sonic realization” akin to the drawings previously mentioned.48 With Folio II, rather than Brown deciphering and refining the gestural trajectories into more conventional notations, he offers the one-page scores to performers to realize spontaneously. Folio II would appear the opposite of the original set (in being a more ad hoc collection and assemblage, without the seemingly systematic exploration of notation in the first set) and yet shares some characteristics: each piece is confined by a page, so as

to be seen “all at once,” and, albeit in a different way from the first set, acts as an insight into the composer’s working methods. In the performance of these pieces, I observed that Brown would sometimes introduce single-page extracts from other works. In York in 1999, for example, I remember pages from Event: Synergy II (1967–68) and Syntagm III (1970) being interspersed with the Folio II pieces. The diversity of notations in Folio II is striking. Brown viewed some as “rational” (to be read from left to right), while others he viewed as more mobile or “irrational.” There are examples of smooth calligraphy, knotted Page 103 →singular gestural motifs, and those that explore the frame, such as Untitled (ca. 1980) (figure 4.6), which consists of a dense “window” of unpitched sounds though with indications of accidentals that suggest chromaticism and asymmetrical rhythms: triplet, quintuplet, sextuplet, and septuplet figures that are enmeshed in an overall field. Again as with Calder Piece and November 1952 (“Synergy”), Brown’s instructions suggest that “what your eye lands on play.”49 A work from the early nineties (figure 4.4) shows a slightly different approach, with instrumentation given: a trio for flute, violin, and piano, again calligraphic but with smatterings of directions—pizzicato, arco, dynamics—the central vertical a web of activity marked “violently,” after which the piece culminates in a pitched gesture. Brown here suggests that particular attention should be given to this central web of intricate durations—loud and dynamic yet without any one instrument dominating. A similar graphic is used for Performable Imaginary Piece for Pierre (1985) (figure 4.7), which exists in two copies, one of which (in black) creates an intense web of directional marks, of overlapping gestural trajectories—a fittingly labyrinthine configuration for the dedicatee. Page 102 → Fig. 4.6. Untitled (ca. 1980) from Folio II, 15.2 Г— 9.9 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. The other version (blue) (figure 4.7) is very close in its gestural shapes (practically a copy) but appears simpler while denoting slightly different dynamic and intensity levels. Brown wanted each of these to reflect, horizontally in time when performed, the dense, compact and yet complex vertical structure, realized as an intense gesture. To the Memory of Helga (1985) (figure 4.8) is an elegantly concise and effective miniature for string quartet—beginning with extremely quiet and coloristic arco and pizzicato rustlings denoted by rising and falling gestures, and concluding with a pianissimo fermata chord that slowly grows and then decays into a held silence. Sketch for New Orchestral Piece (1978) (plate 7) consists of an elongated field of calligraphic drawing. Marks are differentiated in their touch and also their accumulated densities. Taking the “landscape” of marks as a whole, we have a series of gestures that form a kind of open and irregular grid of horizontal and vertical space. Seeing the original in color gives the impression of a light, airy, and gestural musical space, where traceries of orange, pink, green, and blue cross each other in echoes across the surface. There are five stronger verticals that suggest blocks of density, such as the fifth vertical, which is marked tutti. As with other drawings of this kind, Brown has marked at various points ideas for instrumentation, and even solo activities that might be pulled from these meshes of marks at various points. These markings can be surprisingly specific for such a sketch: markings connected to gestural passages such as violin 1, violoncello, bass Page 106 →clarinet, muted trumpet, and so on. As with many of these pieces the instrumental denotations are flexible (this piece was recorded by Blum for multitracked flutes, for instance).50 If we look closer we see that this drawn space represents a kind of musical space typical of Brown’s later works—with the free movement of densities, coloristic webs of gestural activity, and certain sonic trademarks—such as the top line of the drawn area that represents an extremely high violin harmonic soaring above the other activities. Page 104 → Fig. 4.7. Performable Imaginary Piece for Pierre (1985) (blue) from Folio II, 295 Г— 210 mm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 105 → Fig. 4.8. To the Memory of Helga (1985) from Folio II, 278 Г— 215 mm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. During the quasi mania for graphics that grew among the musical avant-garde in the later 1950s and 1960s, Brown often asserted his own origination of this activity in 1952. But unlike other composers, Brown never wanted to create a graphic lexicon that might replace traditional notation. He could have opened the floodgates to a whole series of his own musical graphics after 1952, and yet, apart from 4 Systems of 1954 (an appendage to Folio in its

published form), his “total graphic” approach was, by the mid to late 1950s, actively assimilated into a much more traditional notation. Not until Hodograph I of 1959 did Brown return to broader indeterminate elements with a graphic notation, and in it, as in his later works, there is dialogue between different notational systems. Compare Brown’s approach to a contemporary also associated with a “drawn”/graphic notation: the Greek-born, Vienna-based composer Anestis Logothetis (1921–1994). Logothetis acknowledged Brown’s innovatory graphics of 1952 as the beginnings of an alternative view on notation, and developed his own graphic language. Claudia Mongini suggests the following in differentiating Logothetis’s approach from that of Brown’s or Cage’s: “LogothetisВ .В .В . emphasise[d] the importance of the functional and informational aspects of the notation, which neither improvisation nor chance procedures take into account.”51 Logothetis did this by creating a taxonomy of diverse signs that break down into pitch symbols, associative symbols, and action symbols. His scores make free combinatory usage of each of these notational categories, or exclude certain categories altogether. A piece by Logothetis such as Labyrinthos (1967) creates a kind of angular architectural connective space of diverse associative symbols—the effect not unlike a later Kandinsky painting. Other works show more organic zones of elements morphing and transforming into one another. Brown’s graphics from Folio II—if we can put aside the sheer diversity for a moment—might share something of this visualization of the sonic process, but they lack the sense of being purely informational or strictly codified. They, generally, have nothing diagrammatic about them, other than the hints and fragments of conventional notation that drift through them. Page 107 →They may relate to the “action” symbols of Logothetis, but only up to a point. The fact that Brown so easily sees them within a context of abstract expressionism (“it was natural for me to drawВ .В .В .”) points in a different direction, and again toward a kind of improvisation: These are “virtual” designed [mental] improvisations, which I hear as sound eventsВ .В .В . that’s from William James and Gertrude Stein.В .В .В . Automatic writing, instantaneousness—but that’s also a characteristic of abstract expressionism—the direct contact, you know, “what comes out of your mind NEXT”—that’s one aspect of what I wanted to do and that’s what I still do.52 Drawing as an activity is not bound by the same determinations as the diagram or the plan or blueprint. Drawing is about seeking, improvisation, feeling one’s way, and allowing the hand to explore and the eye to feel. As Ernst van Alphen has suggested, in opposition to the diagram or the codified sign, “It is the gesture of the hand that defines drawing.”53 Brown understood this visceral propulsion in drawing, an energy in a complex process of searching out form while being responsive to its formation. This is what we call the “projective” aspect of drawing, in which the relationship between thinking and the searching of the hand is, almost blindly in its process, making thought patterns visible. In this context, the path of Brown’s hand reflects his mental conception of sounds and their relationships, and he was convinced that the spontaneous interaction between these was a valid generative proposition. For all such “sketches”—whether by artist, designer, or composer—ambiguity is part of the process: the unfinished, the suggestive, the vaguely demarcated, and the holistic grasping of the process of freely forming and shaping something in rough form. Brown’s relationship to drawing and medieval “eye music” as Alden noted, “evoke[s] more directly the ideogrammic nature of early notation. A distinctive feature of early вЂneumatic’ notation (from the Latin neuma, for gesture, sign, movement of the hand) is the speed with which it can be written.”54 This also connects his interest in early music with the influence of surrealistic and abstract expressionist approaches. Contained in Brown’s calligraphic drawings are the materials not only for music but for the energy required on the part of the performer(s) to bring it into being. This conception of rapid gesture was central to the meaning of Brown’s work and to his processes of spontaneous drawing, a means of almost physically entering “into” the musical space. In visualizing the whole of a potentialPage 108 → composition, as in Sketch for New Orchestral Piece, Brown’s loosely constructed grids form a connection with our inherited sense of how musical space might be visualized: high (top), low (bottom), start (left), finish (right). Yet, unlike a traditional score, one can move freely around all these dimensions and “picture” the whole at once, while being able to enter and exit freely at any point in the image/score. Fig. 4.9. One to Five (1970) from Folio II, 8.5 Г— 11 inches. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Another point in relation to these drawings, and what might be surprising to some, is that, when performed, even the most skeletal of these pieces have the feel of a “signature” Brown piece. A case in point is a sketch that Brown referred to as One to Five (1970), which is a schemata for an open form work (figure 4.9), scored for ensemble with optional chorus, with a minimum of five players. Brown demarcates the material into five zones, which the conductor freely combines and explores in performance. Brown indicated that a conductor was essential for the work, even with as few as five players, and a “very inventive and confident conductor” at that “who can really make a strong, sensitive work from a completely вЂopen form’ Page 109 →environment.”55 Brown’s conducting technique owes much to Pollock’s rhythmical traceries in space. Brown noted that Pollock “had an effect upon [his] notation and performance concerns” especially in Folio and then in Available Forms 1 (1961) in which the conductor is similarly “вЂpainting’ (forming) with a palette of my composed sound events”56: It is a conception of sound, of organized events, and ensemble as “plastic” material capable of being molded, modified and “formed” in various ways. The conductor’s function is analogous to that of a painter who has a canvas (time) and colors (timbre) and the possibility of working with the mediumВ .В .В . the micro-forms are composed, and the combinatorial possibilities are conditional in some but not all cases. With all of the conditioning there is still a high degree of “plasticity” inherent in the work, and this “plasticity” is an indispensible [sic] element which engages the performers, the conductor, the audience and myself in the immediacy and life of the work.57 One to Five takes this idea of color, time, and presentation of material as a kind of palette (in its bare bones) for the conductor who, in practice, would also intersperse (though not indicated in the score) fermatas, stops, and staccato attacks or stabs (“karate chops,” as Bruno Maderna called them) within the navigation and combination of the material indicated in the five zones. It is clear from the letter of 1976 that Brown intended to publish the work with a performance note: This thing functions as score or parts. This copy has timbre indications only for instruments but, as I said, it can be (and has been) done with any combination of instruments and/or voices. They can be all over an auditorium (360В°) or grouped on a stage. I usually distribute them by timbre or general frequency so that the direction in which a cue is given can vary timb., freq., density etc. Any combination of the five textures can be done together; all five at once, everyone doing any one or more, etc.В .В .В . the thing is obviously not a “piece”; maybe it is a:—“verbally described potential for open-form sonic activity.”58 It would be convenient to view One to Five as a kind of action score. The results can end up rather like the sound of Brown’s recorded 1964 performancePage 110 → of December 1952 at Darmstadt. Like December 1952, Brown saw One to Five not as a piece but rather as a generator for spontaneous sonic activity. At the time of the Darmstadt performance Brown was criticized by some for abusing his own score, for it not sounding like it looks; Cornelius Cardew reported that it was “an anachronistic performance of Earle Brown’s December 1952 conducted by the composer, leaning heavily on experience gained from the Available Forms pieces.”59 One problem for commentators and listeners at that concert was that, knowing the visual look of the score (which was printed in the concert program), they were hearing a sonic outcome that seemingly bore little relation to what was printed. Brown’s riposte was to ask, “Where did I say what speed it should be taken at? Where did I say it should sound like it looks?”60 He also pointed to the fact that what was generally missed was that the “score” was a fragmented module to be put into motion—not a traditional strict “template” for musical action. However, Brown’s comments on the “look” of the score and its corresponding sound formation are often contradictory; he has suggested that the geometric nature of the score would impose itself upon a performance, but elsewhere articulates a more causal relation between score and sound, comparing his own score with one by Logothetis.61 In one sense, Cardew is right, as Brown’s interpretation of December 1952 at Darmstadt in 1964 was no doubt an experiment influenced by his experience with the Available Forms. And we might see it as applying a

very different sensibility to the piece, a “Pollockian” gestural approach to the spirit in which it was originally made. Brown admitted that the performance may well have “left” the score behind, the latter acting as a generator for that particular performance. One to Five, then, could be seen as a further articulation of the conductor/performer process coming out of such a performance. It could well be the link to December 1952 in the Folio II set, which as a whole explores a much more informal and gestural approach to musical space than its predecessor. Seen together, both Folios are expansions on Brown’s compositional lexicon. If they don’t consist of “pieces” by his definition, then they are appendages to his output, keys to unlocking—through performance—techniques that exist in other works: the spontaneous markings, linear gestures and leaps, the constructed fields, the particularity of colors that can be merged and overlapped, breaks and edges onto silence, and so on. These are all part of the notations that inform both sets. Folio and Folio II bookend Brown’s remarkable output, and the former may well be seen as a sourcebook to which he returned again and again. Page 111 →Folio II seems more private, however, rather like jottings in a notebook, occasional gift sketches, or personal notes on the way to a composition. Why the urge, one might ask, to present such sketches for performance, or for publication? I think this points to Brown’s willingness to share the process of “becoming” with other musicians, that the point of initiating form and making can also be “mindful”: a synergetic meeting of minds. It bridges the gap between private drawing as visualization and public “scores” to be realized. The personalized drawing, with its gestural envelopes and rapidly configured motifs, conveys a joyous sense of improvisation and, as mentioned above, directly conjures something of the energy that Brown felt was necessary for a successful realization of his pieces.62 Folio II might well now be seen in this light as an instructive visual manual in Brown’s approach to gesture and his mapping of form. Many of the pieces from this set operate at the intersection of drawing and musical notation, and take us full circle from Brown’s experiments with painting to his projections of sonic spaces and coloristic interactions between instruments/performers in his open form works. If we take the Renaissance tradition of disegno as a model, then drawing should provide a clarity of concept for working out the basis for work in other media, and yet could also be the tool for an artist to explore his imagination, almost unbridled. Likewise, while capitalizing on the ambiguities and roughly executed qualities of the gestures, many of the drawings of Folio II provide a clear means for performing, and all communicate an attitude or approach that can be heard in a committed performance. Brown saw many of them, as noted earlier, reflecting his “fantasy”—his imagination—resulting in utopian, imaginary pieces that are, however, always actively drawing toward sound, toward a sonic reality. In essence, Brown allows us to partake in his inner processes, his play with color, space, and events unfolding in time. Both Folios complement Brown’s main output, and also each other. What the first Folio does—in challenging the performer to “mobilize in time” a static fragment—the second does differently. Folio II often directly fills in such gaps, with its wiry calligraphy and visual connectors, making palpable this energy that Brown insisted upon in his work. Both then, are rather like sourcebooks with sketches and drawings that can also be pieces in their own right.63 They provide an inexhaustible insight into the poetics of Brown’s approach, with their sense of allowing us to get inside the “workshop” of making. Taking once again both sets together, four tropes have emerged in my discussion of the relationship between music and visual art Page 112 →within Brown’s scores: mobility (physical and conceptual), field, improvisation, and gesture. Such tropes point to a particular period of formation within American culture, when the “liberation of materials” aimed to facilitate a more open experience of the artwork itself.64 Brown’s propositions still reveal the composer, performer, and listener radically situated in an exhilarating encounter with sonic structures and implicit decisionmaking in order to create meaningful form within the arena of performance itself.

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Chapter 5 Four Musicians at Work and Earle Brown’s Indices Rebecca Y. Kim A photograph (figure 5.1) of Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, John Cage, David Tudor, and Morton Feldman from an early 1960s recording session has been a celebrated image of the New York School. The eye tends to fall centrally on Cage because of his role in bringing these musicians together, but of greater curiosity is Earle Brown, under whose aegis this and other recording sessions were organized and on whose personal camera the photograph was taken.1 Brown was the last of his peers to arrive in New York, but through his work on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape (1952–54) he became an integral figure within this group of experimentalists, and went on to create a series of seminal graphic and open form scores, in addition to producing several first recordings of the works of his colleagues for Time-Mainstream Records in the 1960s–1970s. Soon after this photograph was taken (by sound engineer Bob Arnold), however, Brown was increasingly in Europe, and to many historians his time away from New York became the vanishing point in his narrative. This chapter sharpens the focus on Brown by exploring a composition that became the musical entry point for his career abroad. Indices (1954) for chamber orchestra was Brown’s first work for large ensemble, and the score garnered as much attention from European conductors into the 1960s as it did criticism from its first conductor, John Cage, who premiered the work in New York in 1957. Indices was an inquiry into the use of random numbers to index sound events, and it was based on Brown’s Page 114 →conjecture that bias need not be eviscerated from a chance-based musical work. While Indices was a challenge to the thoroughgoing chance methods that Cage had espoused since 1950, Brown positioned this work within the bounds of the experimental practice of postulating, testing, and interpreting results, which signaled solidarity more than separatism from the New York School. What appeared to raise Cage’s critical ire, apart from disagreements with Brown’s technique, was the European interest in Indices and Brown’s revisions to the work in response. The first part of this chapter retraces the history of Indices from the perspective of Brown and examines his methods and justifications for the work. The second part compares Cage’s critique of Indices at Darmstadt in 1958 with the reception of Indices by European conductors and festival directors who were interested in programming this and other works by Brown by that year; these included Hans Rosbaud, Wolfgang Steinecke, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, Henri Pousseur, Otto Tomek, and Luigi Nono. However, before turning to Indices and the mixed impact that its European reception had on Brown as a New York School composer, it is important to revisit the identity of the New York School prior to Brown’s Page 115 →arrival in 1952, when a notably different quadrumvirate of composers had formed under the moniker of “4 Musicians at Work.” Fig. 5.1. From left to right: Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, John Cage, David Tudor, Morton Feldman. New York City, ca. 1961–62. Photo by Bob Arnold. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Four Musicians at Work When Brown moved to Greenwich Village from Denver in August 1952, there were signs of an emergent “New York School,” but this had yet to take on geographical specificity due to the involvement of Pierre Boulez. Earlier that year, an article appeared entitled “4 Musicians at Work,” which featured brief statements by Feldman, Wolff, Boulez, and Cage, who curated the article for the arts journal trans/formation.2 The content of the article was plainly conveyed by its title, and Cage refrained from providing any further summarizing narrative to unite the musical techniques described by each composer. Cage had first met Boulez during his 1949 Guggenheim to France, which predated his first meetings even with Feldman, Tudor, and Wolff. Boulez arranged concerts for Cage’s prepared piano music in Paris, and Cage reciprocated with programs in New York that included Boulez’s works alongside his own and those of his colleagues.3

Henry Cowell profiled the same quadrumvirate of Cage, Boulez, Feldman, and Wolff in 1952 for his “Current Chronicle” report on New York for the Musical Quarterly. Cowell based his article on the statements from “4 Musicians at Work,” but in analyzing the unity of its viewpoints he questioned the stability of the group’s identity in his closing remarks: Since it can be shown that Cage and his friends have come together at one time in one room, the group may be considered an aggregate. So we may toss to decide whether the group is to change or to remain the same, and toss again to decide whether the esthetic pleasure to be derived from the work of its members is to play the role of silence or of an event in sound.4 Cowell made light of the Cageian conceit of mobility, which referred to the changeability of any compositional element in a sound aggregate in Cage’s coin-tossing method as adapted from the I Ching, but Cowell’s rhetorical point accurately forecast the transience of Boulez, whose awkward visit to New York in December 1952 marked the start of his dissociation from the group, musically and culturally.5 Mobility in compositional materials had been Boulez’s suggestion to Cage in their correspondence, though clearly not in the chance environment that Cage was poised to employ it. Page 116 →The timing of Brown’s move to New York was significant in this context. He became a cardinal point in the formation of a bona fide “New York School” of composers. Brown’s graphic scores Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54), his Octets I–II (1953–54) for magnetic tape, and his magnum opus in open form, 25 Pages (1953), amplified their collective inquiries into new sounds and new modes of loosening control so that sounds could be “sounds themselves,” as self-referential phenomena. Yet, in light of his audacious experiments, Brown began to reformulate his methods. He concluded that bias was a necessary parameter in shaping the overall sonic result, and that although sound could be deployed by less determinate methods within a set structure, the composer needed to safeguard against a potentially uniform soundscape. This viewpoint reflected a value, and Brown would specify increasingly the “warmth” and “spontaneity” that this value entailed, which he found lacking in strict methods of random organization. Brown’s revised thinking was therefore the basis for Indices in early 1954. With regard to Brown especially, David Nicholls’s characterization of a single-minded “New York School” as a brief phenomenon from 1952 to 1954 was especially on point.6 Of Brown’s early writings, the document that comes closest to the statements of “4 Musicians at Work” appears in his 1951 correspondence with former Schillinger House classmate Ray Grismer (1927–2010), as an informal manifesto entitled “Why I Am a 12-Tone Composer” (see “Select Texts by Earle Brown” in this volume for the full text). Brown wrote this in part as an apologia of Schoenberg’s techniques after debating their merits with Grismer, who was similarly bemused by Cage’s chance methods. Notably, Brown made no particular claims for Schillinger techniques in this address, but rather argued for “pure” music of the “intellect,” in contrast to mimetic music of the past. Brown invoked a genealogical framework that included Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, BartГіk, Schoenberg, Webern, and Cage. In contrast, “4 Musicians at Work” was an exposition of technique only, with no allusion to composers of the past, although Webern was a tacit historical reference. Arguably, Brown’s statement could have ventured further, because although he had completed Three Pieces for Piano in 1951 and would complete Perspectives in 1952, both of which employed twelve-tone techniques, he largely put aside Schoenberg’s system thereafter. In retrospect, “Why I Am a 12-Tone Composer” reads more like a peroration on Schoenberg, with whom Brown had made arrangements to study in Colorado Springs and then in Los Angeles during summer 1951; however, due to Schoenberg’sPage 117 → declining health Brown was unable to study with the Viennese master before his death that July.7 Further striking in this statement is Brown’s broader articulation of a desire to explore the possibilities of a new technique and a way of composing “differently.” While this informal manifesto is not precisely dated, his reference to “John” is evidence that Brown knew Cage by this point, who had journeyed to Denver with Merce Cunningham in April 1951 for a three-day residency at the dance studio of Jane McLean. The impact of meeting Cage and Cunningham was life-changing for both Earle and Carolyn Brown, as they soon began discussing a move to New York. After David Tudor gave a pair of concerts in Boulder several months later, on June 26 and

July 5, 1951, and the Browns visited New York that August, Earle Brown wrote again to Grismer from Denver that October and unequivocally stated, “JOHN CAGE has done GREAT things to my musical life.”8

Indices and Springweather and People in 1954 If Brown resolved “to write differently” and to explore the elements of music in its “pure form,” he pursued this with rigor upon arriving in New York in August 1952. The capstone to this was Indices, his most ambitious score to date and requiring most of 1954 to complete as a full ballet score; the piano score reduction was completed May 1955. The work was a study in timbres and textures and a crucible for Brown’s later approaches to orchestration. Brown’s scoring was rather unorthodox, like a cross between Stan Kenton’s modern orchestra and the percussion ensembles of Lou Harrison and Cage in the 1940s: flute, trumpet, French horn, violin, cello, double bass, amplified guitar, piano, and a variety of percussion consisting of marimbula, two brake drums, five cowbells, three Chinese drums, three gongs, orchestral bells, and vibraphone (an earlier sketch included tortoise shell).9 Brown’s sketches during this time reflected his research into the sound possibilities of each instrument, and he would later convey to conductors the importance of securing professionals capable of producing all the “colors” of his or her instrument.10 The use of guitar with amplifier and volume pedal specifications was especially bold because it crossed stylistic genres and predated the jazz and popular music contacts Brown would make through Capitol Records as a sound engineer beginning in May 1955. Indeed, by August 1956, Brown identified two works in progress that featured guitar, and the scoring for these works, if combined, was incidentally the same ensemble as Indices: Quartet for Flute, Violin, Cello and Guitar; and Music for Page 118 →Trumpet, Horn, Double Bass, Guitar, Piano and Percussion.11 While there were precedents for using guitar in European new music—Boulez’s use in Le Marteau sans MaГ®tre (1953–55) being the most contemporaneous—Brown’s amplified guitar was an issue for most conductors when he brought Indices to Europe in late 1956. Even at its 1957 premiere in New York, Brown recalled, “It went pretty wellВ .В .В . except for the guitarist, who had about 10 more minutes of music to play when everyone else got to the end; it’s in standard notation and completely fixed in vertical relationships but he got very lost, never before having performed with a conductor.”12 Brown began work on Indices in spring 1954 after Merce Cunningham had been awarded a Guggenheim and had approached Brown for twenty-eight minutes of music for a new “ballet” for six dancers, later titled Springweather and People, which Cunningham intended to present at an uptown venue.13 Brown’s archive contains an early outline of Cunningham’s four-part “Work in Progress” marked with timings and dance groupings totaling twenty-eight minutes and eleven seconds.14 Brown first organized his score manuscript into seven gatherings of staff paper that he called “packages,” each with twenty-four scored pages (except the last, containing twenty-six), and an eighth gathering containing only four scored pages, paginated I–IV, which he set apart as the introductory pages of Indices. With the exception of the first and last pages, each page consisted of five bars in 44 meter at рќ…рќ…Ґ = 120, so that each page unit spanned ten seconds. Formal correspondence with Cunningham’s dance sketch remained loose, however, as Brown then created eleven structural “areas” of varying durations, none of which intersected with the thirty-eight-second cycles of Cunningham’s dance, a numerical value that Cunningham had derived through chance operations. Brown numbered and ruled his manuscript pages in advance of deploying any sound, as he planned to devise a “programme” interfaced with a book of random sampling number tables to dictate where a sound event would be plotted along the 870-bar continuum in an omnidirectional manner. Brown approached the Indices manuscript as a long expansive graph, and accordingly adopted the parlance of the Cartesian coordinate system in naming his work. “Indices” is the plural form of “index,” a title reflecting the multiple ways that Brown indexed each sound event. In previous works such as December 1952 and the Octets, Brown had devised a technique he referred to as the “coordinate technique” or “coordinate system” to derive a pair of values for a sound event along a horizontal time axis and a vertical pitch axis (x, y) that he plotted in a bandwidth-like notation on graph paper (a third dimension, or z-axis, was explored in December 1952). Indices Page 119 →explored more than just these dimensions in its sonic field, however; thus Brown described its technique as a “multi-coordinate system.”15 One might imagine the resulting sound of Brown’s coordinate technique for Indices to be episodic and disjointed, but this technique was just one

component of Brown’s “programme.” The other component was specific to each of the eleven structural areas, which subjected each sound event to a “bias ratio” that acted as a “stressor” to the parameters of timbre, duration, dynamics, and frequency. Brown explained his system to one researcher in 1974 as follows: “In a certain section, random #’s 1 to 5 would indicate a string sound; 6 to 8 would indicate a wind sound; and 9 or 0 would be any other of the instrumentsВ .В .В . obviously a 5/3/2 вЂstress’ toward the section featuring strings, and secondarily winds.”16 Brown turned again to the random sampling number tables he had previously utilized to derive the coordinate values for November 1952, December 1952, the Octets, and 25 Pages, but their use in Indices was also a departure from previous practices because Brown was no longer dealing with a monochromatic medium. The tables of random sampling numbers that Brown used for Indices and prior works were published in 1939 by Maurice George Kendall and Bernard Babington Smith.17 At the time, these 100,000 digits were the most extensive and most randomized set of numbers available, generated with the aid of an electrical machine designed to “eliminate sources of bias which could reasonably be expected to occur”; the digits were then subject to another set of manual tests to detect residual bias. Brown purchased the 1951 reprinted edition of the Kendall and Babington Smith tables in New York, according to the inscription in his own copy.18 Brown’s copy furthermore contains marginalia indicating where he began and/or ended specific works, and he appeared to read each table from left to right, as advised in the introduction. All of the tables have markings, reflecting at least one pass through the one hundred tables by Brown. The 100,000 digits are divided into ten chapters of 10,000 digits, which are then divided into ten tables of 1,000 digits each arranged in twenty-five rows in forty columns. Within each grid, digits are spaced into horizontal groups of fours, and subdivided into pairs of digits, which partly reflected the way the tables were tested for bias. Brown sometimes misremembered the total number of digits in this publication as 10,000, which incidentally reflected “The Ten Thousand Things” project that Cage had embarked on at the time, as described by James Pritchett.19 The Project for Music for Magnetic Tape had apparently been a millstone for both Brown and Cage, as each returned to the acoustic medium thereafter in largescale form. Page 120 →Brown created a “programme” for Indices that he likened to a “hand-made computer piece” because of its “intricate and terribly complex” design.20 Brown noted that the programme required one month to establish and another six months to execute.21 Brown’s marginalia to the left of table 71 documents something to this effect: “Indices, 7-1-54 (comp), 6/54 (sketch).”22 Similar marginalia track his use of the tables, which was not entirely sequential. He began with tables 71–100 followed by 31–50, and at other points used tables 59–64 and 1–2. The other tables had been utilized for the earlier works already mentioned. The marginalia and markings along tables 1–2 indicate specifically that he used these digits for the introduction of Indices (pages I–IV).23 In the ninety-eight pages of Brown’s handwritten calculations preserved in his archive (he called these pages “the printout”), at least four pages reflect his calculations for the introduction alone, with upwards of ninety cycles through the programme. Each repetition of the programme required several minutes to complete, from the moment of locating the first digits correlated with its compositional values to the final detail of notating the event on the staff. Brown did not overtly mark every step of his fastidious process, but he was understandably keen to identify the final sound event of Indices on December 19, 1954: marked 6:19 p.m. alongside table 50 of the random sampling number booklet; marked 6:24ВЅ p.m. in his pages of calculations (figure 5.2a). Marked with the same end-time on page 48, bar 3, pickup to beat 3 in the cello part of his manuscript score, where he indicated “last sd. [sound] completed” (figure 5.2b). The monumental task of composing the work was yet to end, however, as this carefully crafted work was later abridged and adapted for Europe, as discussed further below.24 Figure 5.2a shows the final page of Brown’s calculations. Along the top are the nine actions per sound event, some written in shorthand, to indicate the following: page, bar, point, instrument, duration, tone, special effect, dynamics, and technique of sound production. Each action had a range of values according to the general structure dictated by Cunningham’s outline. The first five actions were straightforward, requiring one value within a single range: 1.Page. Three-unit number from 001 to 171 to signify the page of the score (calculations for pages I–IV

were completed separately). 2.Bar. One-unit number from 1 to 5 to signify the bars per page. Page 121 → Fig. 5.2a. Brown’s calculations for Indices, final page. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Fig. 5.2b. Original manuscript, Indices (1954), page 48, cello and bass lines (pencil sketch below; ink scoring above). Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Fig. 5.2c. Brown’s calculations for two occurrences of cello on page 48 of Indices. Page 122 →3.Point. Two-unit number from 01 to 32 to locate the point of occurrence among the thirtysecond-note values per bar. 4.Instrument. Two-unit number from 01 to 15 correlated with an instrument, which Brown ordered more or less according to a standard orchestral score: flute (01), trumpet (02), french horn (03), guitar (04), vibes (05), orchestral bells (06), marimbula (07), brake drums (08), cowbells (09), gongs (10), Chinese drums (11), piano (12), violin (13), cello (14), and double bass (15). 5.Duration. Three-unit number from 001 to 160, the maximum of which was no more than five bars (one page). Tone, special effect, and technique were specific to each instrument, and Brown enumerated these possibilities with subset values. Techniques of sound production for the cello, for instance, included familiar extended techniques such as pizzicato, sul ponticello, sul tasto, col legno (tratto and battuto), harmonics, and microtones. The techniques for the pianist were more nuanced, with pizzicato, finger slides, percussion mallets, and muting effects on the inside of the piano strings, which Brown attributed to Cowell and Cage in the headnote to the Indices score. Instrument, duration, tone, and dynamics were furthermore contingent on the stressors that defined each of the eleven structural areas. The calculations for the final sound on page 48, for example, occur in Area IV, which encompasses pages 46–55 (ninety-three seconds). In Brown’s sketches, he summarized the stressors for this and other sections, which were based on the bias ratios in his original programme. Brown summarized the Area IV stressors as follows: “string instruments, frequency stress on upper half, general intensity mf-ffff, and medium-slow time.” In the final score, Area IV is correspondingly dominated by string events, while winds are tacet throughout except for a lone trumpet entrance; the percussion writing is also spare with a handful of sustained tones from the guitar, Chinese drums, vibraphone, and cowbells. Closer inspection of the final sound event on page 48 shows that Brown Page 123 →took liberties in the final scoring. In figure 5.2a, the last calculation corresponds to page 48, bar 3, point 16 (thirty-second-note pickup to beat 3), cello (instrument 14), duration 39 (47/8 beats), tone 05 (E2), no special effect, ff dynamics, and with the technique of pizzicato harmonic. Brown crossed out bar 1 in favor of bar 3, and the reason for this modification may have been based on a set of earlier calculations for the cello line on page 48, which also occurred on E, two octaves higher at tone 29 (E4) with a pizzicato snap. As tone 05 was to be produced as an artificial harmonic (with pizzicato), the resulting sound was in effect tone 29 or E4 (E2 stopped manually on the C string, with A as the point of touch). The piano reduction makes this pitch phrase clear, with middle E reflecting both calculations (measure 257 of page 23 of Brown’s piano reduction). Figure 5.2c shows Brown’s calculations for the two cello events on page 48, with row 1 showing the earlier calculation and row 2 showing the later and final calculation. The upper system notated with ink in figure 5.2b shows Brown’s final scoring. The language Brown used to describe his programme—“a hand-made computer piece”—reflected the mechanical repetition of compositional procedures in Indices, but it also borrowed from the language of Surrealism and the bias factors inherent in automata. George Brecht, in Chance-Imagery (1957), explained the semantic association between something “handmade” and the “automatic” processes that stemmed from a “source in deeper-than-conscious areas of the mind,” which was distinct from a “random process.”25 Brown’s decision to construct automata and introduce bias into a highly randomized sampling of elements likely struck Cage as contradictory to or even subversive of the experimental project of reducing the controls imposed on sound by the composer.

Brown’s extensive worksheets make clear that Indices was an experiment categorically different from the ways that Brown had previously employed the number tables. Brown’s justifications for incorporating stressors and bias in connection with his coordinate technique for Indices were generally twofold. First, he did not believe that the abnegation of compositional choice was possible, and he regularly cited his deference to jazz to describe how the chance methods of Cage left him “cold,” likening his own method of combining “the graphic, the вЂprogramme’ and the actions of people” to “an вЂoutchorus’ by Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, and Chet Baker (for instance), or Ornette [Coleman].”26 Moreover, if we look again to Cowell’s 1952 article on the New York composers, it is significant that Cowell had already noted the impossibility of eliminating composer intentionality and Page 124 →choice: “No order of tossing coins can give anything more than a variety of arrangements of elements subjectively chosen to operate upon.”27 Subjectivity had also been pointed out by Kendall in the introduction to the 1951 random sampling number tables: “It seems that wherever any human element of choice is allowed free play, as, for instance, when an observer selects вЂat random’ by eye a number of plants in a field, or draws cards вЂhaphazardly’ from a pack, bias inevitably creeps in.”28 For Brown too, the acceptance of bias was not merely a personal view rooted in his musical experiences and interest in Surrealist thought, it was also an assertion of statistical fact and objectivity. Brown therefore based Indices on his own experiential knowledge, statistics, and Cowell’s observation as points to be acknowledged and further explored, while Cage endeavored to prove otherwise. A second justification that Brown gave for accepting bias was to safeguard against the homogeneity of sound color and texture when using uniformly random values, which Brown frequently referred to as the “wallpaper effect.” He alluded to the Schillinger system to explain that he had used “density as primary determinate” to differentiate the areas of Indices.29 Density was a measure that both Cage and Brown had used during the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. Cage used it simply but deliberately as a number value to measure the number of tracks within a given structural area in Imaginary Landscape No. 5. Schillinger’s chapters reveal a much more substantial application than what the magnetic tape pieces endeavored to index.30 In Brown’s copy of the Schillinger System of Composition, for instance, he made emphatic markings to chapter 8, “Density as Major Component,” including its opening statement: “Density becomes a dominant factor of the thematic unit when the quantitative distribution of elements (parts) and groups (assemblages) becomes the chief characteristic of a unit.”31 Brown had indeed approached Indices parametrically; he had been impressed in 1951 by the extensive methods of Cage’s Music of Changes and the I Ching, and adopted these to some extent in Indices, even allowing silence to figure largely in the way Cage had given equal treatment to sound and silence in the precompositional tables used for Music of Changes.32 By the late 1950s, Brown would describe his own intricately conceived Indices as a “primitive” and “unformulated sound object.”33 Later still, in 1975, Brown aligned the work with Schillinger: “More than anything, the Indices idea was very close to the Schillinger concepts of ratios, densities, [and] statistical distribution, rather than to the pure (or impure), вЂuninfluenced’ Page 125 →CHANCE activities of Cage.”34 In a draft of this statement, Brown had also referred to Indices as presenting “a very unusual вЂstyle,’ for that timeВ .В .В . a kind of long, heterophonic line of great timbral complexity.”35 He ultimately identified Indices along a trajectory of six works that outlined the progression of his ensemble writing and broader approach to form: Indices (1954), Pentathis (1958), Available Forms 1–2 (1961–62), Corroboree (1964), and String Quartet (1965).36 Brown’s view of Indices was changeable, and over time the work accrued different meanings as it passed through many hands. He had borrowed from both chance and Schillinger techniques, and as Brown endeavored to repurpose these methods into one uniquely his own, Indices became a means toward a new end.

Europe in 1957: The Concert Version of Indices When Brown made his first trip to Europe between December 1956 and February 1957, Indices was the most significant score in his dossier. He had saved enough money from the past year and a half working as a sound engineer at Capitol Records to take a solo journey for six weeks, first heading to Paris, followed by Baden-Baden, Zurich, Milan, Vienna, Munich, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Cologne, Paris again, and London. The purpose of his travels was at least twofold. First, he planned to meet conductors for Indices.37 Brown’s travels were

decidedly during the planning months of the summer new music festival season, and with David Tudor’s European recital tour during November–December 1956 still resonant in Europe’s ears, with Four More (1956) and 4 Systems (1954) included on those programs, the time was ripe for Brown’s journey. Second, Brown was keen to meet with a publisher while in Europe, Universal Edition in particular, and had brought Indices alongside other scores on his travels. Because he had remained on good terms with Boulez, Brown first visited Paris for one week and obtained important contacts through Boulez for conductor Hans Rosbaud in BadenBaden, for Heinrich Strobel of Donaueschingen Musiktage, where Rosbaud regularly conducted, and for the director of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Wolfgang Steinecke. Brown would also meet with Otto Tomek, who at the time was a consultative editor for Universal Edition in Vienna. During his travels, Brown also met with Luciano Berio and for the first time met Bruno Maderna, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The trip was an unequivocal success and a turning point for Brown. He made lifelong contacts based on an itinerant residency that allowed him Page 126 →to observe European concert life directly, establish bonds with new colleagues, and gain knowledge of what was possible next musically. When he returned to New York, he summarized the many projects he had secured within that time in a supplement to his 1957 Guggenheim application.38 He reported that Rosbaud was very interested in conducting the European premiere of Indices at Donaueschingen Musiktage, as was Bruno Maderna (with Dresden Radio Orchestra) at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. He also announced, prematurely, Boulez’s plan to conduct Indices with his Domaine Musical at Salle Gaveau during the 1957–58 season, though insufficient rehearsal time played a factor in later removing it from the concert season. Also significant were the articles Brown had been asked to write, reflecting the European avant-garde’s interest in American experimentalism. He described four essays: an article for Berio’s Incontri Musicali on the time notation of Four More and Brown’s other notations; an article on Cage for Universal Edition’s Die Reihe (a request from Stockhausen); a general article on the “poetics” and techniques of new music composers for William Glock’s The Score in London, as a rejoinder to Theodor Adorno’s “Modern Music Is Growing Old” essay that had shaken European new music circles in 1956; and lastly an article on VarГЁse for Steinecke’s DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik. It would be some time before these topics materialized in different guises in Brown’s prose, but he did put one project into motion while still in Europe, which was a new version of Indices. Brown began a “concert version” of Indices while in Baden-Baden by making major cuts to the ballet score during January 11–12, 1957.39 He excised 74 pages from the 175-page ballet score, which constituted about two-fifths of its duration. The original twenty-eight minutes of Indices required significant rehearsal time, and this issue would be raised more than once in Europe. Brown had indeed met with Rosbaud in Baden-Baden during that time; and perhaps because of Rosbaud’s experience conducting Xenakis’s Metastasis in 1955 at Donaueschingen, Brown felt he was the best interpreter of Indices, which came from a similar interest in textural differentiation and overall form. Upon Brown’s return to New York, he planned to send this new concert version along with some notes about Indices to Universal by March 6, and to then send these notes to Rosbaud, Steinecke, and Maderna.40 While Brown had been quick to abridge his Indices score for Europe based on the interest of organizers in arranging its European premiere, several recurring performance concerns emerged. Before Europe, Indices had only been performed as a piano reduction in America by Page 127 →Tudor. While Brown had noted to Guggenheim that Rosbaud was ideal in part because he could commit ample rehearsals for Indices, such luxuries of preparation were atypical. Cunningham, for example, had barely enough time or funds for a runthrough of the twenty-eight-minute work with eleven musicians. Moreover, on May 27, 1957, Brown wrote to a Cuban instrument dealer to send a catalog to Rosbaud because of the marimbula required for Indices.41 While it appeared that a European premiere of Indices was on the horizon, with Otto Tomek writing in May about hearing of its programming at Darmstadt for July 1957 (and raising the possibility of also doing Indices in Cologne that year), Brown’s letters to Steinecke reveal that Indices remained off the table for Darmstadt until he received a decision from Rosbaud and Strobel.42 Instead, Brown offered to Steinecke a nine-minute work he had completed around the same time, Music for Cello and Piano (1954–55), which would indeed be the only work by Brown performed at Darmstadt on July 27, 1957, premiered by Werner Taube and Alfons Kontarsky. Taube felt that Brown’s work was by far the most interesting at Darmstadt.43

Earlier that spring, perhaps dismayed by the difficulties in getting Indices performed, Brown had written a lengthy missive again to his former Schillinger colleague Ray Grismer, with whom he had fallen out of touch while completing Indices but with whom he now resumed correspondence on April 4, 1957 (see “Select Texts by Earle Brown” in this volume for the complete letter). Grismer had been his intellectual equal, and they shared similar backgrounds in jazz and Schillinger technique and a similar interest in new music. Brown reported the success of his Europe trip to Grismer and the prospect that Universal Edition would publish his piano and chamber music (the status of Indices was pending), yet it was evident that Brown found himself at a crossroads, even expressing skepticism about new music in general: I came back from Europe with a determination to try to involve the best of the jazz musicians in the kind of thing I do and in contemporary music in general.В .В .В . Webern, Boulez, etc.В .В .В . to see if eventually it would be possible to have them perform such works in concerts that I or someone else might organize.В .В .В . I may be too optimistic but it’s worth a tryВ .В .В . I’ve almost given up entirely on the so-called “serious” musician in America.В .В .В . If “playing for the love of playing” exists anywhere in America it is in the jazz performer.В .В .В .44 Page 128 →At the time of these remarks, Brown was particularly excited about a series of “collective improvisation” sessions that VarГЁse had asked Brown to help organize. Brown had known VarГЁse’s music in Denver through the Complete Works and, with his move to New York in August 1952, had settled in the vicinity of the French Г©migrГ©. By spring 1957, partly in response to Steinecke’s request for an article on VarГЁse, Brown was having lunch with VarГЁse about once a week and speaking by phone regularly.45 Their main order of business, however, was to plan a series of improvisation sessions that spring. Jam sessions similar in nature had emerged around this time at the “jazz loft” in Manhattan’s flower district, and many of the same musicians would be involved in the VarГЁse sessions.46 Brown’s friend from his Air Force days, Zoot Sims, for instance, was among the musicians involved with the jazz loft.47 For three or four sessions in spring 1957, select jazz musicians convened at Greenwich House Music School, with which VarГЁse was loosely affiliated. Brown functioned as an important liaison for VarГЁse, who in spite of being highly respected among jazz musicians relied on Brown’s contacts from working as a sound engineer and mixer with dozens of musicians. Brown wrote on April 4, 1957, that a session that week would involve vibraphonist Teddy Charles, jazz loft member-resident pianist Hall Overton, drummer Ed Shaughnessy, trumpeter Art Farmer, saxophonist-clarinetist Hal McKusick, saxophonist and composer Teo Macero, trombonist Eddy Bert, guitarist Barry Galbraith, and bassist Milt Hinton.48 According to Brown, the experiment would involve a “loosely scored, simultaneous improvising thing.В .В .В . no chords, everybody in different tempi, meter etc. with at times all or any combination of them blowing at the same time, loudly, softly, high low etc.” He planned to meet with VarГЁse the following day to work out details, and stated, “This is something I’ve always wanted to try and was a little surprised to find VarГЁse also interestedВ .В .В . John [Cage] is also involved but not too much.В .В .В . strangely enuff, he is very conservative and un-experimental about this project.”49 Cage would comment with some derision on this project in his 1958 article on VarГЁse. Notably, Brown’s opinion about VarГЁse’s experiment was also less sanguine by August 1957, as he reported the following to Grismer: “VarГЁse still having jazz musician sessions but I don’t go any moreВ .В .В . it seemed to be an obsession with VarГЁseВ .В .В . a substitute for his own writing and inventivenessВ .В .В . rather an exploitation of the musicians so I withdrewВ .В .В . jazz musicians have tried this before themselves and a notation for this sort of thing is implied by Morty’s graphВ .В .В . it’s certainly a valid thing but I’m not interested in doing it.”50 Brown’s statement to Grismer about giving up on the “serious” musician Page 129 →may have been prompted by an exchange with David Tudor around this time. Brown had written to Tudor three days before his letter to Grismer, concerning a comment that Cage had made to Brown about Tudor finding the notation of Four More to be “impossible.” Tudor’s reply was quite direct and he clarified what Cage misreported: “You’re probably aware that I’m not completely satisfied with your works always, and I have tried to tell you before that this is not due to any difficulties or impossible demands—naturally these when they exist are

all part of the вЂsport.’ Rather it’s because I sometimes feel that your scores are not always the best examples of the ideas that you profess.”51 Brown had written Four More for Tudor, as he had two years earlier with 4 Systems—this time on four pages of time notation rather than in four systems of graphic notation—and Tudor went on to elaborate that the durational differences that Brown “prized so very highly” could only be achieved through a “great distortion” of the notation in Four More. Tudor went on to state his own view that a clear knowledge of the end result of a notation was necessary: “My view is that accuracy of observation has to be considered first; accuracy of representation will follow.” While Brown’s remarks to Grismer may have been in reaction to his experiences with Tudor, Brown’s later writings show that he took Tudor’s comment about his notation in stride.52 Refining notation and establishing performer rapport in so doing would occupy Brown for the next several years, crystallizing in 1961 with Available Forms 1.53 In America, the general reception of Indices was positive. Cage conducted Brown’s original ballet score with a revised production designed by Robert Rauschenberg on November 30, 1957, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.54 Musical America described Brown’s music as “a series of remarkably rich, usually atonal pointillistic sonorities,” but the reviewer had also felt that the “subtle and complex” work was most effective in its “first 20 minutes.”55 In Brown’s account to Steinecke, he described the performance as a “reasonably good first reading” given the limited rehearsal time: “The musicians were technically very good but unfamiliar with the style and вЂsound’ of my kind of writing—they very seldom play Schoenberg and practically never play Webern. Performance of Indices at Darmstadt this year is therefore probably not advisable.”56

Indices in 1958 By early 1958, Brown was still holding out for the possibility of Rosbaud conducting Indices during the forthcoming festival season. He resisted Page 130 →promising the score to another German ensemble for premiere, but by April he received the score that he had given Rosbaud a year earlier, with a brief message indicating that it was not possible to perform the work with the SГјdwestfunk Radio Orchestra, and no further elaboration.57 Several weeks earlier, after Boulez had changed his mind about programming Indices with Domaine Musical for March, Brown had accepted Luciano Berio’s offer to conduct the work in Naples with RAI for Incontri Musicali in June.58 He sent the abridged concert score, and indicated that while he would be creating parts to be sent within weeks, that RAI could go ahead creating parts at their studios based on the concert score, but noted the “rather difficult copying job” because of its print quality. Brown also indicated he would send a letter concerning the instrumentation and scoring. By May 1958, however, Berio felt that Indices could not be programmed, and gave several reasons: “First of all, since the concerts depend on the Italian Radio financially, we have to accept the number of rehearsals given for each concert. Since we want top-notch performances, naturally the rehearsal time is too limited. Your piece requires an unfamiliar playing technique for an orchestra accustomed to the normal chamber music repertoire and rather than give a less than perfect performance of all the pieces, we have had to lighten the program and concentrate on doing the remainder as well as possible. The resulting programs are a far cry from our original intentions.”59 While Berio closed with apologies and indicated that Brown’s work would be performed next year in Milan, this did not materialize, and Berio asked when Brown would be returning to Europe. In late June, Henri Pousseur wrote to revive the possibility of premiering Indices.60 Pousseur was involved with programming concerts for the “JournГ©es internationales de musique expГ©rimentale” during the Brussels World’s Fair in early October, and he asked Maderna to conduct Indices. Having heard that the score was difficult, Pousseur assured that there would be enough preparation for “une execution fidГЁle,” and requested an extra copy of the score to prepare the musicians ahead of Maderna’s arrival. Pousseur knew enough about the score to assure Brown that he would rehearse its distinct modes of attack and inquired about obtaining Boulez’s copy of Indices. Brown was pleased and honored by Pousseur’s request, and preempted any “production” difficulties by offering to locate a marimbula in Europe and a guitarist familiar with amplifier and foot-pedal volume control. Brown furthermore addressed Pousseur’s promise regarding rehearsals of Indices, stating that each player “must enter accurately and be very precise about the вЂintensity’ and timbre of the instrumental techniquePage 131 →В .В .В . it is essential that each performer

be very adept at producing all of the вЂcolors’ that his instrument is capable of.” Moreover, the ensemble was to be approached as a “total вЂinstrument.’” Brown furthermore indicated that the mallet changes for the percussion could be modified, but firmly stated that “all other aspects and instrumental parts are realistic and should not be modified.”61 As Indices was set to premiere in Europe, Cage was preparing to deliver a critique of Indices and 4 Systems in his Darmstadt lecture, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy.” Both works by Brown had attracted significant interest in Europe, but Cage would spotlight their conceptual problems in technical and ethical terms. Of the composers surveyed, which included Bach, Stockhausen, Feldman, Wolff, Brown, and himself, Cage allocated the most space to Brown in a long sweeping middle passage, furthermore analyzing two works by Brown while only considering one by each of the others. Cage first spoke about the function of the conductor in Indices, a role he had served in 1957: “The function of the conductor is that of a contractor, who, following an architect’s blueprint, constructs a building. The function of the instrumentalists is that of workers who simply do as they are told.” While this division of labor may have been unsettling to his lecture audience, Cage made certain to cast the subservience as “intolerable” by asserting his own philosophical and reformist viewpoint, which was a “point of view from which each thing and each being is seen as moving out from its own center.”62 Cage had faulted his own chance-derived Music of Changes in the same lecture, and critiqued the fixity of its notation with similarly strong language by calling it “an object more inhuman than human”; but Cage took Brown to task further for his compositional choices and techniques. Because Brown had introduced bias into his use of the tables of random numbers rather than allowing the sounds to remain as “elements acting according to scientific theories of probability,” Indices was from start to finish “under the control of man.” Without presenting further justifications for Brown’s choices, which he no doubt knew, Cage relegated Indices to the music of the past: “The intolerable situation described is, of course, not a peculiarity of Indices, but a characteristic of Western music, the masterpieces of which are its most imposing examples, which, when they are concerned not with tables of random numbers (used in a way which introduces bias) but rather with ideas of order, personal feelings, and the integration of these, simply suggests the presence of a man rather than the presence of sounds.”63 Cage then went on to argue that 4 Systems also signaled the presence of “the conscious mind” based on the permission Brown granted Page 132 →to rotate the score, thereby introducing a traditional relationship of inversions. The rhetorical point that seemed to linger most, however, was Cage’s depiction of Brown as a composer of the past, which clearly set him apart from his New York School peers.64 The timing of Cage’s critique was curious, as it came ahead of two European premieres for Brown in 1958, a significant feat for Brown and a first among his New York School colleagues. In three days, on September 11, Brown’s Pentathis would have its premiere at Darmstadt by Domaine Musical, with Maderna conducting (substituting for Boulez); several weeks later, Maderna was scheduled to premiere Brown’s Indices on October 9 at the Brussels World’s Fair. Cage’s remarks were an affront to the acceptance of Brown’s work in Europe. From Cage’s perspective, the concert version of Indices likely stirred up some concern, as Brown had in effect condensed the original ballet score into something altogether removed from its original form in order to create an arrangement suitable for European concert halls. Moreover, while Cage had called attention to the necessity of a “careful integration of opposites” between the “conscious mind” and the mind’s identification with “no matter what eventuality” with regard to the notation and form of 4 Systems, this duality was entirely moot in the case of Brown’s most recent work Pentathis, scored in standard staff notation (the title is a play on the words “pen to this”).65 Brown spoke about his approach to Pentathis in a later interview: “I wrote [Boulez] a piece in standard notation and normal conducting practice. I had already done a lot of experimenting with graphics and new notations, but I wrote it in standard notation because, number one, I wanted to go back to it and see if I liked it still, or again, and I didn’t want to drop the new notation on Pierre at the time.”66 Brown would give a similar explanation about the circumstantial considerations for reintroducing graphic notation in Hodograph (1959), which he originally scored in time notation only (modified staff notation), as discussed further in the following section. Cage had previously viewed

Brown with some skepticism, according to Carolyn Brown, particularly with regard to the ease with which Brown had adopted Cage’s experimental approaches, and he at times grappled with whether a different point of view meant a refutation of his own.67 In Cage’s view, Brown had perhaps made too many concessions for Europe in his work by 1958, regardless of the significant opportunities that Europe seemed to promise for the orchestral music that Brown most wished to write. Meanwhile, Cage would continue to stay the course he had adumbrated in his Darmstadt lecture, creating works of increasing indeterminacy and Page 133 →theatricality during the time he remained in Europe between September 1958 and January 1959, with Music Walk and TV KГ¶ln in Germany and then Fontana Mix and Aria during his residency at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan. During that time, Brown moved toward greater refinement in his notation and scoring for large ensemble, and his intention to return to Europe sooner rather than later was perhaps stronger than Cage’s, being based on the opportunities he had observed. In fact, during 1960–61, as Brown was still drafting Available Forms 1, Brown revisited Pentathis to experiment with three deliberate “stops” in the score, which would allow the musicians to regroup at certain points for the sake of maintaining ensemble. These stops forecasted the dramatic holds of Brown’s later music, which became an important accessory to the bursts of sound that would punctuate his music.68 Figure 5.3 shows one of the moments in Pentathis at which Brown specifically asked Maderna and others to cue as a hold, at measure 141, just before the tempo change and staggered entries of instruments, at the top of page 24 in figure 5.3. While Pentathis premiered without major incident in 1958 at Darmstadt, the Brussels premiere of Indices on October 9 did not go as planned. In Carolyn Brown’s account, Maderna reached a joint but reluctant decision with Earle Brown midway through rehearsals to cancel the performance: “The technical demands of the piece were too difficult and Earle’s aesthetic too foreign to be assimilated in the time allotted.”69 Indices continued to pose challenges for musicians and conductors particularly in Europe, and it is no coincidence that Brown began drafting substantial prefatory texts for his scores, beginning with Hodograph I the following year, and then more elaborately with Available Forms 1–2 (1961–62) and Novara (1962), which functioned as capsule essays on the technical and aesthetic language of his scores especially for musicians and conductors. In light of the cancellation of Indices for the 1958 World’s Fair concert, Cage managed to create opportunities for Cunningham and Carolyn Brown to present a suite from Indices accompanied by Tudor in Brussels and Hamburg, both of which were videotaped. The Hamburg footage that was captured during the Das Neue Werk music festival recently surfaced, as did photo stills taken by Earle Brown from the Brussels performance.70 Figure 5.4 shows one of Brown’s images from Brussels, with Tudor’s transcription of the Indices reduction on the piano ledge.71 Upon returning to New York in fall 1958, Brown again began making plans to return to Europe. He wrote to Virgil Thomson in November for a recommendation for a Guggenheim application and described a new Page 135 →orchestral project: “I am at work again at Capitol Records, without nearly enough time to compose, or even to think. But I am working, slowly, on some orchestra pieces which I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”72 Indeed, over a year earlier, in June 1957, Brown had relayed to Steinecke that he was “currently at work on a new piece for orchestra which will go first to Maderna.”73 Brown continued to make known this new project when Tomek wrote to Brown in February 1959 to follow up on their discussions from Darmstadt. Brown described a new twenty-minute “Work for Large Orchestra” and in his description made pointed references to the prior obstacles of Indices. Writing in April 1959, Brown said that his scoring would put Tomek’s “mind at ease,” as it included “no вЂodd’ instruments” and “no unusual seating,” after which, for good measure, Brown requested a list of the instruments and number of performers on each part in Tomek’s orchestra.74 When Luigi Nono wrote to Brown in July 1959 to ask for a new work, Brown referred to this orchestral project as “Available Forms.”75 Page 134 → Fig. 5.3. Pentathis (1958), pages 23–24, mm. 139–44. Copyright В© 2008 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Fig. 5.4. Duet from Springweather and People. Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, and David Tudor (piano). Studio Michiels, Brussels, October 1958. Photo by Earle Brown. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Apart from making headway with what eventually emerged as Available Forms 1 two years later, Brown had also begun work on an essay that Nono Page 136 →requested the prior fall, on new music in America in relation to Schillinger, Cage, and Cowell for DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge.76 The issue was soon canceled, however, and by summer 1959 Nono now asked Brown for a new composition to be played before and after a lecture at Darmstadt “on the problems of indetermination, chance, and on the precise conscience of human thought in its unity of instinct and reason.”77 Nono furthermore stated that only Brown’s work would frame his presentation. The proposal was rather unusual given Brown’s most recent work Pentathis, which swerved away from the chance-based technique of Indices and the notational indeterminacy of 4 Systems—these works having been critiqued publicly at the 1958 Ferienkurse by Cage, with Nono in attendance. Still, Nono presupposed that Brown’s new score would be of the same ilk as 4 Systems and thus would lend itself to two demonstrably different performances before and after his lecture (comparable to the multiple versions of Stockhausen’s KlavierstГјck XI and Cage’s Variations I that Tudor had presented during Cage’s 1958 Darmstadt lectures). In reply, Brown assented to Nono’s request for a new work and indicated that it would indeed “deal with indetermination, instinct and reason”—but only “to a certain extent.” Brown voiced some ambivalence about the relevance of his work to Nono’s thesis: “My score may not be the best example for your lecture. There are many, more experimental scores, dealing with indetermination and chanceВ .В .В . (.В .В .В I’m not quite sure what вЂchance’ means anymore).”78 These reservations, however, did not preclude Brown from granting Nono the freedom to discuss his work in 1959, even in Brown’s absence from Darmstadt that year. Moreover, rather than deliver to Nono an excerpt from his “Available Forms” in progress, Brown chose to send another recent work, Hodograph I, but with significant revisions.

Notations of Past and Future On September 1, 1959, Brown’s Hodograph I served as the musical prelude and postlude to a fiery lecture by Nono entitled “Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute,” which addressed the bewildering influence of two Americans on the European avant-garde. The exact import of Nono’s critique with regard to Brown was less than clear, however, because not once did Nono mention Brown by name in his lecture proper. The two figures Nono identified were John Cage and Russian Г©migrГ© Joseph Schillinger, both significant figures to Brown.79 By all published accounts, Nono mentioned no other composers in his lecture apart Page 137 →from Cage and Schillinger, as both Stockhausen and Brown (among others) were described in rhetorical effigy. Martin Iddon recently analyzed Nono’s lecture in detail and rightly pointed out, “What are not retained in any printing of the essay are Nono’s introductory words to the performance of Hodograph I”.80 Indeed, only in Nono’s introductory remarks do we find clear and substantial mention of Brown. The omission of Nono’s opening remarks in written accounts of the 1959 Darmstadt meeting has relegated Brown’s involvement in Euro-American postwar music by that year as a mere footnote, if at all, when in fact his presence in Europe was on the ascendant and far from superfluous. If we examine the archival audio of Nono’s introductory remarks housed at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD), it reveals several important aspects about “Geschichte und Gegenwart” and Nono’s complicated reception of Brown.81 Before turning to these remarks, the circumstances of Nono’s lecture and Brown’s Hodograph should be noted. Brown’s correspondence with Darmstadt director Wolfgang Steinecke had begun in May 1959 for the forthcoming summer course, after Maderna had raised the idea of bringing a version of Indices with dancers to Darmstadt, a proposal from which Brown demurred when Steinecke proposed using the piano reduction only.82 Upon Tudor’s suggestion, Brown instead offered a composition for the Darmstadt faculty that year, involving Severino Gazzelloni, Tudor, and Christoph Caskel.83 Thus, Brown scored Hodograph I for flute, piano/celesta, and percussion (vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel). The original manuscript in Brown’s archive was signed “June 1959” and reveals that it was originally conceived without a trace of its now signature hodographic calligraphy and instead notated with definite pitches and time notation on a staff, in a manner closer to Pentathis than to Folio and 4 Systems. Upon corresponding with Nono in July, however, Brown interpolated three systems of graphic notation, which he termed “implicit” notation, which were to be treated durationally in the same manner as the other eleven

systems in “explicit” (nongraphic) notation.84 In a letter dated August 26, Brown indicated that he was still working on “the trio” and described how the occasion of Nono’s lecture subject, as well as the caliber of the musicians, had prompted him “to try again” in the manner of December 1952 and his earlier graphic experiments. He furthermore explained his plan to draw the graphic lines himself for any future order of the Hodograph score, to which the performer would reciprocate with a sonic response on par with his own “spontaneously” drawn notations: Page 138 →It seemed that this was an excellent time for me to try again for this kind of “performer involvement,” in view of the subject of your lecture, and also it seems that with such extraordinary performers, perhaps this extraordinary immediacy can take place. I have not before tried to bring it about by having “areas” of performance freedom within the piece; surrounded by “determined” areasВ .В .В . perhaps it will be possible this way.85 At the time, Brown’s Folio was largely unknown to most of Europe, apart from the several colleagues to whom he had shown the score. December 1952 was not premiered in Europe until October 1960 in Cologne, with Tudor performing and Brown in attendance.86 Brown had described December 1952 to Nono in the above letter, where he discussed the purely “spontaneous” performances that he and Heinz-Klaus Metzger had realized informally. Cornelius Cardew attended Darmstadt in 1959 and reported that Nono read aloud portions of Brown’s correspondence during his lecture. In the archival recording at IMD, Nono’s introductory remarks in fact include the above quote from Brown’s August 26 letter, translated into German and read aloud, in addition to Brown’s other explanatory comments.87 While Nono quoted generously from Brown’s two-page letter, particularly with regard to Brown’s efforts to prompt performer freedom, Nono omitted the section in which Brown explained the prehistory of Hodograph traced through his Folio scores. Nono’s redacted excerpt opened a specious window onto Brown’s compositional rationale, implying that Brown was one of the naive beginners (“ahnungslose AnfГ¤nger”) to draw Nono’s censure for confusing composition with speculation (“die Komposition mit Spekulation verwechselt haben”) by writing for virtuosi instrumentalists such as Tudor and Gazzelloni, whose realizations rivaled composition. Nono’s identification of two of the musicians who had performed Brown’s work prompted murmurs, snickers, and scattered applause from the Darmstadt crowd.88 Nono’s remarks prior to the lecture had been more laudatory and less scripted. He had spoken about the absence of any “dogma” in Brown’s treatment of the indeterminacy-determinacy binary, and Brown’s higher quest toward an authentic and clear compositional voice (“Klarheit”). Brown’s August 26 letter may have softened Nono’s views about indeterminacy, but the letter arrived far too late, as any cloaked criticisms of Brown and American experimentalism were left unaltered in the written lecture that Nono delivered on September 1. Page 139 →When Brown wrote to Cardew in October, he had asked about Nono’s presentation, having heard nothing from Nono directly: All I’ve heard is that Nono played my [piece] during a lecture in which he clobbered John—and probably me on the way by. I knew that he was going to have my [piece] played in the lecture but didn’t condition the [performance] on my agreeing with his point of view—it all sounds mighty like a mess.В .В .В . If you’ve seen the score(s), what do you think about the “implicit” areas—never tried before to goose the performers during the highly detailed “explicit” scoring—by using 2 such extremes I tho[ught] that it might just be poss[ible]. I have never been fond [of] the “take it home and write out the parts” type scoring (I’m very interested and sympathetic but not actively) not fond either of improvisation but somewhere around there lies a kind of “integral to the score impulse.”89 Brown’s caution regarding performer action was such that he outlined a tacet option in his performance instructions for the implicit notations in Hodograph, so as not to force a contrived action: “If the implications are considered (by the performers) to be insufficient as motivations for a relatively spontaneous action, these areas

may be ignored and only the вЂexplicit’ systems be performed. If one or more performers find the areas вЂpossible,’ the others may remain tac[e]t for the given time.”90 Preferring no spontaneity over a misbegotten impulse, Brown had signed the new instructions July 1959, and sent them along with the revised score.91 In Cardew’s view, Brown had escaped Nono’s invective regarding the misguided freedoms dictated by the scientism of Schillinger and the orientalism of Cage: “For some reason, (I was very jealous) he excepted you from this tirade, and read out a letter you wrote him. The piece was neither implicit, explicit nor duplicit. It was Triplicit. Perhaps because they had only one rehearsal (I believe) it was never clear whether they were ex- or implicit groups being played at any given points.”92 Tudor also reported that Brown had been singled out as “the only one on the right path.”93 Brown had been less convinced, however, and admitted to feeling rather “stuck” between “a polarity of situations” when writing to Ray Grismer in September 1959 and identified with VarГЁse’s situation: “I argue for rationality with John and against rationality with Stockhausen and agree to a large extent with both of themВ .В .В . the only one I come into contact through which who seems to share my skitzofrenia [sic] is VarГЁse.”94 Page 140 →The musical and ideological territories through which Brown had to maneuver during the years examined in this chapter were a tumultuous prelude to the series of successes that came with Available Forms 1 in 1961. Brown’s willingness to “try again” in the case of Hodograph and with the Baden-Baden version of Indices were emblematic of his openness to cultivating a viable dialogue with the European avant-garde, though many of these details have been glossed over or undocumented historically. Cultural politics aside, Brown’s musical concerns were the main source of circumspection during the latter 1950s, and the feeling of being caught in the debates about aesthetics and allegiances with regard to technique was secondary to his broader goal of achieving a stronger immediacy in his notation and overall communicability with performers and conductors. Available Forms 1 achieved this rapport with clarity, and the system of cueing and notational “telescoping” of sound events that Brown now put forth was illustrative of the “total instrument” he had specified as his orchestral sound ideal time after time with Indices: “There is intentionally not too much material in this piece in order for the musicians to hear their position in context. It has proven to be practical in that the performers have enough time in rehearsals to become familiar with the sound of the event and of their relationship with it. It is, of course, ambiguousВ .В .В . [but] it involves them creatively and creates a feeling of intensity and engagement in the performance felt by the musicians, the conductor, the audience, and me.”95 As his Available Forms took shape, Brown put to rest the possibility of premiering Indices. Interest in the work remained, however, with Cardew reminding Brown to send him the electric guitar part of Indices in December 1960 and Tomek asking again for the work in 1962 for a Darmstadt performance. Brown would by then describe Indices as “a very strange score,” however, signaling his desire to move forward with newer projects, and indeed he did, returning to Darmstadt that decade to lecture about new works in 1964, 1965, and 1967.96 It is no coincidence that Brown arrived at a crossing point in the notation and performance of his works just after he committed most of his time (not all, it should be stressed) to living in Europe beginning in 1961. He quit his job at Capitol in 1960, and on looking back at the years that followed, he recalled: “I decided to devote myself to being a composer, not to do it on the side.В .В .В . I still don’t know how I lived from 1961 to 1968, but in one way or another, with lectures, commissions—mostly in Europe—I was able to make it.”97 Indeed, when one follows Brown’s paper trail of addresses, schedules, and commissions through Europe in the 1960s, one Page 141 →marvels at the alliances upon which he relied abroad and his pursuit of a sound ideal that could only be rendered best through direct contact with ensembles and conductors. The word “hodograph” refers to a line representing the direction and velocity of a moving body, not unrelated to “Brownian movement” in physics, he told percussionist William Kraft in 1962.98 Brown’s long passage from New York to Europe to get Indices performed had been rife with revisions, critique, and moments of quandary for Brown, and not until 2010 would the concert version receive its protracted European premiere, posthumously in Germany.99 Throughout, Brown remained open to exploring the paths necessary toward achieving the sound ideal that he had long sought, often as a lone traveler between two musical worlds.100 Though Brown was not one to write polemically in these years (his attention was on his scores, it appeared), his preface to Available Forms 1 did seem

to include a subtle rejoinder to the critique Cage had leveled against Indices. The conductor in his work was no longer the contractor, but rather a free artist: “The conductor’s function is analogous to that of a painter who has a canvas (time) and colors (timbre) and the possibility of working with the medium.”101

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Chapter 6 Their Man in Europe, Our Man in America Earle Brown and the European Avant-Garde Richard Toop My title, naturally, implies a European perspective, which is basically the one I still have, even after living in Australia since 1975, and it’s the one I’ll pursue here. I’ll seek to talk about how Earle Brown came across to Europeans, and how it is that he, of all the New York School composers, even if he didn’t astound us in the way that Cage did, seemed most intriguingly close yet different. Perhaps I can start here with some personal reminiscences, not so much of the man, whom to my regret I met only a handful of times, starting (I think) at some concerts at York University in May 1968, but of early encounters with his music, as well as, perhaps even more importantly, with the LPs that came out in his extraordinary Contemporary Sound Series. For me, as for many others in my generation, these were of seminal importance: I grew up with them, so to speak. According to D. J. Hoek, the first issues came out in 1961.1 I certainly didn’t catch up with them that early: I was sixteen then, and just coming to terms with the mixed blessings of Robert Craft’s Complete Webern, though I was starting to become aware of newer music too. I got the first (my first, that is) experience of the CSS during my first year at university (it would have been 1964): I remember the excitement of unpacking what were actually the first recordings I’d ever ordered from overseas: the Cologne LP with Stockhausen and Kagel, and the Italian one with works by Berio, Nono, and Maderna. Thereafter, Page 143 →in the various little London stores such as Discurio and the Gramophone Exchange where I went in search of new recordings of new music, one of my greatest hopes would be to find a new Time Records release. Not everything in the series was golden: there was a disc with the Hamburg Chamber Soloists where for my taste the only interesting piece was Castiglioni’s little Tropi, though they had another absolutely intriguing one with pieces by Xenakis (Achorripsis), Aldo Clementi, Bo Nilsson, and KotoЕ„ski. Perhaps “one revelation after another” would be a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit. From the U.S. repertoire, there was a very enjoyable disc of Feldman (Durations) and Brown, and a seriously hard-core one of Cage (Cartridge Music) and prepolitical Christian Wolff (including pieces I subsequently loved to play myself). There was Aloys Kontarsky’s wonderful European take on Ives’s Concord Sonata, and a definitely revelatory Sonic Arts Union LP, which for many of us was our first exposure to a post-Cage “next generation”: to Ashley, Behrman, Lucier, and Mumma (though I think I had already heard a much more low-fi LP offering from the ONCE Festival). On the European front, a classic Gazzelloni album with solo works by Berio, Castiglioni, Evangelisti, Maderna, Matsudaira, and Messiaen, and a string quartet disc where Brown’s own quartet sat next to parts of the Boulez Livre (which most of us knew of only by hearsay), and what was almost certainly the first LP release of a major work by Giacinto Scelsi (the Fourth String Quartet). Plus our first drastic exposure to cross-cultural art music: Mayuzumi’s utterly weird Nirvana Symphony. All this, of course, beautifully recorded by someone who had been a leading sound engineer for Capitol Records. In the classical sphere, at least, I doubt whether this combination of engineer and A & R man has ever been matched, much less surpassed. Here I should also mention my first encounter with the Maderna-Brown connection. I was sitting in an aural class at university. The classes were essentially futile: they were a pretext for the lecturer—a very modestly talented “regional composer”—to demonstrate that he had perfect pitch, and most of us didn’t. So I used to bring along something to read, and on this occasion it was the latest copy of the English Gramophone magazine. Since its review orientation was decidedly conservative, I was often more interested in advertisements in the back pages, where small specialist record shops would sometimes deliver unexpected surprises. So I was looking through these back pages, and suddenly my jaw dropped: there was a new Italian RCA three-disc album, mainly conducted by Maderna, with works by, among others, Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Maderna himself, Penderecki,

Page 144 → Pousseur, Haubenstock-Ramati, and Earle Brown (the only non-European in the compilation).2 I couldn’t get out of the class fast enough to place my snail-mail order. Eventually the discs came, and for me they were thrilling. But the two performances that really stayed with me were those of Stockhausen’s Kontrapunkte and Earle Brown’s Available Forms 1. Re the former, Stockhausen was actually pretty dismissive: he once complained to me that Rzewski played the piano part “like a piano concerto,” but I must admit that’s exactly what I liked, and—excuse me, Mr. Stockhausen!—still do. But the Available Forms performance was a revelation, and a lasting one. Not only did I include the score in the list of one hundred pounds’ worth of scores that constituted my university music prize (which generally incensed the chair of department, though that was also because almost all the scores were “soft-back,” so one couldn’t imprint the university crest on them), but it featured in just about every lecture on early indeterminacy that I ever gave. I’ll come back to that piece a little later. From Earle Brown’s point of view, the basic facts about his relationship to Europe seem to be well summarized in the 1997 interview with Amy Beal reproduced in Contemporary Music Review.3 And I don’t seek to dispute any of these: it’s just that I may look at some of them from the other side of the fence, so to speak. But let’s start by recapping those “bare facts.” Brown’s first contact with Boulez was in New York in 1952, at the time when he was working with Cage on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape that gave rise to Cage’s Williams Mix and his own Octet. Paris (and Boulez) was the starting point for his first European trip in 1956, followed by another in 1958, and he spent much of the sixties living in Europe, where Paris remained a particular favorite—he fondly recalls composing Corroboree at a cafГ© there. Returning to Stockhausen for a moment, I note that my first “proper job” was as his teaching assistant at the Cologne Musikhochschule, in 1973–74. I don’t remember Stockhausen ever mentioning Brown, though of course he had known him since at latest 1958: he features in the familiar photo, with Cage lying prone on the floor, that Stockhausen used to accompany his brief “Echt oder gemacht” essay, refuting a polemic against electronic music by the (retrospectively) somewhat Nazi-tainted musicologist Friedrich Blume.4 Brown was rather insistent, especially in later years, that a piece like 25 Pages might have influenced works like Boulez’s Third Sonata, and Stockhausen’s KlavierstГјck XI, and this is something I’ve been asked to comment on. Well, forgive me, but I rather doubt it. I can’t really speak for Boulez, but the forms of Trope and Constellation-Miroir (especially Page 145 →the latter) are by no means as open as they may initially seem to be. As for Stockhausen, the whole notion of emulation, let alone imitation, is just out of character. Perhaps partial appropriation is not out of the question: Feldman,5 whose early relationship with Stockhausen was characteristically problematic (I won’t say “paranoid,” but I’ve seen the term used) reports Stockhausen as having said, after an early meeting and perusal of his (Feldman’s) scores, “I’ve decided to use you in my music.” Well, I can’t rule it out (and indeed Feldman once remarked of Brown, “I think he’s been ripped off more than any of us, in an overt way”), but if it happened, I’d say it was very uncharacteristic. Far more typical, I’d say, was another incident, also involving Feldman’s music, related by David Tudor. It occurred while Stockhausen was starting work on KlavierstГјck XI. He described his plan to have many fragments spread over a single sheet, and Tudor said this reminded him of a piece by Feldman (perhaps Intermission 6?). Stockhausen’s immediate response was, “Well, in that case I won’t do it!” and Tudor claims that he had to go to some lengths to persuade Stockhausen that the two cases were really quite different. I’ll return to another aspect of this topic later. If one looks at the commissions for Brown’s works from the late fifties through to the early seventies, they’re overwhelmingly European: just about all of them, in fact, apart from From Here, commissioned by the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in 1963, and Novara (originally entitled Available Forms 3) from the preceding year, which was requested by Lukas Foss for the Tanglewood Festival. If I may borrow from Leporello, “il catalogo ГЁ questo”: to start with, Pentathis (1958) was for Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical, and Hodograph (1959) for Luigi Nono at the Darmstadt Summer Courses, though one can’t imagine that Nono was any too pleased about the work’s indeterminate aspects, given his furious public polemic against the latter during the courses—all in all, Hodograph would have sat much more naturally within Stockhausen’s course than Nono’s. The next works are Available Forms 1 and 2 (1961, 1962),

commissioned respectively by the City of Darmstadt and the RAI Orchestra for the Venice Biennale: Maderna conducted the premieres of both.6 Then, in 1963—my apologies for the pedantry of all these dates, but they do emphasize the almost remorseless continuity of the commissions—comes Times Five, for the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, and next year, from Radio Bremen, Corroboree, for all three Kontarskys: not just Aloys and Alfons, but Bernhard too. The year 1965 brings the little harpsichord oddities for Antoinette Vischer—Nine Rarebits—and the altogether more significant String Page 146 →Quartet, commissioned by the Donaueschingen Festival for the LaSalle Quartet. In 1966 the ORTF (French Radio) commissions Module I, which was combined with Module II at the 1969 Venice Biennale—I was actually there, and I remember seeing Brown with his faithful camera on the steps of the Fenice, but for some reasons I don’t recall hearing the piece (I was on a very tight student budget, and perhaps I just couldn’t afford a ticket). Event: Synergy II (1967/1968) was commissioned by the Royan Festival and copremiered by Brown and Gilbert Amy, who had recently taken over the Domaine Musical conductorship. In addition to Module II, 1969 also sees Module III, for the Zagreb Festival, in 1970 the Maeght Foundation commissions Syntagm III, then in 1972 it’s the Venice Biennale again with Loops, and in the same year Time Spans, for the City of Kiel’s Olympic Games. What I want to emphasize here is not just the quantity of these commissions, but the quality and prestige of their commissioners. The apparently rather prosperous Antoinette Vischer apart, these are all star gigs, at star venues, with star performers. Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Domaine Musical, Venice, Zagreb: it’s a remarkable assemblage—about all that’s missing is the French festival La Rochelle. At this time no other member of the New York School—not even John Cage—could match this level of European demand and exposure. But after 1973, the trail of European commissions rather dries up—curiously just when the Morton Feldman cult is about to get under way, though it’s a bit ahead of that. Maybe this simply reflects the fact that Brown had moved back to America, but there are a couple of other thoughts that occur to me. His first great European advocate, Maderna, died in 1973, having been ill for some time. In fact, Time Spans marks the point, I think, at which his second major composer-interpreter, namely Hans Zender, takes up the running, but maybe in those days, Zender didn’t quite have the reputation and influence that he subsequently and justly acquired. The work was written for Zender to perform, and I remember hearing it live at West German Radio, conducted by him, not long after I arrived in Cologne, so probably in late 1973, along with the first part of Takemitsu’s GГ©meaux (where the soloist “twins” were Heinz Holliger and Vinko Globokar), and Zender’s own ZeitstrГ¶me. My main memory of the performance is that the two pianos were startlingly out of tune with one another: almost a quarter-tone apart. At the time I wondered if this was intentional, but it clearly wasn’t! In fact, I didn’t get to see the score of Time Spans until quite recently, and when I did, something else came to mind. At the time I moved to Cologne,Page 147 → a veil was slowly being drawn over a musical controversy that had apparently raged for over a year. It involved a piece by the young Marxist composer Nicolaus A. Huber, called Harakiri. In this piece, the small orchestra’s string instruments are all radically tuned down, to a point where discernible pitch production is only possible at very low volume levels. Over the course of about fifteen minutes the strings get ever louder, and accordingly ever scratchier. Eventually a prerecorded tape takes over. There is a deafening clap of thunder, about a minute of rainfall at the threshold of pain, and then a rather maternal female voice delivers a two-minute lecture on crescendi and decrescendi as forms of social repression. Naturally the piece was intended to provoke, and indeed it did. But as Beate Kutschke showed a few years ago, behind the surface scandal, there was another one.7 The work had been commissioned by Clytus Gottwald, on behalf of Radio Frankfurt, and what incensed Gottwald was not the work’s politics (he was well aware of Huber’s outlook), but the fact that despite a pretty decent fee, he was convinced that Huber had just dashed off the score in a few hours, and the result was not in any sense worth the money. Now if you look at the score of Brown’s Time Spans, which lasts a bit over twelve minutes, you’ll see that it comprises just four pages of notation, notably sequences of fifteen chords apiece for the two pianos (at the top of the first page in figure 6.1), and pitches derived from these for the remaining instruments, which remain constant throughout the piece! As an instance of “Good notation is what works” (the aphorism Brown contributed to Cage’s Notations book), it’s exemplary: it works very nicely.8 But in terms of a “German work ethic,” not to mention a note-count-orientated version of “bang for your buck” (or

back there and then, “Deutschmark”), and in the context of the Harakiri debate, one can see that Brown’s position might suddenly have seemed a little precarious. This, however, is pure speculation on my part. And indeed, I shouldn’t pretend that Brown’s relationship to the European scene was consistently euphoric. Perhaps there’s something symbolic about the fact that the very first sentence of the program note he wrote for the first of the post–Available Forms European commissions listed above, namely Times Five, has an element of dissent. He writes: Not being overly charmed by purely electronic sounds or by the environmental “concrete” sounds for which the French Radio Studio is best known, I took this commission as an opportunity to multiply and transform more or less “normal” instrumental and vocal sound sources. Page 148 → Fig. 6.1. Time Spans (1972), page 1. Copyright В© 2008 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Page 149 →In short, Earle Brown was always very much his own man. But as time went by, he sometimes found himself in more acrimonious situations. Many of these had to do with interpretation, and in two senses: both musical and extramusical. Re the latter, Brown was generally resistant to the attempts of left-wing philosophers like Heinz-Klaus Metzger to appropriate his work for Euro-Marxist agendas, just as Cage had been unhappy with Daniel Charles’s attempts to “phenomenologize” him. In fact, the only member of the New York School to be happy with such treatment was Morton Feldman. The following excerpt from a conversation with Metzger is typical: EB: My works of art are not conceived to be understood. I don’t believe in understanding as an absolute. HKM: Mr. Brown, your pieces as we experienced it today in the case of Folio, have a kind of sociology, I should sayВ .В .В . they are social modelsВ .В .В . certain notations in Folio are to be read or visualised, and at the same time as you ask for the reading of the score, you ask for a spontaneity of the musician.В .В .В . I should say, there is no music that is not political. EB: Well, there is no music that can’t be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political. HKM: Of course. But I am speaking of the objective fact of a work of art, which is a political fact, if the composer wants or not.9 In terms of interpretation, the experience of working with Rainer Riehn’s Ensemble Musica Negativa on Folio (recordings issued as part of the Music Before Revolution LP album, which is also the source for the conversation just quoted) apparently had its fractious aspects. More problems came some years later (1995), while working with Ensemble Avantgarde Leipzig on Event: Synergy II, among others. Using a degree of tact, Steffen Schleiermacher (pianist in the ensemble, and coconductor) writes, “The collaboration between Earle Brown and the Ensemble Avantgarde turned out to be stimulating, but sometimes by no means uncomplicated. At times, views on musical perfection, on form and dramaturgy, and on musical freedom and determinism were wildly disparate.” Not long after, colleagues in Berlin suggested to me that Schleiermacher’s comments were decidedly diplomatic and placatory (but these were, after all, the liner notes for a CD release!).10 There’s another negative aspect, already touched upon earlier, that requires a little elaboration here. In the course of the sixties, whatever success Page 150 →his new work enjoyed in Europe, Brown felt increasingly aggrieved that “open forms” were regarded there as a European innovation (as witness the cast-list of Stockhausen, Boulez, Pousseur, and (slightly oddly) Berio at the start of Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta), and that his own earlier pieces like Folio and 25 Pages were being willfully overlooked.11 European commentators might well have felt that in comparison to Eco’s examples, these pieces weren’t really forms at all, just

anthologies of available materials. Be that as it may, Brown became ever more determined to assert his priority. Things probably came to a head in 1973—the year Brown returned to the United States—but some correspondence with Stockhausen two years earlier already shows where the wind is blowing. Fig. 6.2. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Earle Brown, Darmstadt, 1958. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Stockhausen is planning a book on the Cologne Courses he organized at the Rheinische Musikhochschule from 1964 to 1968 (in the meantime, they have been taken over by Kagel). On April 5, 1971 he writes a decidedly cordial letter to Brown, asking him to contribute: “Please write a text for this important book.В .В .В . Write about anything you like—: the idea of a team work [with] composers-interpreters, about your subjects, your personalPage 151 → friendship with several of the other course leaders, your ideas about such an institute for the future etc., etc. anything.”12 Brown’s reply (May 18) is far from friendly. He feels that he was just used as a fill-in while Stockhausen was away in Japan, that he doesn’t have a clear content focus, that he doesn’t care about any fee, and so on. Then, out of the blue, he continues, “Incidentally—tell your P.R. men, Hodeir at least, that they (he) do you no service by being inaccurate about history.В .В .В . Many people have said and written angry things about your (Hodeir’s) statements in the N.Y. Phil. program and it doesn’t exactly charm me either! вЂThe idea of interchangeable elements inaugurated by StockhausenВ .В .В . in 1957.’ .В .В . This, as well as graphic scoring (collective score for graphic improvisation), вЂtime notation’ (proportional), and вЂopen form, mobility’ all exist in my вЂFolio and Four Systems’ (1952–54) and вЂ25 Pages’ (1953). I know that you know it but I really think that you should help some of these mythological musicologists to know it—!” Stockhausen’s response (May 25) to this tirade is surprisingly temperate. He points out that the only time he met AndrГ© Hodeir was in Paris in 1952, chez Boulez, and he doesn’t know what he wrote, but that if Brown wants to criticize him, he should also criticize American writers like Salzman, who “tries to change everything into an American History of Music with a few unimportant satellites in Europe.” He also says he wishes Brown wouldn’t bother about such things: “We have better things to do,” and concludes, “I also hope to see you as soon as possible. I sincerely wish that you are happy and successful in your work.” Brown’s (June 1) attempt at self-exculpation—for example, “I hope that you didn’t take the вЂincidentally’ part of my letter as a personal criticism of you” (how else would one take it?) and re PR, “I used the phrase ironically!!”—is not entirely convincing, and it’s not long before he again pursues his case: “I still consider, вЂthe way I am presented’ as important in the PR sense as in the performance sense.В .В .В . I must admit that IВ .В .В . get frequently angry at the misrepresentation of fact that these вЂword-men’ play withВ .В .В . and I don’t agree with you that we should ignore it! .В .В .В As you say, вЂwe have better things to do,’ but I still detest un-professionalism in every area of вЂwork’!” Again (on June 16) Stockhausen urges restraint: “I know, that you are hurt because you see your [role] in history and you want, that historical reports are just and fair. I have given this up since long [ago]. Several times I have published my opinion, that the history, as we read it, is an invention of individuals, who naturally distort it. History is literature. The very fact, that you get angry, as you wrote in your letter, at the misinterpretations of Page 152 →fact, shows me, that you want to be seen in a special way. My experience tells me, that this is impossible.” But his counsel falls on deaf ears. Universal Edition in Vienna is just about to start publishing all of Brown’s works from From Here onward, and several of these scores have a preface that begins: “Spontaneous decisions in the performance of a work and the possibility of the composed elements being вЂmobile’ have been of primary interest to me for some time: the former to an extreme degree in FOLIO (1952), and the latter, most explicitly, in TWENTY-FIVE PAGES (1953).” (En passant, the notion of “mobility” is perhaps less contentious than that of “open form”.) The same comments had already appeared in the prefaces to the two Available Forms pieces. Now let’s return to something more positive, namely the impact of Brown’s later music on European

composers, and the extent to which it sounded at least a bit European even then, and perhaps more so today. Obviously, this is going to involve a number of assumptions and instinctive responses that some may find highly contestable, but if that provokes some ultimately enlightening discussion, then so much the better. I’ll start by clearing the pitch a little. Pace Brown’s own assertions, I don’t think that the graphic pieces from Folio would have had much direct resonance, though of course they were very interesting. I played almost all of them during my undergraduate days, and so did lots of other people, but as “music from elsewhere.” The more “pointillist” keyboard pieces had a sort of familiar ring, but they represented the situation from some years back, not the current one. Universal Edition first published 25 Pages much later, in 1975, so my guess would be that only people who knew David Tudor (such as Stockhausen) would have encountered it much earlier. Besides, I have the impression that apart from 4 Systems, Tudor didn’t really play much of Brown’s music in Europe, compared to that of Cage, Feldman, and Wolff; that’s certainly what is suggested by his recordings for German radio stations. And for some years Pentathis, though in many respects compatible with European post-Webern pointillism, rather slipped under the radar, too. So my impression from my late teenage years was—and still is—that the first piece that seemed to say to us, “This is not just interesting, it also has something to do with you” was Hodograph I (and lots of us waited keenly for Hodograph II, but alas it never came). That rapprochement was partly gestural, but also partly conceptual: the idea of a musical discourse between relatively fixed and free was very much in the air at the time. The Darmstadt course where it was first performed also saw the premiere of Stockhausen’sPage 153 → Zyklus, and Stockhausen had also just completed Refrain, which has striking affinities to Hodograph not just in terms of instrumentation (basically the Gazzelloni/Caskel/Tudor Darmstadt kit, but with Cardew (later Stockhausen himself) on celesta in place of Gazzelloni and his flute), but also in terms of the mixture of free and fixed: Brown’s graphic sections have much the same function as Stockhausen’s cluster/glissando “refrains.” And in the case of its “free” sections, Hodograph was particularly intriguing since each copy of the score had different, hand-drawn graphic inserts, so it was a “personalized” copy. That was a bit of a thrill: it was like a superior version of a “signed copy.” But naturally there are also significant differences between the two pieces: apart from being much shorter than Stockhausen’s work, Hodograph is tight and tense, whereas Refrain, despite a couple of brilliantly glittering passages toward the end, is intentionally “spacious” (to cite Stockhausen’s own description). But as I’ve already suggested, it’s Available Forms 1, especially as presented by Maderna, that marks the real “meeting point” with the European avant-garde. This is not the place for me to attempt a proper analysis of his celebrated recording with the Rome Sinfonica, but I would like to make some observations on the opening minute or so. Beginning with basics: the score of Available Forms 1 consists of six pages, on each of which there are up to five sections, mostly rather precisely, albeit spatially, notated, but some much freer. The conductor is free to assemble these in any way she or he likes, signaling spontaneously (if so inclined) what section, on what page is to be played next, and there are many options for overlapping or repeating structures. The title is highly significant: the emphasis falls on Forms; the conductor is, so to speak, Homo faber: the responsibility is not just to do something, that is, perform a piece, but to make a form. This presupposes that the conductor has some conception of “making forms,” as opposed to articulating existing ones, and at the time, this caused some concern among friendlily disposed colleagues. In a letter to Boulez dated May 31, 1964, Brown recalls, “When Bruno first saw [Available Forms 1] he said that it was extremely dangerous and I should not allow the piece to be generally вЂavailable’ to conductorsВ .В .В . and that вЂYou should only allow it done by yourself or me or Pierre.’” One should note here that Maderna had recently been involved in a performance on Xenakis’s Duel (1960), in which two conductors choose the order of materials, but according to math/game-theory-based restrictions (which Maderna seems to have taken cum grano salis).13 Brown disagreed with Maderna’s caveat, but it is clear that the whole questionPage 154 → of what constitutes a good (or more especially, bad) performance is something that frequently gave him much cause for thought. Indeed, in the same letter, he comments, “The big trap in the whole thing is the conductor and although I have developed the process further recently I, at the moment, don’t see any way round the fact that a musical work needs a вЂproducer’ of that workВ .В .В . but it seemed to me that I must commit myself to

the implications. How can one protect themselves (and the work) from bad performances? Any work can be killed.” Moreover, in the immediate wake of Available Forms 2 Brown took a more cautious approach, for example by restricting the number of materials available to the conductor, making them more homogeneous in texture and timbre, making suggestions as to how they might be deployed, and so forth. Not until late-1960s pieces like Event: Synergy II was the diversity of the Available Forms pieces reembraced. Let’s contrast this with Cage’s situation at the time. As stories in the Indeterminacy lecture and comments elsewhere make clear, his large-scale works from this period (notably the Concert for Piano and Orchestra of 1958, and Atlas Eclipticalis from 1961—the same year as Available Forms 1) certainly experienced performance difficulties, but not in terms of “interpretation” so much as the generic attitude of many of the musicians. You no doubt remember Cage’s comment, “My problems have become social rather than musical.” With Brown, in contrast, the potential problems were emphatically musical. So now let’s come back to Maderna’s rather legendary recording of Available Forms 1. I’ll concentrate here on about the first eighty seconds of just under nine minutes in total. The initial focal point is page 4 of the score (figure 6.3). I won’t analyze every detail, but I’ll note a few. The starting point is the “infinitely sustainable” event 2: a soft chord for four instruments (oboe, bassoon, trumpet, and cello) that Maderna elects to sustain for almost exactly one minute. This rather impassive material serves as an ideal framework for the insertion of other elements. The first of these, rather intriguingly, is not an obviously “contrasted” event, but another soft, rather neutral “looped” one (event 4, I think). Since both are absolutely wind-instrument based, this leaves things absolutely open for shorter, more incisive inserts in which percussion predominates (e.g., events 1 and 3). And it’s only once this initial phase, based on the juxtaposition of small instrumental groupings, is over that Maderna opts for one of the “tutti” events on page 1. Sure, this isn’t demonstrable “serial thinking” per se, but it’s rather typical of the way that European serialists thought about local formal detail at the time. Page 155 → Fig. 6.3. Available Forms 1 (1961), page 4. Copyright В© 1961 (Renewed) by Associated Music Publishers, Inc. (BMI) International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission. Page 156 →One thing that seems especially significant here is that although many of the events in Available Forms 1 involve indeterminate pitch elements and “noise” factors, Maderna steers away from them for about the first third of his interpretation. This, it seems to me, reflects a particularly (early sixties) European outlook. The use of “noise” was well established in electronic music, and there was an interest in the New York School’s use of it in instrumental music, but no great hurry to “go there”: apart from certain sonorist works by Penderecki and GГіrecki from the early sixties, the latter only came into play in the later sixties, with younger German composers like Hespos and Lachenmann. I hope I haven’t appeared overly fixated here on Available Forms (and remember that there are two of them!), but if I have, then so be it. They were, I think, Brown’s key works for many European composers. Boulez, in his contribution to the CMR compilation, singles them out “as his chefs d’oeuvre, although I remain fond of his later music as a whole,” and he goes on to say that Brown’s cueing processes in such pieces certainly had an influence on him (as composer and conductor) in pieces like Г‰clat, from 1965, as did aspects of Maderna’s work (which first responds to Brown’s work, I think, in the First Oboe Concerto of 1963). Finally, I should at least touch upon the issue of what, for Europeans, seemed most “European”—or at least, most culturally and aesthetically congenial—about Brown’s music. As one might expect, it’s something that changes over time, though there are some constant factors. If one goes back to the earlier more or less fully notated works, the rapprochement probably lies in Brown’s capacity to compose figures in an athematic context that still sound incisively quasi-motivic. This is doubly impressive in a “time-notation” piece like Music for Cello and Piano (1955), where the two parts are not strictly aligned; it’s no surprise that this piece long remained a fixture in Siegfried Palm’s repertoire, even though it wasn’t written for him. When one gets to Hodograph I, other aspects come into play. It’s not just that the piece sounds very

“Darmstadt” (in a positive sense), despite being written on the other side of the Atlantic: its whole approach to structure—including the formulation and disposition of materials—is typically European too. Here a diagram may be helpful:

System 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Flute x x x x / x x x / / x x Piano x x x / x x x x / x / x x Perc. x x x x / x x/ x / x x Page 157 →The piece consists of eleven “explicit” systems, using the time notation familiar from Brown’s 25 Pages, with three others comprising graphic (“implicit”) notation, placed after the fourth, eighth, and ninth “explicit” systems (the terms “explicit” and “implicit” are Brown’s own, in the preface to the score). By no means do all eleven “explicit systems” use all three players; the first two and the last two do, but within the frame provided by these formal “bookends,” the remaining seven are highly (though probably not systematically) varied. One can see here that while there is only one “solo” system (system 8, for piano), there are three “duos” (explicit systems 3, 6, 9, so every third system), each with a different instrumental combination. This seems fairly typical of European structural thinking. Likewise, the irregular placement of the three “implicit” systems, between 4 + 4 + 1 + 2 “explicit” ones, is not exactly serial, but it’s likewise not far removed from Stockhausen’s approach at the time. As noted earlier, it’s the Available Forms pieces that make the biggest impact at the time, not just because of the great diversity of materials they place at the conductor’s disposal, but also the innate appeal of the materials. In a letter to Maderna (January 9, 1970), Brown spells out his own responsibilities as the composer: “It is not just the conductor’s responsibility to make вЂinteresting’ forms but very much MY responsibility to write the events in such a way that they can be multi-combined interestingly and their content is STIMULATING!!!” Subsequent pieces mainly concentrate on more limited materials, and in particular they tend to polarize between works that focus on sustained harmonic blocks (already anticipated in the Orchestra 2 materials of Available Forms 2), such as Cross Sections and Color Fields and Time Spans, and those that focus on often glitteringly aleatory textures, such as Sign Sounds. While such pieces are generally liked in Europe (as instances of “what Brown does”), they are not particularly influential. But apart from certain structural affinities, ways of defining musical material, and an astute balance between personal style and openness, perhaps I could conclude by nominating something less obvious that comes into play in the early seventies: a particular kind of lyricism. I’m not suggesting for a moment that lyricism is not a characteristic of many different styles of American music. But when I listen to something like the solo violin music in Brown’s Centering, I really do hear a lot of “Europe” in it. To me, as a European, it sounds a lot more like “us” than “them” (which in this context—forgive me!—means “you”). Initially, I chose to end with this work simply because it seemed to exemplify a musical point that I wanted to make. But the other day, when I pulled out the score to clarify exactly Page 158 →which excerpt I wanted to use, I was quite startled by something I had completely forgotten. The work dates from late 1973, so maybe you can guess where this is heading. The work has two dedicatees: one is the poet (and Brown’s longtime friend) Mary Caroline Richards. As for the other, I’ll simply cite the brief program note at the start of the score: the piece is also dedicated “to the memory of Bruno Maderna who was a very close friend of mine and whose death I heard of as I was in the process of completing the work. The very last 5 notes (for solo violin) are quotes from Bruno’s first oboe concerto.” The latter, as I noted just above, was Maderna’s first work to respond, however modestly, to the Available Forms experience. So that made my choice for me: here are Centering’s closing moments. Do the last five notes seem to come from “another world”? Only a little bit, I think. Fig. 6.4. Centering (1973), page 15. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation.

Page 159 →

Chapter 7 Collage and the Feedback Condition of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece Elizabeth Hoover Four percussionists stand equidistantly on stage. At the center is a red mobile by artist Alexander Calder, grounded on a fifty-seven-inch stand and spanning over twelve feet in diameter. Each performer has an array of over fifteen varieties of percussion instruments, including cowbells, temple blocks, timbales, bongos, marimbas, brake drums, tam tams, and conga drums. Stationary, the percussionists begin rubbing fingernails and sticks over cymbals and timpani. Barely audible and inarticulate sounds. Deep groans, knocking, buzzing, and rattling. Hollow wails. The percussionists leave their stations and approach Calder’s sculpture, slowly striking the petals and branches with mallets to produce metallic clicks, taps, and bongs. The percussionists return to their stations. The iron resonance of the mobile is replaced by a bright and luminous herd of xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel that stampedes the ears of the audience. A rush of cowbells, temple blocks, and drums. The percussionists again approach the mobile, now in motion, and they hit, scrape, rattle, and knock at its rotating parts with hands and beaters. Their choreography is considered and intricate, yet spontaneous and constantly in motion as the mobile increases in speed. The percussionists return to their stations and begin to watch the mobile intently as they strike their instruments until it slows. Its movements stop: silence.1 On February 27, 1967, Diego Masson and the First Percussion Quartet Page 160 →of Paris premiered Earle Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–66) at the Theatre de l’Atelier in Paris.2 The multimedia work employs a palette of almost one hundred percussion instruments, and a standing mobile that Calder created for the work, Chef d’orchestre. By incorporating this sculpture, Brown seemingly relinquished control by relegating the actions of the performers to the unpredictable movements of the mobile. A closer examination of Brown’s compositional process shows that he carefully balanced this unpredictability, as well as indeterminate parameters incorporated in the musical score, with the determinacy of his own authoritative voice most immediately demonstrated through its formal structure and directions for performance. The beginnings of Calder Piece can be traced to 1963, when Brown and percussionist Diego Masson drove to SachГ© in France to meet with Alexander Calder. Brown had been in Paris completing Times Five for tape and orchestra for the Service de la Recherche of the French Radio when Masson commissioned Brown to compose a work for his new group, the First Percussion Quartet of Paris. The commission prompted Brown to turn to the artist whose conception of mobility had continued to influence his compositional aesthetic of open form since the early 1950s.3 Brown hoped to create a musical work that incorporated mobility in its form, guided by the movements of the very object of inspiration: “Wouldn’t it be marvelous if I could figure out a way to have a Calder mobile function as a conductor of the four musicians in the percussion quartet?”4 The collaboration immediately enticed Calder. Having experimented with sound-making sculptures since the 1930s and having always been intrigued by the sounds that resulted from the materials of his works, he did not object to the possibility of the percussionists directly striking one of his mobiles.5 After lunch was devoured, much wine consumed, billiards played, and even the “flat on Sandy’s CitroГ«n” repaired, the collaboration was set into motion. While Calder worked on his own contribution to the project, Brown began composing his score: In Paris (in 1963) I began work for the Quartet with the idea that it would be “conducted” by a mobile in the center of the space, with the four percussionists placed equidistantly, in four corners, around it; the varying configurations of the elements of the mobile being “read” by the performers, and the evolving “open form” of each performance being a function of the movements of the mobile, and subject to the scoring and “choreography” of the performers’ movements.6

Page 161 →Once Calder completed the mobile, however, Brown had to reconsider certain musical parameters. In its final form, Calder’s mobile was painted red, an artistic decision that significantly impacted Brown, who originally planned for multiple colors to act as a determining force in the production of sound.7 Brown responded by creating a score with textual prompts without reference to color that encouraged the performers to engage directly with the mobile to define aspects of the work’s formal order. In a 1999 Current Musicology article, Brown reflected on his 1966 collaboration as “a very intricate вЂfeedback’ condition between the mobile, the score, and the performers.”8 Brown’s description of Calder Piece referred specifically to his interest “in the human performance potential.”9 This chapter explores the multitudinous nature of what this potential signified through the feedback that occurs within and between the processes of composition and performance. Brown composed Calder Piece through a “collage-paste-up process” first mentioned in a letter to John Cage in 1966. Collaging like the visual artists who inspired him, Brown cut and pasted precompositional maerials (composed fragments of music intended to be source material for the collage process of other works, recontextualized for Calder Piece) onto a larger page of blank paper. In the first half of my inquiry, I explore Brown’s collage-paste-up process for page 3 of Calder Piece, collaged from his own String Quartet (1964–65). This conception of feedback among Brown’s works relates to ideas of order and wit discussed in a monograph Brown often cited, Henri Bergson’s Creative Mind. The second half of my study probes the performer’s role in Calder Piece. To understand the responsibilities of the performer, I interviewed percussionist Robert Fernandez, who took part in the American premiere of Calder Piece in 1980 with the Antenna Repairmen ensemble, under Brown’s coaching at CalArts. My conversation with Fernandez illuminates his process of “reading the mobile,” a recurring direction in the score that urges the performers to use the mobile to determine the order of specific musical events. Fernandez discusses the eighth and final page, which is a direct copy of page 3 (examined in the first half of my discussion), but a central difference is that page 8 is open in form and thus foregrounds the performer’s own efforts in the act of collage. This creative endeavor, although dictated by Brown’s directions within a closed formal structure, depends on the percussionist’s ability to retain a visual image of the mobile while reading the score at select moments. According to Brown, the percussionist must “read” the mobile as follows: “Visualize (imagine) a configuration of Page 162 →the вЂpetals’ as being superimposed over the field of pitch configurationsВ .В .В . and play the figurations that the вЂpetals’ would cover at that instant, in any order you wish. When the mobile is moving or at rest, glance at its total configuration at that instant and play the corresponding areas.”10 This remarkable cognitive feat closely resembles ideas about the circuitry of memory from Bergson’s Matter and Memory. I explore how the phenomenological level of feedback in the mind of each performer of Calder Piece functions simultaneously within Brown’s larger “вЂfeedback’ condition” between those performers, the score, and the mobile.

Open Form and Alexander Calder In 1999, in one of his final essays about his work, Brown explained his compositional influences, ideas, and works, and concluded with a double quote. First, a poem by Jean-Paul Sartre about Calder’s mobiles (in Brown’s own translation); and second, Brown’s version of the poem: Calder establishes a general density of motion for each mobile, then he leaves it on its own. The objects inhabit a halfway station between the servility of a statue and the independence of nature.

—Jean-Paul Sartre Brown establishes a general density of potential for each composition, then he leaves it on its own. The sonic elements inhabit a halfway station Between the servility of form And the independence of nature. —E. B. (excusez-moi, J.-P.)11 This parallelism makes clear that Brown identified with Calder’s artistic aims to balance mobility and form. As part of the “New York School” of composers, Brown was no stranger to the visual artists also experimenting in New York at the time. While Brown enjoyed the spontaneity of gestural paintings by Jackson Pollock, it was the impermanence of Calder’s mobiles that most captivated him. After first encountering the sculptor’s work in Page 163 →1948, he felt an immediate kinship with the visual artist’s idea of variability. As Brown later reminisced, Calder’s mobiles spoke to his conception of musical indeterminacy and ideas of time: In Calder, the construction of units and their placement in a flexible situation that subjects the original relationships to constant and virtually unpredictable, but inherent, change (the movement of the units as well as the movement of the viewer) led me to construct units of rhythmic groups (with assigned intensities but “open” timbre possibilities subject to an independent timbral-density plan), modify them according to previously mentioned “generative” techniques, and assemble them rather arbitrarily—accepting the fact that all possible assemblages were inherently possible and valid.12 By the time Brown met Calder in 1953, the effect of the artist’s mobiles on Brown had manifested into what the composer referred to as “a practical (for me) notational expression” evidenced in Folio and 4 Systems (published in 1954), a collection of scores in which each introduces a new level of ambiguity in notation.13 As Brown explained: “I felt that the realizable concepts of physical and conceptual вЂmobility’ in relation to the graphic input by me was a practical and creatively ambiguous stimulus to performer involvement and sonic creativity.”14 In the first score of the Folio series, October 1952, Brown notated pitches and rhythms in standard notation; however, he destabilized the performer’s playing field by removing all rests. This field was expanded in November 1952 through the creation of more lines in between the usual five-line staves. The performer may read the notation indicated on or around these staves from any direction. December 1952 requires the most “sonic creativity” by the performer and is the graphic score often cited as an extreme pole in midtwentieth-century, American avant-garde composition.15 Brown’s entirely graphic score was composed by creating a Cartesian quadrant and using random sampling number tables to plot indices to determine the length, width, and cardinal direction of the lines of the score. Despite Brown’s controlled compositional process (for instance, he stated in a 1970 interview that he introduced “prejudice” into the work by setting numerical parameters for the creation of the horizontal and vertical lines), December 1952 relies on the improvised actions of the performer and allows for a flexible situation in which form and content are open.16 Because the pieces of Folio incorporate open content in addition to open form, Brown regarded the work a precursor to open form.17 Page 164 →Brown considered his first composition in open form to be 25 Pages (1953), for one to twenty-five pianos. Although 25 Pages mirrors the flexibility of Calder’s mobiles in the creation of overall form, its individual identity is the result of its fixed sound parameters of dynamics, invertible pitch, and instrumentation. The pages may be played in any order, with the systems being open to readings in either treble or bass clefs;

however, these invertible pitches are fully notated. It is with 25 Pages, then, that an important facet of Brown’s definition of open form emerges: 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 recognize 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.18 In “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” Brown’s lecture at Darmstadt in 1964, the composer explained how he used and developed “time notation,” graphic notation, and open form.19 Through this “kind of new notation thatВ .В .В . generally tends toward a lessening of precise control and the conscious introduction of ambiguity,” Brown stimulated the performer’s creative output while maintaining his own authority as the composer.20 As he further articulated in his “Notation” lecture, “Ambiguity in the service of expanding the conceptual and real potential of the work must not lead to the loss of the work as a recognizable, and to a certain extent, вЂobjective’ entity.”21 The balance of mobile form and identifiable content in 25 Pages closely emulates Calder’s mobiles; they are “never the same twice, but always the same thing,” Brown said of the artist’s sculptures.22

Mobile Interior Structures and Feedback By the 1960s, Brown’s conception of “open form” had changed from his previous definition of open form as “a condition of mobility” in which emphasis is placed on the collaboration between the composer, performers, and/or the conductor.23 In the prefatory texts for scores such as Hodograph (1959), Times Five (1963), Corroboree (1964), and String Quartet (1965), Brown introduced the concept of a fixed overall form consisting of malleable, mobile structures to emphasize the performer’s involvement and the spontaneous exchanges that depend on the moment of performance— Page 165 →Brown’s interest in “the human performance potential.” For instance, Corroboree’s performance note highlights flexible “interior sections” that sustain the performers’ involvement: The macro-form is fixed but there are degrees of flexibility and spontaneous exchange in most of the interior sections of the form. As in my “open-form” works (a different form of the materials in each performance), the possibility of intimate, immediate, and spontaneous exchanges and shifts of action and “poetry” throughout the performance is extremely important.24 Subsequently, in the headnote to String Quartet, Brown incorporated the phrase “flexibility within inner structures,” in order to strike a balance between a formal identity and the spontaneity of performance: STRING QUARTET is one of several works in which I have attempted to combine the “graphic” and “mobile”—improvisational qualities of the 1952 works (as in FOLIO), and the “composed material, open form” conditions of TWENTY FIVE PAGES (1953) and the AVAILABLE FORMS works of 1961–62. In composing these later works, which use more than one performer without conductor, I have fixed the over-all form but have left areas of flexibility within the inner structures. The works achieve a strong formal identity while maintaining the “performer process” spontaneity and the balance of collaboration between the composition and the performers that are characteristic of the previously mentioned open-form and graphic works.25 At Darmstadt in 1965, in his lecture “Form in New Music,” Brown had referred to these compositions as “closed forms with вЂmobile’ interior structures” and indicated that closed form “means only that a definite sequence of events is given.”26 Mobility thus modifies “the formal effect which we experience from performance to performance, despite the fact that it is a diagrammatically fixed вЂform.’”27 In a fixed form without mobility, Brown felt that the very process of performing music would be compromised, a process that he viewed as “limitless” and “infinite in effect.” When form involves mobility, on the other hand, there is a noticeable exchange between design and perception

that results in a continuous and infinite loop, a notion Brown related directly to feedback:28 Page 166 →One cannot diagram response, how can one formalize a cause which is consistent with infinite effect? .В .В .В by realizing that every cause and effect process (which everything is) is based on an infinite labyrinth of “feed-back” effects and to try and balance the input and output factors somewhere between determinism and anarchy.29 Brown’s remarks offer insight into his conceptualization of open form by the 1960s. Calder Piece is not in open form, as one might assume from the role of the art object as conductor. Although the work incorporates a mobile physically as a percussive instrument and emulates the mobile within the flexible situations of its interior structures, its overall form is largely closed. The work showcases Brown’s play of “mobile interior structures” within closed macroforms, a shift that consciously accommodated for variability and the “labyrinth of вЂfeed-back’ effects” between, within, and outside the work. In Brown’s view, this modified open form not only “expands the potential of the вЂenvironment’ of relationships (the work) but also the communicative potential, its inherent multiplicity of meaning.”30

Brown’s “Collage-Paste-Up Process” and Surrealism During the time that Brown began composing “closed forms with вЂmobile’ interior structures” in Europe during the mid-1960s, John Cage wrote to Brown requesting a contribution to the book, Notations. As a collection of manuscripts that Cage gathered from composers and music publishers during the middle of the twentieth century in particular, Notations “show[ed] the many directions in which music notation [was]В .В .В . going.”31 Published by Something Else Press in 1969, the book featured extracts of notation by 259 composers. On February 12, 1966, Brown responded to Cage’s letter and detailed the pieces he had written while in Europe through his “collage-paste-up process.” These were also works in which Brown had used closed forms with mobile interior structures: Everything I’ve written over here (Corroboree (3 pianos), Calder Piece (Perc. Qtt.) and String Qtt. have all been “scored” by a collage-paste-up process which results in rather large pages which must be photo reproduced—(no transparent master sheets, except of the “generalized” material which is collaged)—these collages will have to go to AMP [Associated Music Publishers] for printing beforePage 167 → I can let them go. The “original masters” of everything else are either at the apt. or AMP. What I have here are some of the original sketches of the materials in Av. Forms II, which are more “interesting” visually than the final scoring, I think—sketchy drawings, notes, comments to myself, false starts, etc.,—better than a “finished” thing, as rehearsals are more full of life than performances.32 For Calder Piece, Brown worked directly with copies of the score in his process of collage. A matter of physically cutting and pasting paper, his process mirrored visual artists and poets such as Robert Rauschenberg, Max Ernst, AndrГ© Breton, and Tristan Tzara. Although the influence of Surrealism on Brown’s creative process and output has not been weighed heavily by scholars, Brown cited Surrealism as a significant source when asked about his artistic inspirations in a questionnaire from around 1985.33 Regarding his personal experiences with these inspirations, Brown provided a timeline of when he read and encountered the Surrealist work of Breton, Ernst, and Tzara; as well as abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Frank Stella. Brown’s “collage-pasteup process” not only denoted the way he composed, it also referenced a community of artists who had influenced his work methods. Brown’s method of collage strongly resonates with the “material mode of cutting and pasting distant elements” described by Elza Adamowicz in Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, an analysis of surrealist practices in the 1920s and 1930s.34 Adamowicz defines surrealist collage as “manipulating already existing

signsВ .В .В . a privileged mode of creating the surreal.”35 By incorporating preexisting materials, Collage effectively anchors surrealist activities in the real, thanks to the “reality” of its processes, which unmask, critique, and renew the perception of utilitarian reality and modes of representation and expression. Disrupting the accepted order of reality, it constitutes a critique of artistic and social codes.36 The disruption of this reality is contingent on the visibility of expressing the process of collage. As Adamowicz describes: In contrast to traditional expectations in aesthetic production of material finish, semantic coherence, seamless narrative, and the integrationPage 168 → of parts into the body of the text, leaving smooth contours, in surrealist collage the scars left by the grafting of spare limbs remain visible. The appropriation and assemblage of disparate fragments, in aggressive or discreet juxtapositions, are inscribed in surrealist collage as a visible gesture or a performative act—which explains the recurrent motif of the pointing hand, the frame within the frame, the theatre set or podium—in the overt staging of seams, material tears, semantic incoherence, iconographic anomalies or narrative nonsequiturs.37 In Calder Piece, the “material mode” of creating the score with precompositional materials mirrors the surrealist act of collage. Yet the published score does not overtly show evidence of this cutting-and-pasting process in sight or sound. In the following section, I reconstruct Brown’s cut-and-paste process from the surviving sketches of Calder Piece as “the pointing hand” to the grafted and juxtaposed parts of Brown’s work. The “visible gestures” exposed through my reconstruction not only parallel surrealist collage, but also raise issues about self-borrowing and self-collage in Brown’s work.

Calder Piece: Composition of the Score The score for Calder Piece consists of eight pages of collaged and newly composed material. These pages are complemented by Brown’s “Directions for Performance,” instructions that are restated or paraphrased throughout the score. I discuss these directions in relation to the role of the performers in the next section. In addition to the “Directions for Performance,” Brown also incorporated significant information on the first page of the score, including a drawing of the mobile with its fourteen petals numbered and the distribution of percussion instruments to the four players or “sections” (see table 7.1): “Percussion sections should be arranged in a full circle of instruments with the mobile in the center.”38 Brown balanced the distribution of collaged versus newly composed musical material throughout Calder Piece: half of the pages consist of the former, and half consist of the latter. Table 7.2 describes the musical material of the eight pages and indicates whether the music is collaged or newly composed. Even though Brown only originally collaged two pages of Calder Piece (table 7.2 shows that page 5 is a copy of page 2; and page 8 is a copy of page 3), all of the precompositional material currently held at The Earle Brown Music Foundation relates to the third page.39 Brown’s collage Page 169 →process for page 3 in particular not only exhibits the composer’s inclination toward self-borrowing, in this case from his 1965 String Quartet, but also a level of feedback between a quartet for percussion and a quartet for strings. In Brown’s archive, there are several pages of musical material on manuscript paper, grouped together as the precompositional material for the score of Calder Piece.40 None of the individual pages were labeled by Brown; however, the content points to the three pieces he mentioned to Cage as having been composed through a “collage-paste-up” process. Three pages Page 170 →contain precompositional material for Corroboree. Begun in 1963 and completed in 1964, Corroboree intersected with the conception of Calder Piece, which Brown composed between 1963 and 1966. Even though Brown sampled from Corroboree’s precompositional material in his collage process for Calder Piece, he did not quote or collage it into the final pages of his percussion quartet.

Table 7.1. Instruments assigned to each percussionist in Calder Piece 1 Glockenspiel

2a Xylophone

3 Glockenspiel

4a Xylophone

Marimba 3 cymbals

Vibraphone 3 cymbals

Marimba 3 cymbals

Vibraphone 3 cymbals

12 cowbells 1 tam tam

4 cowbells 1 tam tam

4 cowbells 1 tam tam

4 cowbells 1 tam tam

1 gong 1 brake drum 5 temple blocks

1 gong 1 gong 1 brake drum 1 brake drum 3 temple blocks 3 wood blocks

1 gong 1 brake drum 3 temple blocks

1 log drum 1 log drum 1 log drum 1 log drum 1 ceramic drum 1 ceramic drum 1 ceramic drum 1 ceramic drum 1 set of bongos 1 set bongos 1 set bongos 1 set bongos 1 set of timbales 1 pedal tom-tom 1 set timbales 1 pedal tom-tom 3 tom toms 3 tom toms 3 tom toms 3 tom toms 1 conga drum 2 conga drums 1 conga drum 2 conga drums 1 pedal tympani 1 tympani 1 pedal tympani 1 tympani 1 “normal” tympani 1 “normal” tympani aPercussionists

2 and 4 are assigned identical instruments.

Table 7.2. The pages of Calder Piece categorized as collaged or newly composed material Page Collaged / newly Musical material number composed 1 New Graphic notation, movement from metal to wood to skin to the mobile’s timbres 2 Collaged Available Forms 1 and 2 3 Collaged String Quartet 4 New Two duets, time notation, timbre and rhythm specified 5 Collaged Duplicate of page 2 of Calder Piece (different directions for performance) 6 New Time notation, unpitched, rhythm specified 7 New Graphic notation 8 Collaged Duplicate of page 3 of Calder Piece (different directions for performance) In contrast, the other two pages of manuscript paper, provided as figures 7.1 and 7.3, respectively, include all of the musical material found on page 3 of Calder Piece. These two pages contain precompositional material for String Quartet, a piece also composed through the “collage-paste-up” process and completed in 1965. Just as Corroboree was collaged from material he specifically composed for two or three pianos, Brown collaged String Quartet from material idiomatically written for a string quartet. Unlike the collage process for Corroboree and String Quartet, in which newly composed material was cut, arranged, rearranged, and pasted onto a piece of paper, Brown used previously composed material from the String Quartet as collage material for page 3 of Calder Piece. He did so by cutting apart copies of the String Quartet’s precompositional material and pasting these selections onto a larger piece of paper—what I call the “collage-sketch” of page 3 (see figure 7.4). The collage-sketch prefigures the form of page 3 of Calder Piece, which alternates between full ensemble and duet. The “Directions for Performance” for page 3 state that “each system is [to be] read horizontally across the whole page.”41 There are four disjointed systems in total.42 In discussing the relationship of page 3 of Calder Piece with sections of the String Quartet, my analysis focuses on what I shall refer to as systems 1a, 1b, 3b, and 4b in figure 7.4.

Page 3 of Calder Piece opens with all four percussionists playing on nonpitched instruments, moving from wood to metal to skin sounds, as indicated by Brown in the published score.43 Brown adapted this section from the four-part writing of his precompositional material for String Quartet, from the first system of figure 7.3. In the final score for String Quartet this system appears sixty seconds into the piece (see figure 7.2), as the third “section,” where Brown specifies that the pizzicato is to be played “вЂbelow the bridge’ indicated by an “x” placed on the line or space corresponding to the open string on the instrument.”44 Although all four percussion parts employ the “x” notation to begin the third page of Calder Piece, Brown omitted the first twelve “x”s of the pizzicato notation in the beginning of the cello part of String Quartet, which instead begins with a portion of Page 171 →graphic notation found in the final line of the String Quartet’s precompositional material in figure 7.3. The notated “x”s of the first system of precompositional material in figure 7.1 return on the fourth A below middle C in the cello line of figure 7.2. Fig. 7.1. Precompositional material (1) for String Quartet used as collage material for page 3 of Calder Piece. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. In the context of page 3 of Calder Piece, Brown separated the notated “x”s from their assigned clefs and cut the system from the page of precompositional material (figure 7.1) before pasting them onto the “collagesketch” (figure 7.4). This instance of collage-paste-up corresponds to the instrumentation of the first system (1a of figure 7.4) on page 3 of Calder Piece, a section scored for nonpitched percussion instruments. Brown labeledPage 173 → the percussion parts, “1,” 2,” “3,” and “4,” by hand directly next to the cut, precompositional material pasted onto the collage-sketch. Page 172 → Fig. 7.2. String Quartet (1965), page 1, system 1. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Fig. 7.3. Precompositional material (2) for String Quartet used as collage material for page 3 of Calder Piece. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. The second half of the first system in Calder Piece (1b of figure 7.4) features a duet between Percussions 1 and 3 on marimbas. The instructions in the score direct the performers to play the duet “fast.” This system may be traced to the third system of the precompositional material in figure 7.1. Brown originally scored this material for two violins. In the published score of String Quartet these two lines appear at approximately 2′20″ as the sixth section. Similar to the tempo marking in Calder Piece, the material is to be played “as fast as possible” in String Quartet. In composing Calder Piece, Brown dismantled the original four-part scoring of String Quartet by cutting the two violin parts from the viola and cello parts created in the precompositional material, and pasting them onto his collage-sketch (figure 7.4). However, because the duet incorporates marimbas in Calder Piece, Brown did not cut off the treble clefs fashioned originally for a violin duet. Brown borrowed violin lines from the String Quartet for two more duets in Calder Piece: one between Percussions 2 and 4 on vibraphone; and another between Percussions 1 and 3 on glockenspiel. The former creates the first half of the second system (2a), and the latter creates the first half of the third (3a) system on page 3 of Calder Piece (figure 7.4). Following the first half of the third system (3a) on page 3 (figure 7.4), the first half of the first system occurs again. In its repetition as system 3b, however, the entire section is a retrograde inversion of itself. To create this inversion, Brown flipped the cut-out precompositional material of String Quartet (first system of figure 7.1) upside down before pasting it onto the large piece of paper of the collage-sketch. In addition to this flip, system 3b also differs slightly in instrumentation. Whereas both systems feature nonpitched percussion instruments, the first progresses from wood to metal to skin sounds; in its flipped repetition, however, the composer did not specify such a progression of timbre. The decision to repeat this section—upside down or not—is meaningful for its relation to String Quartet. In the final version of String Quartet, the section is marked as a phrase to be played twice; in Calder Piece, Brown retained the repetition but reversed the pitch order. Brown repeated this technique of pasting the precompositional material upside down onto the collage-sketch for the first half of the fourth system (4a), on the bottom left-hand corner of the page. The material in system 4a occurs for the first time in Calder Piece as the fourth system.

After the “explosive” graphic notation section that ends system 4a of Calder Piece, Percussions 1 and 3 stop playing on their respective instrumentsPage 175 → and are instructed to go to the mobile to play directly on it. Only Percussions 2 and 4 remain to play a duet on xylophone in the second half of the fourth system (4b). In the final score of Calder Piece there are eight gaps in the ledger lines of the duet, an odd occurrence in the context of the seamlessness of the rest of the score but likely explained as an editorial oversight by Brown. Indeed, the viola and cello parts of the second system of precompositional material for String Quartet pictured in figure 7.3 were taped onto the collage-sketch, as the second half of the final system on the third page (figure 7.4) of Calder Piece. Page 174 → Fig. 7.4. “Collage-sketch” of page 3 of Calder Piece. Brown pasted each system of precompositional material from the String Quartet onto this page. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. The taped piece of paper provides physical evidence of the cutting process: there are three incisions made to alter the viola line, and five made to change that of the cello. Most of these cuts delete clefs necessary for the lines of String Quartet. For example, the viola part switches to the treble clef after the first twelve notes. In Calder Piece, this missing clef is the first gap, or cut, in the ledger lines. Brown also altered the cello line in a similar manner for its use as the second line of the fourth system (4b) of Calder Piece. Brown maintained the clefs in the final version of the String Quartet. The viola and cello lines occur together as the ninth section at three minutes and forty seconds into the piece. Brown marked the section as follows: “dynamics free, rhythm as is, and duration free where possible.” These comments are comparable to the directions for the final system of Calder Piece: although the dynamics initially indicate fortississimo to mezzo piano, after the first ten notes, Brown marked the volume level as “free.” Once more, the String Quartet and Calder Piece relate to one another; this time through dynamic markings ascribed to similar cut-and-pasted passages. Lastly, might the above editorial “oversights” in system 4b also function as a subtle nod by Brown to his collage-paste-up process? Although Brown did not articulate the influence of Surrealist artists on Calder Piece specifically, the work demonstrates a departure from “the traditional expectations in aesthetic production of material finish,” through the cuts to the ledger lines in system 4b. But the self-awareness of his collage-pasteup process and possible allusion to Surrealism extends beyond one system in the piece. It is hard to ignore the visible disjointedness of page 3: he divided the four systems in half, and then consistently cut ensemble passages into duets within these systems. In addition, by employing ready-made material originally composed for String Quartet, he “manipulate[d] already existing signs” to disrupt order and create feedback between the two quartets. Brown’s recontextualization of the precompositional material for String Quartet in Calder Piece is in direct dialogue with the order of events in Page 176 →String Quartet. The entire third page of Calder Piece is a rephrased quotation of musical events. When listening to a recording of page 3 of Calder Piece some may hear percussive sounds of disorder, unrelated narratively to the collaged score, yet Brown’s collage-paste-up process produces a notion of time and order that closely aligns with that of Henri Bergson’s. Brown repeatedly cited Bergson as an influential figure throughout his life: in his 1965 “Form in New Music” lecture; in an interview with renowned art historiancritic Dore Ashton for the 1982 performance of Calder Piece at the Neuberger Museum; and also in a 1995 interview with conductor John YaffГ©. In the latter, Brown recalled reading Bergson during the time that David Tudor had premiered works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York.45 Bergson’s prose provided philosophical validity for the seemingly “disordered” events of Brown’s open forms and the compositional aesthetics of the American and European avant-garde, often criticized in mainstream journalism at the time. Brown referred to one specific Bergsonian phrase from Creative Mind repeatedly, “Le dГ©sordre est simplement l’ordre que nous ne cherchons pas”; or, “Disorder is merely the order you are not looking for.”46 In Bergson’s quote, Brown found a sympathetic articulation with his music, and an artistic mission that lifted the “veil” between social fixedness and the freedom of consciousness.

Bergson’s idea of “several orders, several existences and, in addition, a play of wit which unconsciously juggles with them” relates to the “feedback” between Brown’s string and percussion parts previously examined.47 Although the collaged page of Calder Piece is only one part of the “very intricate вЂfeedback’ condition between the mobile, the score, and the performers,” the analysis of page 3 reveals one such “order we [were] not looking for,” in the way Brown collaged his compositional materials. Akin to Surrealism upsetting “the accepted order of [visible] reality,” Brown ordered anew the events of a preconceived musical reality (his precompositional material for his String Quartet), to create the third page of Calder Piece, thus creating a feedback between the two pieces that may be recognized by the listener.48

Calder Piece: Composition of Performance In his descriptions of mobile interior structures, Brown emphasized a balance between formal identity and performer spontaneity: “For me, the mobility (or mutability) of the work had to be activated during the performance of the work (as in the Mobiles of Calder), and expressed spontaneously and Page 177 →intensely by the performer.”49 In conversation with Derek Bailey, Brown explained his relationship with performers: Yes, but you see it’s my responsibility to try and condition their sensibility involvement. I used to envy painters very much because they had their work in their hands, so to speak. They could see it. When you’ve done it, it’s in its real form. Writing music you don’t have the real thing. All you have are symbols. So, in any case, the writing of music involves an aspect of projection, I would say, projecting your imagination into a situation you are not going to be present in, and in that sense it’s not so strange for me to try to project one stage further, which is to project the conditions that I hope, with good will, the musicians will enter into.50 The closed formal structure of the collaged pages of Calder Piece, although mere “symbols” when analyzed outside of performance, invite percussionists to participate in Brown’s “projection” about the creation of “a performance [that] is composed rather than a composition [that] is performed.”51 Because the composer projects the conditions, the invitation to collaborate does not take away from the act of composition: Rather than diminish the responsibility of the composer or anyone else, it expands and intensifies all of the dimensions of creating and perceiving. The performing of music is one of the most intimate collaborative involvements that any of the arts permit, and the process and results are the most potentially ambiguous and abstract, which is to say, limitless, multiple, and infinite in effect.52 To better understand the collaborative effort necessary to create the “intricate feedback condition” involved in Calder Piece, I spoke with Robert Fernandez (b. 1953), one of the percussionists who gave the American premiere of Calder Piece on March 9, 1980, at the Fourth Annual Contemporary Music Festival at CalArts in Valencia.53 Fernandez performed Calder Piece with his Antenna Repairmen colleagues Arthur Jarvinen and M. B. Gordy and their teacher, John Bergamo. Fernandez explained how their work on Brown’s Calder Piece began: The Repairmen were a trio already and John was our teacher, so we were already a likely candidate.В .В .В . We knew Earle from AvailablePage 178 → Forms and him conducting. I loved playing those pieces. They were really hard. When you take graphic notation seriously and you want to make music out of it, you gotta practice it. It’s not just, you go [makes scalar sound]. It’s the Isaac Newton what-goes-up-must-come-down. You gotta really play and make choices. Sometimes I would write stuff in my score.В .В .В . I wrote [on page 3] to play this on four instruments and do this here and play this muted. We really took the piece seriously. You have to practice that kind of music. When there’s no pulse and it’s all seconds, then you gotta figure out how to gauge the notes and the spaces and all that stuff, and it’s very challenging. You have to put on part of your composer hat and say, “He’s giving me this, these boundaries, but then how do I control these other boundaries?” And it’s my decision.54 Brown entrusted these four percussionists to “hear each other and play within a certain amount of time” in

Calder Piece.55 To grasp the levels of freedom Brown allotted to the performers, my questions for Fernandez revolved around their interaction with Calder’s Chef d’orchestre and the score. His discussion indeed alluded to the potentiality of Brown’s “вЂfeedback’ condition,” specifically in relation to page 8, which is a direct copy of page 3 but with significantly different performance instructions. I discussed page 3 earlier in this chapter for its collaged construction, and my narrative analysis followed the way a performer would read the music according to Brown’s instructions for that page: Ensembles as indicated: non-pitched and pitched instruments. Each system is read horizontally across the whole page. For page 8, on the other hand, Brown instructed performers as follows: “Read” the MOBILE as on pages 2 and 5, SOLOISTICALLY. Play any of the written figurations (do not improvise), maintaining the given timbre and dynamics but do not synchronize as on page 3. Free solo-polyphony of any figures on the page.56 When Brown instructs the performers to “read” the mobile, this also indicates open form. Brown gives this direction on pages 2 and 8 only, and they constitute the “mobile interior structures” of the closed macroform of Calder Piece. To “read” the mobile, as explained in the instructions for Page 179 →page 2, means “to visualize a configuration of the вЂpetals’ as being superimposed over the field of pitch figurations of page 2 [and page 8] and play the figurations that the petals would cover at that instant, in any order you wish.”57 Although the sound content is fixed, by leaving the visualization and superimposition of the mobile to the discretion of the percussionists, Brown entrusted them with creating a formal design as well as a “performance [that] is composed rather than a composition [that] is performed.”58 In effect, the percussionists become artists who perform their own collages as they “read” the rotating mobile, the score page itself compositionally collaged by Brown. In the CalArts performance, Brown inserted an extra page between pages 7 and 8 of the published score. This new eighth page was a copy of the fourth page (not examined in this study), thus making what is the final and eighth page in the published score the ninth page for the CalArts performance. As a result, pages 4 and 8, and 3 and 9 were copies for Fernandez. With regard to this ninth page—once again, the published page 8 in the Calder Piece score—Fernandez stated that for “page 9, I have вЂopen form,’ and then it says, вЂindependently go to any figure.’”59 I asked Fernandez to explain the final two pages of his version of Calder Piece, in relationship to the pages from which they were copied. He replied as follows: Page 3 had much more detail. I had dynamics and.В .В .В . This one [Fernandez’s page 9] just says “open form” and “independently go to any figure.” .В .В . The last page says “open form,” “independently go to any figure,” but I don’t have much written as far as that, I guess because by that time, we already had [performed the page]. This page was the same as the other one. And we had a lot of these gestures already memorized. So we didn’t have to look up at the music. We kind of knew, okay I’m number 1, it’s the same recurring material. And then maybe Earle said, if it’s the same material, maybe a little interpretation, different interpretation. And I put “open form,” which means the figures are much more—there’s not maybe as much synchronization. I’m not sure, I’m not sure. I see [the parts] lining up still, so we probably did that. Maybe it’s more spacious. I’m not sure. I have very little marked on this. Even on the backs of the pagesВ .В .В . nothing.60 Fernandez’s description of a performance score devoid of markings on his ninth page (the published page 8) mirrors the lack of markings on page Page 181 →8 in a drawer of performance scores in Brown’s archive. Fortunately, after performances of Calder Piece, if the percussionists did not want to hold on to their performance parts, Brown kept them. They are original parts that the performers were free to mark and make notes on. The parts are held in Brown’s archive in a drawer marked as “Calder Piece” and were labeled by the

composer as “Used Calder Parts.” Unfortunately, none of the leaves are labeled by performance, performer, or even by date.61 Despite this lack of information, these pages contain markings made by percussionists that speak to their performance decisions. For example, in a complete Percussion 3 part, the only markings made by the player appear on page 8 of the score in the lower right-hand corner (see figure 7.5). In this part, the eighth page is a direct copy of page 3. In the lower right-hand corner of page 3 are instructions to go to the mobile. Functioning as page 8, however, these instructions—“[Perc. 1 to mobile (begin before this ends)],” “[MOBILE struck: gong-like, med. soft mall.],” and “[Perc. 3 to MOBILE (10″ after this ends)]”—have been crossed out. At the top of the page, “8” has been written in pencil and red marker. No other markings have been made, just as in Fernandez’s part, implying that the performer was participating in an open form environment and engaged with Calder’s mobile. Page 180 → Fig. 7.5. Calder Piece, copy of performer’s score for percussion 3, page 8. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. In other conversations regarding Calder Piece that are not presented here, performers also described the ease with which Brown altered the score, or allowed performers to alter the score, to suit or meet the capabilities of individual percussionists.62 Fernandez’s explanation of the CalArts performance draws attention to the freedoms Brown felt comfortable to give performers, and the role of the creative mind vital to the mobility and feedback condition of Brown’s work.

Feedback and the Matter of Memory in Calder Piece Two primary courses of action emerge for the percussionist in a performance of Calder Piece: first, there may be a predetermined route decided by the performers or Brown in correspondence with the score before its intersection with the mobile; second, there may be a route in which the percussionist’s decisions are partly dependent on the movements of the mobile during the moment of performance. This latter realization relies on the percussionist’s ability to perceive petals of the mobile, superimpose this image onto a section of the score, and then play the pitches encircled by the imagined outlines of the petals in the order composed by Brown. Calder Piece is as much a collaged score as it is a collaged performance, Page 182 →pieced together by perception, memory, and the actions of a percussionist’s body. These cerebral processes were also explored by Brown’s philosophical hero, Henri Bergson. I propose a Bergsonian analysis of the performer in Calder Piece to illuminate yet another plane of the multitudinous “feedback condition” of the multimedia work. Bergson describes two forms of memory in Matter and Memory, memory by lesson and memory by representation. The first form, memory by lesson, requires a repetition of the same effort. By doing so, an individual learns by heart, and “To learn by heart is to create a cerebral mechanism, a habit of the body.”63 Bergson refers to memory by lesson as “movement” because it requires action that occurs in a distinct duration of time: “The memory of the lesson I have learnt, even if I repeat this lesson only mentally, requires a definite time, the time necessary to develop one by one, were it only in imagination, all the articulatory movements that are necessary: it is no longer a representation, it is an action.”64 Memory by lesson in Calder Piece may be interpreted as the process by which the percussionists learn the score. The gestures constructed by Brown must be practiced. By rehearsing these gestures repeatedly, the recurrence of material may have also resulted in their eventual memorization as performance actions or habit. This is particularly relevant to the duplicate music on pages 3 and 8. In playing the third page, the musical material should not be read in correspondence with the mobile. The eighth page depends entirely on a reading of the mobile, however, and the performer must not only be cognizant of habits learned while practicing the page without the mobile, but also “forget” the linear reading required in performing page 3. I asked Fernandez if it was possible to resist the sensory-motor relationships that he had built after having played the third page during a performance and after having practiced both pages in rehearsal. In his response, he confirmed the possibility of performing both pages similarly but also offered ways in which the performers consciously altered the performance of the final page in order to differentiate what had been played for page 3:

I’m sure that some of the phrasesВ .В .В . crept up, you know, because they were hardwiredВ .В .В . and I practiced that way. But we could have internalized a different speed, and that’s going to change the effect. So, if somebody conducts something at a quarter note equals 80, and somebody conducts something at a quarter note equals 110, those Page 183 →gestures, even though they are the same, are going to feel different because of the speed. That seems like a nobrainer, but it could have been that we just started on—at a different feel.65 The order of the phrases in the duplicate page was subject to change, as was the tempo. He continued: Maybe we picked four different sounds, or maybe we just picked four sounds that were from areas [in the score]. So mine is still G, D, A, and E. So maybe I picked from whatever family of instruments. I picked one from there, one from there, one from there, one from there and then sort of went with that, maintaining, again, the low-high relationship. I mean, maybe that’s what we did, or maybe we just picked really four different sounds and stayed to those, just like we did on the other page. Maybe we picked four sounds and stayed with those.В .В .В . Maybe it was much more open in that respect. And we really kept, again the high-to-low relationship and the spatial relationship, but maybe we were much more liberal with the actual notes. So, it’s still, I maintain the two parameters of high to low and spatial, but maybe, what was actually played was different notes. I’m not sure. From my systems, for that 1, 2, 3, 4, it works fine, once you get to the pitches, then, that has to stay the same. But again, the gestural, like on my next system, when we go into duet 1 and 3В .В .В . maybe we took longer with that gesture. So, instead of [sings gesture in different speeds, slow then fast] I have a feeling this was much, as it says, open. And we took more liberties with this one. Just because looking at this, I didn’t write a whole lot, except “open form.”66 Fernandez’s circuitous answer offers many possible performance scenarios for differentiating the final page from page 3. No doubt it was difficult for him to remember the exact way in which they “read” the final page in conjunction with the mobile. Bergson’s explanation of the second form of memory, memory by representation, “has none of the marks of habit” and may be used to shed light on Fernandez’s own memory process.67 Through habit, a lesson is learned. However, “The lesson once learned is but the composite image in which all readings are blended.” 68 Thus, the second form of memory is a representation of each reading, the recalled “memory-image.”69 The memory-image and the lesson learned through habit intertwine to inform memory. Page 184 →When the movements of the mobile are considered in tandem with the contents of Brown’s score during a performance, memory recalls multiple representations. In Calder Piece, one representation results from the perception of the mobile in which part of the art-object becomes memory-image. The percussionist depends on the memory-image, a conception different from the object itself, to continue reading the score. In addition to Calder’s mobile, the collaged musical score also becomes memory-image. The preservation of the mobile and score as images in the percussionist’s mind enacts a play between the past image (or even images) and perception in present time. In Bergson’s words, “If there be memory, that is, the survival of past images, these images must constantly mingle with our perception of the present, and may even take its place.”70 In Calder Piece, the percussionist’s perception of the score and the mobile in real time involves “feedback” in the mind between Bergson’s “memory-images” of the score and “memoryimages” of petals of the mobile. Remarkably enough, Bergson employs the metaphor of a circuit to describe this relationship between perception in real time and memory.71 Although perception is often represented in a linear trajectory, such a representation describes a “mind [that] goes further and further from the object, never to return to it.”72 As Bergson explains, however: “We maintain, on the contrary, that reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always find its way back to the object whence it proceeds.”73 This active state of perception allows for the movement of memory, in which there is an interaction between memory-images: “Behind these images, which are identical with the object, there are others, which merely resemble others, stored in memory, which merely resemble it, and others, finally,

which are only more or less distantly akin to it.”74 In performances of Calder Piece, this may be read in association with the images of the score and the mobile, part of which is learned by habit since lesson and memory-image are interconnected. The performer cannot help but involve memory-images already perceived: “It is the whole of memory, as we shall see, that passes over into each of these circuits, since memory is always present; but that memory, capable by reason of its elasticity, expanding more and more, reflects upon the object a growing number of suggested images,—sometimes the details of the object itself, sometimes concomitant details which may throw light upon it.”75 Through a Bergsonian circuit, memory aids the percussionists Page 185 →of Calder Piece in creating a formal design that is collaged with Brown’s (also collaged) score: its own “вЂfeedback’ condition” that participates in the “вЂfeedback’ condition” of a performance of Calder Piece.

Feedback of Open Form The year 2015 was momentous for Calder Piece. After its performances in December 1983 at Centre Pompidou in Paris by Diego Masson’s Ensemble Musique Vivante, the piece disappeared from the concert halls, museums, and music festivals in which it had previously been performed. That disappearance was the result of the private auctioning of the Chef d’orchestre mobile in 1989.76 For the first time in over thirty years, the work was performed with the mobile for an exhibition at Tate Modern entitled “Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture.” Audiences were treated to two performances on Tuesday, November 10, and Sunday, November 15, by Rosie Bergonzi, Dori Raphael, Beth Higham-Edwards, and Molly Lopresti, founders of the percussion quartet Beaten Track Ensemble, from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.77 In a recent conversation with three of these performers, Bergonzi, Higham-Edwards, and Lopresti discussed their relationship with the mobile and how it significantly affected their perceptions of the score. Although pages 3 and 8 in the score are duplicate copies of musical material, Higham-Edwards and Bergonzi emphasized that the changing performance contexts affected their perception of that musical material. In comparing pages 3 and 8, Higham-Edwards interpreted the musical events of page 3 as duets, read from left to right, that she “could have sungВ .В .В . back to you for sure after a while.”78 This collaboration between percussionists was replaced by one with the mobile on page 8. As a result, the context for the musical material also changed. Although certain pitches had the possibility of recurring when performing page 8, the realization of any similarity between the two pages happened after reading the mobile and superimposing it onto the score. Higham-Edwards (pictured in plate 8) explained: You do have a different relationship with the things that you’ve already played on page 3 because you know how it fits in with that other person’s part and you kind of have a bit more of a familiarity with it.В .В .В . But when you look up at the mobile and you look down and it’s landed on a bit that you’ve played on page 3 you kind of go, “Ah! that there”; whereas maybe if it’s on a bit which you hadn’t played before, it might take a bit second longer [to recognize].79 Page 186 →The act of reading the mobile on page 8 disrupts the collaboration established on page 3 and temporarily displaces previously composed memory-images, despite the presence of the exact same musical material in terms of pitch. Higham-Edwards clarified, however, that although she did not favor the lines of the duets she had performed earlier on page 3 when reading the mobile for page 8, evidence of the memory-image remained in the act of performance: “I still looked at the mobile, but I think I was probably slightly quicker to be able to play the bits I had rehearsed over and over, whereas the other bits you’d have to—not sight read, but you are not as familiar with it.”80 To superimpose the petals onto the score via her memory, HighamEdwards determined that the structure of the mobile in her field of vision lent itself well to the dimensions of the score: But when I looked upВ .В .В . because the way it spins sometimes it’s very broad and its definitely either going to be top right corner or bottom left and sometimes it’s kind of in the middle. When you look up quickly and look back down really quickly its really quite obvious which bit of the page you should be reading. Just the way the mobile itself is structured. Sometimes I felt when it was completely horizontal, I had to sort of look up and choose either top right or top left.

There’s no way I could have done both. But when it was thinner because it was side on, it takes up quite a small surface area in your vision. So it’s quite clear. But when it is broad, even though it’s taking up a big surface area in your vision because of the petals, you can sort of choose the petal that’s spinning towards your face fastest or . . . which one stands out most to you.81

Bergonzi also underlined the changed collaboration between pages 3 and 8; however, the difference for Bergonzi was not only that she might play a line that was part of another percussionist’s part for page 3, but that even the material she played for page 3 might be changed in the context of page 8: “You kind of have to start in a middle of a phrase, which you would never do when you are playing with someone else [in reference to the duets of page 3]. Starting in the middle of a phrase means the rest of the phrase has a completely different feeling.”82 The Beaten Track Ensemble’s account of its performance of Calder Piece underlines the dynamic Bergsonian circuitry of memory and perception that is not merely in the minds of the performers but also enacted by the mobile at the center of the work. Calder’s Chef d’orchestre mobile is Page 187 →Brown’s homage to the mobiles that had inspired his concepts about form, but also an essential actor in any performance of the work. Brown chose to structure Calder Piece as a closed form overall, with select open interior structures. In my view, he did this to counterbalance the “very intricate вЂfeedback’ condition between the mobile, the score, and the performers.” His instruction for the percussionists to “read” the mobile in connection with the score reflected Brown’s interest in the most intricate loop of this triangulated feedback, which involved the movements between perception and memory in the minds of the percussionists. These “other planes of feedback” operating outside the musical score act much like the petals of the mobile, “never the same twice.”

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Chapter 8 Imagining an Ever-Changing Entity Compositional Process in Earle Brown’s Cross Sections and Color Fields Fredrick Gifford I wanted (and still want) very much for the work to have a “reality” of its own in addition to the specific controls imposed by myself and by the performer. Ambiguity in the service of expanding the conceptual and real potential of the work must not lead to the loss of the work as a recognizable, and to a certain extent, “objective” entity. The “object” must reappear transformed by the process imposed upon it as a “subject.”1 In this passage from a 1964 lecture, Earle Brown described his foremost aesthetic concerns during the composition of Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54). Now with the benefit of viewing the whole of his compositional pathway, which spanned half a century and saw over forty highly individual works completed, it is clear that these aesthetic concerns continued to inform Brown’s musical thinking more than the technical solutions he employed in a given work. Brown’s compositional trajectory was anything but a straight line or teleological “evolution.” His works are like branches that grow from a single tree: although every limb shares a source, the reality at the tip of each may be strikingly different from that of its nearest neighbor. By always asking a core set of questions about the compositional “reality” of a work, Brown remained free each time to create a new sonic “object” Page 189 →that could be “transformed by the process imposed upon it.” This approach produced a body of work in which technical solutions (whether harmonic, instrumental, timbral, notational, or formal) could be applied, adapted, or ignored according to the necessity of each composition.2 The goal of this chapter is to discern the “reality” of Cross Sections and Color Fields (1972–75) by analyzing the distinct features of the work and the compositional actions preserved in Brown’s original sketches.3 A detailed investigation of the compositional process reveals concepts, impulses, and ideas (both musical and extramusical) important to the genesis of the piece, as well as how these concerns were addressed technically to create the “recognizable” work. Understanding the piece as one instance in a sequence of works devoted to core questions about the reality of a musical work will illuminate the concrete issues and technical responses inherent in Earle Brown’s aesthetics. Finally, this inquiry into compositional process sheds light on important principles regarding Brown’s integration of openness in the work.4

Toward an Understanding of Process In order to construct a network of core aesthetic concerns that came to bear on Cross Sections, I surveyed Brown’s lectures, interviews, sketches, program notes, and letters, and tracked ideas that continually stimulated the composer’s imagination over time.5 Several important themes emerged from this survey: Earle Brown was a sound composer, concerned with freedom and communication, and interested in generating programs that would create an ever-changing entity.6 It became clear that a careful approach to his method should consider the following themes as primary, though without any a priori hierarchy: Sound composer refers to an approach that avoids overparameterization of the musical object while forming basic sonic material for a work. Freedom points to openness of materials in both composition and performance (e.g., What is liberated and when?).

Communication immediately recognizes new potentials for a listener who is an integral part of the realization process. (Where is the spontaneity? How will it shape the audience-artist relation in real time?) The program generates a coherent environment for musical or compositionalPage 190 → activity. (What are the kinds of variables in play and will they produce the desired effects?) Pursuing such lines of questioning will lead to an articulation of the work as a mutable entity occurring and experienced in time. To understand Brown’s process, analysis must focus on what the work always has the potential to become. This is the best hope for understanding Brown’s view of the musical work as an everchanging entity manifest in time: “The composer’s abdication from total sovereign finite power over the performer, audience, and work is paradoxically to give the work an infinite power and universality—an attempt to reach an absolute state of entity—a multi-ordinal thing.”7 Brown’s technical solutions seem to result from context-based responses to the core aesthetic concerns first associated with process in works such as 25 Pages (1953) and Folio: It was aВ .В .В . trip that I took through my own mind and my own history of being a performer myself and my interest in spontaneity and direct contact with sound and improvisationВ .В .В . when I got through this from October 1952 to the spring of 1953 I had found by working through it [in] my own mindВ .В .В . a functional useful notation which allowed me to control but also to let go.8 Regarding 4 Systems, Brown wrote: “The score was composed as being a spatial totality (first and last compositional actions not necessarily taking place at the left and right respectively) [and] temporal continuity of performances being an end result rather than determining factor.”9 Brown also singled out the 1952–53 work Octet as a watershed: “This is the first of my pieces in which the compositional action can take place at any point in the Total Space (or total time) of the composition rather than in the continuous left to right manner.”10 These statements marked a fundamental change in the composer’s thinking. It was neither necessary for compositional activity to be carried out with prior knowledge of where its material would occur in a realization of the score, nor did the final temporal sequence of events have to be determined at the beginning or even during the process: nonlinear compositional moves were now viable. By the early 1970s, Brown had realized a number of important works that pioneered different levels of openness in a variety of media: the time notation of 25 Pages; the graphic scores associated with Folio; larger works such as String Quartet (1965) that combined both open and closed parts Page 191 →to realize a global form; and Calder Piece (1966), another hybrid closed form with open interior sections that incorporated a sculptural mobile as both conductor and instrument. While all of these works contributed to the technical armature for Brown’s evergrowing repertoire of solutions, two “families” of ensemble works seem to stand in a unique relation to Cross Sections: Available Forms 1 and 2 (1961–62) and Modules I, II, and III (1966–69). A letter to Bruno Maderna in 1970 shows that Brown continued to view the Available Forms works as vivid examples of the necessity to incorporate open form solutions into the compositional process: It is not just the conductor’s responsibility to make “interesting” forms but very much MY responsibility to write the events in such a way that they can be multi-combined interestingly and their content [be] STIMULATING! My “open-form” work is not to evade compositional responsibility!!!!11 Available Forms 2 for ninety-eight instruments with two conductors marked an extreme point in terms of the orchestral complexity that open form could generate. It addressed responsibility and freedom for conductors and musicians with a dynamism akin to that with which Folio had explored openness via graphic notational solutions.12 The Modules balance this aspect of the Available Forms. They are part of a line within Brown’s output that includes Cross Sections, centered on exploring a simplification of both material and musical utterance.13 The quintessential example of this line, however, is the ensemble work New Piece (1971), completed only months before Brown embarked on Cross Sections. New Piece so severely limits its musical materials that

they are represented as four chords on a single sheet.14 Brown voiced the need to reconcile the intricacy and austerity of these two families of ensemble works in an unpublished program note for Cross Sections: “Contrary to much contemporary music, which moves very rapidly and with great complexity (much of my own included)В .В .В . I have tried to create a minimum effect of color change with a relatively limited field of sound texture (events) (elements).”15 In the abovementioned letter to Maderna, Brown also delivered some of his most explicit remarks about his compositional approach: Because of the “open-form” realization potential (rather than a strict continuity from left to right, in sequence, as in closed score) I have Page 192 →a kind of technique of balancing the content of the events in any one score between different kinds of energy (density of motion through time) potential and color contrasts (instrumentation), and acoustic weightВ .В .В . (a combination of instrumentation and register and interval.[)] I actually have a pretty well defined “theory” of my composing which is based on ACOUSTICS & ENERGY potentials but I have never formulated it coherently (for publication)В .В .В . there is a definite necessity to conceive the events as a total (gestalt?) composition but also necessary to expand the usual compositional awareness so that there is enough variety between events so that the conductor’s “forming imagination” is stimulated!!!!16 Brown’s comments here link the core aesthetic concerns enumerated earlier with the technical features of a work: “acoustics” and “energy” relate to sound composition; “the conductor’s вЂforming imagination’” involves communication (between both material and musician, and form and audience); “gestalt” addresses program; and “open form” references the freedom inherent in the process of the work’s realization. In another descriptive introduction to Cross Sections from May 1, 2000, Brown revealed concerns specific to the 1975 work (strikingly in line with those outlined above): I decided, in “Cross Sections” .В .В . to slow down my conceptions of sound-events and make a relatively slow moving “land-sound-scape” of expanding and contracting sound-color fields. I realized that the warm and poetically intimate sound events that could be created, provoked, [and] stimulated by not demanding accuracy to a pre-determined continuity but achieved by a combination of compositional determination activated by a conceptual flexibility and improvisational “programme” that I wanted. It necessitated a search for a delicate balance between “control and freedom” of visual demands, but indicated “notationally,” in musical, or graphic terms—not by chance but by flexibly interpretive terms.17 Based on Brown’s statements about Cross Sections, I constructed questions and applied them to the sketches in order to clarify important details about the emerging model of process: What sonic materials are at the core of the work’s “identity”? How is “compositional determination activated”? What is the “improvisational program”? Where does Page 193 →control reside, and what is free? These aspects are discussed further in what follows.

Cross Sections and Color Fields: The Sketches In a letter to John Cage from 1966, Brown characterized his original sketches for Available Forms 2 (1962) as “sketchy drawings, notes, comments to myself, false starts, etc.”18 The description also applies to the varied sketches for Cross Sections, held in the archive at the Earle Brown Music Foundation in Rye, New York.19 Among the approximately 125 pages of material are graphic symbols drawn in pencil, words jotted on napkins, colored diagrams, more traditionally notated music, and annotations on publisher’s proofs. A rich source of information, all of the sketches for Cross Sections were preserved by Brown and grouped together in one drawer.20 The draft of the program note previously cited points to Brown’s continued interest in the work as late as 2000.21 A number of pencil sketch pages have titles written in ink (usually red), very similar to that used to

correct the publisher’s proofs; some sketches are dated; some pages are photocopied or recopied by hand; and a number of loose sketches are written on the same graph or manuscript paper. In order to address the numerous and heterogeneous items, I developed a system of content-based coding to aid identification and organization. Given my focus on compositional concerns as well as the specific nature of these sketches, six basic sketch categories emerged. These are listed in table 8.1 (numbers in parentheses refer to sketch examples included later in this chapter). The “sound composition” aspect of Brown’s process became immediatelyPage 194 → apparent when studying the sketches. His holistic approach to material produced sketches that seldom consist exclusively of only harmony or only rhythmic patterns. Though Brown always attributed the concept of sound organization to VarГЁse, he usually used the term sound composition (a category in which he included Cowell, Cage, and Feldman, as well as himself) in his lectures and writings as an alternative to serial composition (as in the works of Pousseur, BarraquГ©, Stockhausen, Boulez, or Babbitt). For Brown, serialism was a parameter-based method in which aspects of sound such as pitch, duration, intensity, instrumentation, and mode of attack could be separated, arranged on scales, and ordered. In contrast, the sound-organizational approach considers all of these aspects to be integral elements in an imagined sonic event: Table 8.1. Six basic sketch categories in Cross Sections and Color Fields Abbreviation Category Description PROC Process Words and/or diagrams describe a process (sketch 23) GEST Gesture Graphic and/or verbal indication of event or formal section (sketch 47) CHOR Chord Notated harmonic material, usually on staves, as chords (sketch 3) INST Instrument Instrumental/timbral data (orchestration, transformations) (sketch 24) RHYT Rhythm Time or rhythmic notation of gestures or lines (sketch 59) SCOR Score Short, full-score drafts; manuscript; notation on proofs (sketch 87) Well I didn’t use strict twelve-tone writing afterВ .В .В . 1953. I used my own systems and also some Schillinger ways of putting tone-sound together. VarГЁse used to say there are two kinds of composers—sound composers and note composers—and I am definitely a sound composer.22 Compare this with the following statement from a lecture predating Cross Sections by four years: VarГЁse always spoke of a sound-oriented techniqueВ .В .В . for me, VarГЁse was the extension of the potentials of sound composition into the future and it seems to meВ .В .В . at this moment, 1968, [sound-oriented organization is] having more effect on the current music than note- oriented developments of Webern.23 The result of such an approach in Cross Sections is that sound events are nearly always presented in the sketches as amalgams of instrumental or timbral cues with dynamic shapes or notes attached (figure 8.1, sketch 87). In order to depict this fusion accurately in the coding, I needed to avoid overly narrow categorization based on musical parameters. For this reason, I assigned a primary category to each sketch in an attempt to capture its immediate nature, while also noting important secondary categories. A few sketches received double coding because they addressed multiple aspects (sometimes on different parts of the same page). For example, since Brown almost always indicated which instruments would sound the notes of chords, nearly all CHOR sketches possess an INST component. However,Page 196 → a separate category was also necessary for those purely INST ideas devoid of any pitch or rhythmic information. Page 195 → Fig. 8.1. Sketch 87, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Sketch 50 is essentially a note of mostly words and numbers, and is coded under the category of PROC because it

addresses the number of elements in an open form section as well as what INST families would play them. Typical of the blended nature of these sketches, even rhythmic notation is appended to more fully capture the imagined gesture on this card. Such hybrid information made it ineffective to code sketches based solely on notation or a single type of information. In table 8.1, the categories are arranged from abstract to concrete. PROC and GEST, although related to early stages of more abstract material, should be understood as discrete categories: the former is quite broad and often uses verbal or diagrammatic means, while the latter’s pictorial aspects are frequently enhanced with additional information. PROC sketches typically outline multivalent information. For example, sketch 52 shows a rhythmic sequence in which chords are distributed in the brass and how another harmonic construct, what Brown dubs “Major Sectional Aggregates,” will be interspersed to transform the voice-leading throughout this passage. In the coding of this sketch, INST and CHOR are given secondary status, since the PROC idea operates on them. The category GEST is more specific and may display information diagrammatically (sketch 67), graphically (76), proportionally in time and registral space (42), in metric notation (51), with timings (81), or with timbral and dynamic information (96); ruled paper is used to imply equal time units as graphic figures indicate register, instrumentation, and density of textural activity in instrumental families. The more concrete categories of CHOR, INST, and RHYT clearly define harmonic materials (20), timbral possibilities (27), or rhythmic sequences (56), respectively. CHOR sketches often employ standard notation, while RHYT sketches may use metric, proportional, or time notation. SCOR sketches involve manuscript pages and copies of the published score. Many of the latter are simply copies, but some include edited material (118), annotations clarifying performance options (12), or conducting technique (13). A good example of the multifaceted nature of the sketches of a sound composer is sketch 23 (figure 8.2), coded primarily as PROC, and secondarily as INST/GEST. Here there are a variety of verbal, timbral (INST), and expressive markings accompanying timing and dynamic information (GEST). This is a PROC sketch for two reasons: the detailed information Page 197 →is not consistent enough to define specific GEST, RHYT, or INST figures; and Brown has outlined the kinds of materials that could be involved and how they might be related and transformed. Such not-yet-determined potential is characteristic of PROC sketches.24 Fig. 8.2. Sketch 23, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Viewing the sketches as functional parts of the developing mosaic of Cross Sections makes it possible to understand each as contributing to an essential stage of the work’s creation. The ever-increasing detail and interrelations among sketches reveal a process broadly outlined by progress toward the final, published version of the work—the musical entity as set out by its score. This would necessarily include all the sounds that could occur when the score is realized, including all open, semiopen, and fully notated parts. The sketches reveal a composer who remained responsive to the work’s changing reality when momentary suggestions and ideas emerged as the work gained context. Overall, the sketches detail a compositional process in Cross Sections of imagining, articulating, and then fixing a gestalt that evolved through five Page 198 →stages: imagine the entity, program the environment, define the identity, establish the surface, open the work. These five phases trace a broad “sequence” of thought, but attention must be drawn to the fact that the categories are abstractions and do not preclude the possibility of simultaneous occurrence (in rare cases, even in the same sketch). In the following section, the stages of this process are defined through an in-depth exploration of the sketch contents, guided by Brown’s own statements about intention and method.

Imagine the Entity: Articulating Essentials He enters into it [the canvas] precisely because he knows what he wants to do, but what saves him is the fact that he does not know how to get there, he does not know how to do what he wants to do.25

Gilles Deleuze’s characterization of the artist before a new work is particularly apt for Brown and Cross Sections. Brown’s initial sketches are direct and uninhibited, in the sense of not yet knowing “how to get there.” He has glimpsed the work as an entity in his imagination, but its image is still vague. In this initial stage lies the core idea: Brown is concerned with quickly recording his impressions about what the work is or can be. The sketches seem to focus on questions such as these: What sounds are emblematic of this piece? What idea(s)—musical or otherwise—can drive these sounds for the entire work? Most common in this phase are PROC and GEST sketches, filled with quickly jotted graphics or words about process. Brown acknowledged Gertrude Stein’s influence on his compositional approach when he spoke about this manner of working: [Stein] said there were so few masterpieces because you cannot write a masterpiece if you remember. And in a certain sense I was trying to outdistance my critical faculties by sketching so rapidly, because I believed—and I still do—very much in my intuition, and I was looking for ways to get into the sound of something, get into the gestures of something, and bypassing punctuation for the moment.26 Such an unrestrained approach is clearly evident in graphic sketches (often employing colors) such as sketches 83 and 90; and in brief notes about any aspects of the work already known, as in 6, 30, 49a–b, 58, 65, 67, and 80. One of the most striking sketches from this initial phase is sketch 93 (figure 8.3), dated 1973.27 This segment of about ninety seconds of music Page 199 →mixes a variety of information based on what is already imagined: graphic notation hints at textural densities; register is distributed through instrumental families or spacing cues; types of gestural activity are verbally described (“nervous chord”); and timbral and dynamic cues accompany some events. This type of sketch exemplifies an attempt to capture and record any and all parts of the image as glimpsed, so that later imaginings may build on the heterogeneous nature of what is now known. Fig. 8.3. Sketch 93, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. In sketch 6, Brown describes an evenly spaced chord that can expand and blend instrumental families in “subtle, random-seeming variations on single вЂcolors.’” He seemed to be imagining that the music could vary as it contrasted “time as a continuity of вЂpoints’ to time and reality as вЂprocess.’” This verbal articulation of the entity would persevere in Brown’s conception despite whatever materials might be composed later to fully realize it. This temporal idea became a central component of Cross Sections: Page 200 →All of the material and the basic form and structure of the piece are composed by me but, as in my work since 1952, I am strongly committed to including a kind of “renewal factor” so that the work can come to life, transform, and express itself somewhat differently in each performance, yet continue to be its very distinct “self.”28

Program the Environment: Mechanisms and Behaviors Brown often spoke of himself as a programmer who sought to understand the ramifications and combinatorial potential of his materials in “the unfolding of implicit context.”29 The programming phase therefore involved the development of musical processes that would liberate time while also creating the essential environment for the work. The composer needed to construct musical mechanisms and behaviors that would ensure a coherent and communicative space so that the listener could play a role analogous to that of the viewer of visual or sculptural art: The relationship of these processes to a Mobile . . . this was a revelation to me, and a new independence for the work itself and for the viewer . . . the viewer was much more of a collaborator . . . it sent the work out on its own into a world which it itself could create anew each time it was seen . . . the conditions which would provoke the incredibly profound level of collaborative communication!!!!30

Brown’s method was rooted in his own transformative experiences in the visual arts: The strongest examples of Art were in space, andВ .В .В . radically unsystematic, but beautiful, committed, and full of potential which had the power to make one re-think the entire question of artist-audience-communication responsibility, rather than focus on development of a technique.31 For Brown, the compositional necessity of openness derived from exactly the spontaneous communication that could result in a composed environment: Consideration of the piece as a piece (object) or as an environment (field of active involvement)[.] Involvement as:— Difference between the object in the ART sense and a flexible Page 201 →conditional field of activity in the “new” sense. (an object has an ideal.В .В .В . a field of activity has an inherent conditional existence within which the ideal is contained but not trapped).32 Although the specific types of openness that occurred across Brown’s output sometimes receive attention as a generalized topic (his oeuvre contains many unique solutions), this essay focuses on the question of how Brown arrived at specific aspects of open form as a preferred musical solution among other valid approaches in Cross Sections.33 In the programming phase, the crux of the matter lies in understanding what this process of “opening” will achieve for the work. Brown again saw the issue articulated clearly by Stein: Out of discontinuous materials and forms—materials and forms which have “parts” and are “composed”—a continuum of intensity, which is not the sum of parts. She [Stein] was “expressing” a continuum of present movement, making it intrinsic to the work itself, and this inner thing is complete, not as a construction but as a continuum.34 It would seem that the creation of such a continuum, whether during the compositional process or the performance itself, stems from a generative process preoccupied more with time (the “continuum of present movement”) than form.35 It is in this “programming” phase, however, that the spatiotemporal environment became fixed. Paradoxically, the decision to employ open form techniques within a work fixes the temporal aspect of the entity. Questions in this programming phase may be general: Should there be open form, and if so, what kind(s)? How might open form aspects function as an integral part of the work? Other queries may carve out specific lines of the program: How will timbral colors “cross” instrumental families? Can crossing be directly related with harmonic considerations? In the aforementioned unpublished program note for Cross Sections, Brown articulated key components that defined the work’s environment: “Cross Sections and Color Fields” refers to the frequent sonic activity “across” the 4 major orchestral sections or families:—woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. “Color fields” is a reference to a kind of painting of recent years in which there are relatively vast areas of a single color or very subtle contrasts and interactions between a Page 202 →few colors and simple shapes.В .В .В . I have tried to create a minimum effect of color change with a relatively limited field of sound texture (events) (elements).36 “Minimum” and “limited” signal that Brown did not wish to create a program that would proliferate highly differentiated material. His focus was instead on “subtle contrasts” and “simple shapes.” If the first phase of sketching (imagine the entity) aimed to articulate the essential sounds and broadest relations in the piece, then this second phase (program the environment) attempted to immediately understand how these sounds might change over time; or, how other related or subtly contrasting sounds could be introduced to enrich the original idea.

PROC sketches again predominate during the programming phase, although other elements (especially CHOR or GEST) appear, as Brown manufactured musical grist to test how mechanisms might function. Some of this material, though originally conceived as hypothetical, would survive or be adapted in the later phases. Lists attempting to discover the right types of events and transformations appear frequently in this preliminary stage. Such inventories enumerate the concrete sonic forces involved (sketch 75b), timbral possibilities (27), “extreme cases” (33 and 34; see the subsequent discussion), number of elements that define a section or sections (75b and 75d), transformational processes (4, 5, and 24), or even structures that would result from the application of such processes (8).37 Several sketches in this stage (25, 33, 34, and 46) reveal Brown exploring a procedure originally employed over a decade earlier in Available Forms 2. In sketch 25, Brown recopied, by hand, sketches from the earlier work, and marked them as “Extreme Cases.” These are essentially lists of possible maximum and minimum values for densities, timbres, and numbers of attack. The values are expressed as numbers in the case of densities and attacks; smooth or varied instrumental sequences for color transformations; and loud, soft, or changing dynamics for gestural types. In sketches 33, 34, and 46, Brown applied this concept to create similar lists for the specific resources of Cross Sections. Some of these values were later adopted to define local goals within sections of the work; others were not used. This aspect of Brown’s approach highlights the importance of understanding the possible limits of a specific environment during the programming stage. Timbral transformation, another important procedure carried over from Available Forms 2, has become a main argument in the newer work. Speaking about Cross Sections in 1989, Brown acknowledged, “I tried to Page 204 →strip away the tremendous complexity of Available Forms IIВ .В .В . to do the maximum with a simple amount of material, and to limit the material that I compose and still have maximal interactional complexity.”38 In sketch 25, Brown copied out a listing of “congruous” timbral sequences from the earlier work. It is noteworthy that in a sketch contained among the Available Forms 2 materials at EBMF, Brown had carefully listed all possible “mixed instrumental areas.”39 To create the “crossing of color fields” in the 1975 work, Brown designed the communication between instrumental areas according to his earlier work, but now simplified his discourse by carefully exploring further potential latent in his previous method. Page 203 → Fig. 8.4. Sketch 24, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. A large number of sketches in the programming phase of Cross Sections depict methods for organizing and changing timbre over time. Already at this stage, Brown was careful to envision “events” as aggregates formed by specific timbral voices (e.g., the “19-part string chord” mentioned in sketches 20 and 48d as an “extreme case” of “Maximum Divisi”) so that their transformation could then be sketched as relations within and between instrumental families: sketches 8, 24, 46, 48b–c, 58, 75b–c, and 84. Programming would therefore link timbre and harmony, thus creating the colors of the title. Although specific harmonies may not yet exist, in this phase, Brown’s sketches attempt to establish what harmonies would need to be like (similar numbers of subgroups in each instrumental family, smooth registral transitions between subgroups or within a given register) in order for them to transform in the desired ways. Sketch 24 (figure 8.4) and sketch 84 (figure 8.5) show the lists of possibilities and relations between cases typical of this phase. Note that in figure 8.5 Brown seems to revisit the original transformational program once the exact instrumentation of Cross Sections has been set. Sketch 79 (figure 8.6) is also characteristic of this phase. The left-hand column shows Brown working out what will fill the “quick mp space.” He relates the number of attacks (and the time needed to experience them) to activity densities and action speeds. Certain aspects of identity articulated during the programming phase would survive the process, but seldom without modification. Every detail seems free to be adapted as its specific role within the entity becomes clearer. For example, the “stabilizing” chord Brown imagined, dubbed “Fibbonacci [sic],” became crucial to the work and would in fact occur in the final version, but only at its very close (at letters O and P) and not every

three to four minutes, as “programmed” here. This idea is further explored in sketch 59, reproduced in figure 8.7. At the top, Brown diagrammatically Page 205 →represented the return of the stabilizing chord. In the lower left, he orchestrated the Fibonacci chord in the strings, complete with its E/Aв™-outer pair. Fig. 8.5. Sketch 84, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. The insistence on the two-voice pair (low E/high Aв™-) aligned with a timbral sequence (strings/brass/winds /percussion), which here characterizes the “Fib. chord” (as it is abbreviated in almost all sketches), became another enduring feature. The chordal variants Brown would later devise to flesh out the program often respect one or both of these notes in the same register, but might also obscure them through density of voicing in those registers (compare the chord just before letter C, at letter G, and chord 3 in open form section N). Likewise, the symmetrical timbral progression (strings-brass-winds-percussion-winds-brass-strings) would be generalized beyond the Fibonacci chord and used to underlie more complex and varied sequences than originally programmed. Treatment of the E/Aв™-pitch and register pair demonstrates how determinations made during this phase informed subsequent composing. Although any number of viable continuities to and from this sonority might be composed,Page 208 → a choice needed to be made about which ones would most reinforce its basic design. For example, appearances of the E/Aв™-pair had to function in the sense of the original programming by providing stability and quasi repetition. When Brown strongly protested being viewed as a chance composer, he was speaking about this facet of his method. Creating an environment in which more than one sound may be desirable in a given context had nothing to do with allowing any sound to occur at any point in the work. Page 206 → Fig. 8.6. Sketch 79, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 207 → Fig. 8.7. Sketch 59, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. During this programming phase, Brown was forming the whole of his work in all of its structural relations in accordance with his sound organizational approach. This stemmed directly from creating an environment rather than a chain of concomitant events, thus permitting the possibility of “opening” the form (reordering sections, parts within sections, notes within parts of sections) later in the process. Even if the temporal ordering of elements were changed, the elements would not cease to be related, since they have been composed as necessary components of the entity, not results of one another. This is why programming the environment, despite when it may occur during the compositional process, must be seen as prior in terms of the evolving conception of the work. Such an approach relates to what Brown meant by the “multi-ordinal thing.” Elements were generated in order to create a number of viable relations among them, but without giving priority to any singular aspect that would limit sequential possibilities or force a progression. Although it may have been impossible to imagine and audition every feasible sequence or arrangement of all of these components, the programming had to be carried out in order to ensure that unwanted confusion (in the form of goal-directed harmonic function, emphasis on, or repetition of nonstructural detail, for example) would not accidentally creep into the environment of the work.

Define the Identity: Specific Content and Relations Oh, identity and entity were two big differences, subtle differences, but different things. IВ .В .В . always wanted my pieces to have a[n] identity and to be an entity, an entity apart from meВ .В .В . all of the open formness of Twenty-five Pages and Available I and Available II and the other open form piecesВ .В .В . [I] wanted very much for them to have an identity.40 During this phase, Brown endeavored to set out the concrete elements of the work and reconcile them with his conception of the entity as programmed.Page 209 → One basic question would dominate this phase: What are the precise musical elements that will best relate and change in the ways elaborated in the programming phase? Many types of sketches play a role in defining the musical identity of Cross Sections: GEST sketches are particularly important, fleshed out with PROC (ever more specific in this phase), as are INST, RHYT, and CHOR examples.

CHOR sketches are often employed in order to make the basic sound events more concrete. Here Brown seemed to be concerned with discovering the types of chords, textures, or instrumental interplay most effective for realizing the kinds of processes already outlined. In his provisional program note for Cross Sections, Brown articulated a great deal about the piece and how it would function: I have recently been interested in the very subtle color contrasts between the major orchestral textures and subdivisions within basic families when they are performing the same or similar intervallically related “chords.” ([I]n this case, the term “sonic aggregates” would serve better than the term “chords.”)41 He even focused the reader on the concrete materials of the work, the “sonic aggregates” (replaced in the final program note with “sound structures”).42 Brown, the sound composer, did not limit his conception to simple chords because, as in previous phases, generic interval constructions were imagined at the same time as timbral identity and textural behavior. In this third phase, Brown had to decide on the specific contents of these aggregates, even if he could not imagine exactly how they would sound (in terms of sequence or juxtaposition) in a version of the work: “The potential within this вЂindirect’ contact with the final fact of the work is actually the key to the door of a new world.”43 Sketch 93 (figure 8.3, categorized primarily as a PROC sketch and deemed important to the early phase of imagining the work), is itself a copy of a sketch. It holds a key to understanding Brown’s pursuit of everincreasing detail. Above the first four ink columns, Brown wrote the following abbreviations in pencil: “Fib.—Max Div.—First chord—Max Spd” [i.e., Fibonacci—Maximum Divisi—First Chord—Maximum Spreads]. With these words, he was naming the “sonic aggregates,” the basic elements that would anchor the textural activity envisioned in glyphs and diagrams from earlier stages. In short, these aggregates would define the aural identity of the work (one cannot help but wonder exactly when these terms were penciled onto the copy of the earlier colored pen sketch, dated Page 211 →1973 in ink). Ideas seen in other sketches—basing the work on a single chord with timbral changes, or using one recurring Fibonacci chord to stabilize the work—appear crystallized in four internally distinct but closely related structures that would fill the overall soundscape of Cross Sections.44 In this way, the actual elements of the work (independent from any future ordering of them) ensured “enough variety between events,” which Brown deemed crucial in his earlier letter to Maderna.45 Page 210 → Fig. 8.8. Sketch 3, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. These aggregates are sketched in great detail, complete with clearly copied out transformation instructions and instrumentationВ guides, in sketches 3, 7, and 125. Each is summarized below and shown in sketch 3 (figure 8.8): “First Chord” is a symmetrical chord built around middle C, exclusively from alternating thirds and fifths (already imagined in sketch 6 and worked out in sketch 4). It is the only aggregate that is the same for all instrumental families (the others are composed with unique variants for each orchestral section). Although it was not the first sonic column found in the 1973 sketch, number 93, this would eventually become the first chord heard in the final version of the piece. This implies a process in which Brown initially imagined sounds in time so that he would understand what they were or how they might relate to each other; but as the environment took shape, he was able to free them from any fixed sequence and reorder them as envisioned in the program. A significant number of sketches from across the compositional process document Brown constructing, voicing, and extending this aggregate in time: sketches 3, 4, 10, 32, 51, 81, 82, 87, 93, 99, and 100. “Maximum Divisi” is the harmonic material Brown envisioned for the extreme case of maximum textural density. Whether treated as a tutti chord or divided into simultaneously sounding chamber groups, different variants are prepared for each family, including pitched percussion (only the strings and percussion have middle C) in order to create what Schillinger might dub a “Sigma chord,” a superposition of component scales. The harmonic relations are worked out in sketch 7.46 This sketch clearly identifies the 19-note divisi chord mentioned in sketch 48d and developed for the open form section at letter N (sketch

20). Sketch 55 shows the derivation of five-note subsets for each family from the “Max. divisi” structure. It should be noted that a very early impulse to structure the basic Page 212 →sonority in “half and whole tones around a вЂsigma’ chord’” (sketch 31) was essentially realized in the many interlocking seconds occurring between the different versions of this chord for the instrumental families. While CHOR and INST sketches predominate here, Brown also remained inclined toward graphic GEST sketches to focus his imagination and fix events in time, even while trying to define specific harmonic and timbral relations (e.g., sketch 47 in figure 8.9 and sketch 8, the latter of which would eventually become letter G in the final score). “Maximum Spreads” are aggregates in which material is symmetrically extended across a very wide register. The clearest version of this distribution is given to the strings, where chromatically expanding intervals open outward in eight “steps” from middle C (major 2nds through major 6ths). The smaller versions, for winds and brass, employ registral contraction to accommodate instrument ranges and sound subsets of this chord, emphasizing—though not limited to—fifths and fourths respectively (thus incorporating an important programming attribute seen in sketch 32). “Fibonacci Chord” is built from a symmetrical interval structure, in which a segment from the eponymous series (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 [the first 1 has been omitted]) defines each note’s semitone distance from the previous pitch, expanding outward from C. This is the original version and is given to the winds. The basic harmony is preserved for the brass (middle C is not heard), strings, and percussion, but internal re-voicings (chordal components change octave) are employed to vary color (strings) and accommodate registers (brass and percussion).47 “Major Sectional Aggregates,” an additional defining structure (worked out in programming sketch 8), play a special role in Cross Sections. These are registrally locked and widely spaced (though not intervallically fixed) four-note harmonies (five for the strings) that stand out from the other “sonic aggregates” by avoiding unison doublings with nearly all other basic sonorities. In this way, the major sectional aggregates abandon the primary relation that guarantees smooth voice leading between the other four basic aggregates throughout the piece. The Major Sectional Aggregates forge a strong link with the Maximum Divisi chord: they emphasize pitches not contained in the latter sonority (see sketch 8); and their lack of Page 213 →an essentially symmetrical interval structure creates a special type of energy shared with the only other asymmetrical basic aggregate. Brown clearly worked out the Major Sectional Aggregates (three for each family) in sketches 7 and 8, and copied them onto the aggregate reference sketch, number 3. Fig. 8.9. Sketch 47, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. While the identity of the work is not purely harmonic, Brown’s central conception of slowly changing color areas could not be expressed as notation until the actual number of basic units and the specific pitch relations between them were concretely established. Putting such pillars in place ensured that the final events of the work would have harmonic coherence and embedded contrast. Preparing content relations in such an intricate manner made possible what Brown called the “liberation of structure”: The liberation of time is what the open form does and liberation of structureВ .В .В . I believe that the piece is identified more by its content than by its structureВ .В .В . I have faith, a kind of instinctive faith that nearly any form of the materials I write will work. The open form pieces can go anywhere.48

Page 214 →Establish the Surface: Fixing Elements in Notation But I always wanted to make objects because I ha[d] the idea that I wanted the piece to be free, not people to be free.49 As Brown takes the final step toward making his musical “object” concrete, details and figures emerged to establish the surface of the work. All aspects that could be precisely fixed in notation were done so in this phase. The paradoxical notion that so motivated Brown is again apparent here: only by composing out and fixing the

details—even if those details are choices within an open form section—will the work’s identity be secured; only then can the entity possess a “reality” of its own. The inner workings of open passages are decided here, such as determining the chordal relations or instrumental families. These sketches are filled with examples of CHOR, INST, and RHYT, but also employ graphic GEST images to focus or define textures and shapes within smaller sections. The sketches in this phase clarify the internal priorities of Brown’s compositional process, but occupy no more space than others (the distribution of sketches is fairly even across phases as summarized in table 8.3 at the end of this chapter). What is striking in this phase is the relative ease and extreme discipline with which Brown transforms his growing number of ever more detailed lists and graphic symbols directly into musical notation. The ease stems from having already composed complex sounds and their relations (timbres, textures embodying aggregates, instrumental transformations) in the environment and identity phases. The discipline lies in administering the envisioned program on the surface by doing “the maximum with a simple amount of material.”50 With so much of the work’s identity already determined, invention in this phase is focused on the most appropriate manner to notate the events in time.51 In his note to the published score, Brown defined four basic types of “notational control” in the work (representative sketches from this phase are in parentheses):52 1.Areas of sound transformation indicated in minutes and seconds (87, fig. 8.1) 2.Strictly controlled areas in metric notation (as in most music) (17, 63, 64, 91) 3.More loosely controlled sections of figurative material in “proportional” Page 215 → notation, which will result in slightly different juxtapositions and sequences in each performance (36, 37, 88) 4.Fully “open form” areas where the inner time and color sense of the conductor has more “free play” (106, 108, 120) One of the most compelling arguments for the compositional necessity of open form solutions in Cross Sections is found in this phase. The sketches clearly demonstrate that while Brown imagined openness as an essential component of the work, present since early PROC sketches, open form was never an explicit goal of the sketching process. In fact, all four of these notation types coexisted throughout earlier stages. What seems to have occurred is a process in which Brown gained ever more control at imagining the sonic images of the work while also discovering the best kinds of openness with which to communicate them in notation. In this phase of the compositional process, Brown needed to determine how these types of openness would appear in the score and cast the work’s materials accordingly. Rhythm receives much attention at this point in the process. Brown made attempts to “sense” the surface rhythmic gestures through temporal notation (sketches 38, 39), in order to verify which was best for the kind of event imagined. In this case, the questions seem to be: Where do these sounds occur in relation to each other and within the time span of this gesture? Does this relationship need to be exact? Sketch 116 exemplifies an amalgamation of timing as well as proportional and metric notation; its hybrid nature was carried into the final score at letter D. With the work of the previous phase accomplished—the relative tension or relaxation of sonorities, registers, and timbres notated—Brown was now able to determine the temporal relations within events. Some examples (19, 39) from this phase did not make their way into the final score. Such selectivity reveals a composer who remained free, even at this stage, to audition and decline elements based on decisions taken in previous stages of the process. The sketches in this phase contain mostly sectional- and phrase-length units of material. Notated items appear contained on one or two facing pages (37), often with minimal or no indications about what precedes or follows. One striking feature is that Brown allocated full pages to sonorities that were destined for open form sections, but seldom wrote instructions about transitions or orderings (cf. sketches 106 and 108, the latter of which is a copy of a manuscript SCOR page). Brown may have considered the open form sections to be so clearly related to

previously programmed Page 216 →elements that further details could wait until the preparation of the final score; or he determined that the final form and function of these sections could be set only in the last phase of composing.

Open the Work: Liberating Content to Realize the “Multi-Ordinal Thing” [The composer] must simultaneously conceive the image of his work and all of the ramifications of its effect and life as it goes out into an infinitely complex world of other people.В .В .В . Rather than abandoning the work and ignoring the performer and the audience, the composer is attempting to bring all of these elements into an intense relationship of oneness within the new conception of order and formВ .В .В . which is new in the sense that it is spontaneously organic and fulfilled by virtue of its process-concept. As ever, if the composer has not foreseen the environment and process clearly and profoundly in terms of his materials, the piece will not function well or come to life.53 If other phases of the process thoroughly explored the why, how, and what of the piece, in this phase, Brown could concentrate on the question of when. The previously carried out stages were aimed at creating an overwhelming but atemporal unity of specific items. This “multi-ordinal thing” was now free to be animated—not defined—by its temporal sequence. In order to fully realize “the liberation of time” set up in the programming phase, Brown’s process would require one additional step: The equivalent liberation within music would be, “the liberation of sound,” and it has happened, but more important to me in a discussion on Form, (which is not an element in an art (as are word, object and sound) but a manifestation of the disposition of elements) would be, “the liberation of Time.”54 The necessity for communication focused the composer’s attention on this potential liberation of time via “the disposition of elements.” Brown viewed a work’s form as one possible outcome of realizing its underlying design: “I prefer to think of form as the result of activity in relation to a вЂlabyrinth of implications’ rather than as a fixed configuration.”55 Page 217 → Fig. 8.10. Sketch 124, Cross Sections and Color Fields. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 218 →In this final stage, Brown attended to the disposition of the entity’s identifying elements and compositionally fixed contents in time according to the previously articulated program. The arrangement of all elements into the final ordering of the notated score (whether open, fixed, semiopen, etc.) had to be settled in this phase, reinforcing the idea that the form of the work is a result of the compositional process. In this way, Brown continued to revel in the paradox that had energized his process throughout: the act of choice on the part of the composer generates freedom for the work. Evidence of this phase is contained primarily in SCOR sketches, where the implications of some of the earlier PROC ideas are fully realized. In early sketches such as 26, 49a, and 50, Brown indicated that some type of open form would play a pivotal role, and more or less specified the degree of openness when establishing the surface. The SCOR sketch 124 (figure 8.10) provides an example of the fluidity that may remain in this final phase of composition. Although the sketch page contains all the musical elements that would constitute letter L in the final score (page 18), Brown wrote instructions about how to cycle through these materials in performance. These would not be the indications included in the published score, however. Brown later discarded the indication to repeat the three final chords in reverse, and instead chose to include written-out dynamic gestures (in time notation) applied only to the final middle-register cluster. The work of the previous stages yielded closely related aggregates made of separable components that could be interchanged in order to create timbral transformations. With these, Brown possessed the ingredients needed to ultimately assemble a coherent, musical whole that could withstand formal mobility: “The construction is

based on the interaction of sound components and the possibilities of spatial and temporal projection inherent in the enumeration of the rhythmic, dynamic, tonal, and structural possibilities.”56 In the work leading to this stage, Brown had composed a network of unordered events, each belonging to and a necessary part of Cross Sections. What remained was to create an acceptable disposition of elements: to liberate an ideal version of the work contained in the environment (recalling Brown’s earlier idea).57 A broad sequence needed to be found that would best reinforce the set of initial questions that defined the entity: I was very interested in the possible manifestations, multiple lives, multiple manifestations of an entity. I consider that the musical materials that I wrote for Available [Forms] I and II are the pieces. The Page 219 →fact that the form is different every time is a plusВ .В .В . but I was always proobject: entity.58 Brown viewed the spontaneity involved in forming a work as directly related to his “sound” approach.59 In addition to providing organization, this approach inherently bestowed a purposeful choice and attendant responsibility upon both composers (during the compositional process) and performers (during the realization of the work in time): So that’s where I began; with what I hoped were the unconditioned facts of SOUND, capable of any configurations which I could find for them or provoke them to assume.В .В .В . This is where the specific influence of Pollock entered and how I got involved in “spontaneous” performance processesВ .В .В . a performer directly confronting the conditions of the work and finding one of the many solutions (forms) of the material at the moment of performing.60 Brown seems to have reserved one critical moment of spontaneity for this late stage of the process. With all the conditions of the work’s “reality” before him, he now sought to find a viable solution to the challenge of configuration. The previous stages documented Brown’s increasing focus on detail and specificity. He would now know exactly what Cross Sections involved: the general nature of sounds (monumental, resonant, primarily chordal); the specific aggregates that make them (Fibonacci, First Chord, Major Sectional Aggregates, Maximum Divisi, Maximum Spreads); the detailed activity of the textures that project these sounds onto musical time; the number of events constituting each; and even the existence and function of the several open sections exploring components of these larger aggregates over the entire time span.61 The commentaries by Brown included throughout this chapter demonstrate that openness was not a singular technique or even a goal in itself: new musical forms resulted from a need for new ways of communicating and new types of freedom for the work. This was borne out in the sketches of Cross Sections as well. Of the few formal diagrams sketched along the way (59 [figure 8.7], 65, 73, 74, 115), most have been categorized as early developments in Brown’s compositional process and therefore not reflective of the unique final form of the piece. Perhaps the sketch most crucial to guiding Brown’s decision-making in this respect is the “identity” sketch, number 3 (figure 8.8)—a concise Page 220 →presentation of the specific elements that define (and actually occur in) the work—not a formal diagram that tells of what the next step will be. Understanding the kinds of decisions that led to the final order of events in Cross Sections can only be achieved by comparing Brown’s sketches with the final score, the result of this finely wrought process. This is represented in table 8.4 (at the end of this chapter), which outlines the final disposition of materials, type of notation, and related sketches. Brown decided to create a final arrangement of the work’s musical materials that both incorporates repetition and constantly changes. The five principal sonorities create a broad trajectory of transformation in which the First Chord (letters A–C; 3.5′),62 Maximum Divisi (letters D, E, G, H, and M; 5′), and Fibonacci Chord (letters O and P; 3.5′) each receive multiple sections; while the “3 chords” (2.5′), Major Sectional Aggregates (1′), are assigned only one section each.63 In this way, only the Maximum Divisi sections are

repeated after an intervening, new sonority has been heard. But the Maximum Divisi sections almost always appear as fragments of the full aggregate, often in contracted versions, which ensures that their longer duration (about a quarter of the work) does not seem disproportionate (it is noteworthy that rehearsal letters E, H, and M involve peaks of activity, extreme cases). The exception comes one sound before letter H. This singular arrival of the full aggregate will (even if slight deviations of timing are taken into account) mark an important temporal event in the overall duration of the work. The full aggregate will occur at either the Golden Section (hardly surprising for a work using the Fibonacci series as one of its principal organizing sonorities) or the midpoint (a nod to the symmetry of the First Chord). This is exactly the sort of compositional control Brown described in his letter to Maderna: placing watershed events in a location that, notwithstanding performer or conductor freedom, would reinforce the work’s primary structuring mechanisms. Brown’s sketches reveal well-made choices regarding when to sound certain aspects of the work’s identity within the overall environment in order to reinforce basic aspects of the entity. Overlaid upon this basic shape, Brown has introduced a trajectory of increasing harmonic intricacy as the work progresses through time—another example of how the open form composer in no way disregards the temporal domain. The pure Maximum Spread Aggregate receives one minute of attention at letter K and continues in the open form section at letter L. The increasing complexity associated with the Maximum Spread Aggregate culminates in a tutti presentation, followed by a single occurrence of a sonority consisting only of pure fifths and then an orchestral cluster. Page 221 →This extreme case interrupts the sense of developing narrative—excessive predictability would have undermined the work’s “multi-ordinal” nature and limited the material’s ability to “go anywhere.” Since the interruption does not sound essential materials, it also serves as a kind of empty space, preparing the way for more Maximum Divisi material. This material will be enriched by its subsequent open form appearance at letter N, where a composite, derived from sketches 59 and 106 (again related to but not part of the principal sonic aggregates), is integrated in the basic sonority in the percussion parts. At the same time, an additional process of generally increasing complexity is carried out exclusively in the open form sections. This complexity must be understood in terms of the way open form sections relate to both their surroundings and each other. In Cross Sections, open form sections begin by timbrally varying but consonantly retaining local chords (letters A and B). They then interrupt the Maximum Divisi continuity with texturally new but harmonically related material (letter F). The next open section introduces a new texture (another extreme case) as it re-sounds more strictly notated figurative material (letter H). Returning briefly to its original, consonant role (letter L), the open form material is itself interrupted by some of the most rare and distinct extreme cases in the entire work: the last two sounds of letter L. After this rupture, several kinds of open material constitute the musical discourse for much of the final third of the work (letters M–P). In this passage, Brown has composed textural variety (letters M–N; N–O; O–P) and harmonic variety (letters M–N; N–O/P).64 This effectively superposes yet another large-scale process in which relatively fixed events gradually transform into a chain of completely open ones.

In Sum I think I was liberating time but it also could be said that I am liberating my content. I am liberating musical materials that I create. That could be said too.65 Everything contained in the sketches points to a process that concludes with Brown assembling the necessary and viable events of the work into a whole.66 Compositional freedom enters late, and as a result of aspects of the process itself. Brown has developed a method that does not give priority to order and causal relationships. By focusing on the entity, first through programming its environment, then by defining and notating its Page 222 →specific attributes, Brown has constructed the “materials and forms which have вЂparts’ and are вЂcomposed’—a continuum of intensity, which is not the sum of parts.”67 In each stage of the process, compositional work moves from the general to the specific, but this process may be carried out time and again, for a variety of cases. In effect, Brown has composed a series of pathways, each one an offshoot of the initial germ, and each one equally valid. When combining these to form a final continuity (a form in time), Brown was careful

to balance the various types of activities, identities, and microenvironments. The resulting sequence coheres due to the clarity of each of the sonic aggregates and the careful relations among them. Every multisection sequence that explores a color field and timbral crossing reinforces the sonic hallmarks of the work. Simultaneously, Brown’s final arrangement put into question any clichГ©d sense of narrative form: the listener is able to experience the entity critically, but is never given one, singular message. In this way, Cross Sections ensures communication, an essential aspect of Brown’s project: The responsibility of the artist is then to bring a work into existence through a total commitment to the basic nature of the materials and the conditions derived from their natureВ .В .В . where is the basis of choice where the function of art is always an open question? .В .В .В What has happened is something like the recognition of the difference between a message and the general concept of communication: a message has specific, usually functional information to impart; communication can take place without words, pastorale [sic] sounds, pictures of family and friends, etc., and without a specific messageВ .В .В . an intuitive contact with anything outside of oneself is a communication.68 The most far-reaching implication of Cross Sections and Color Fields is that its contents have been created in such a way that they are freed for the listener. The final stage of opening the work is only truly realized when Cross Sections is heard in space and time. In performance, the work’s inherently nonlinear relations may be explored by the audience in myriad ways. The nearly infinite number of possible realignments and juxtapositions enabled by the work’s fixed and flexible content will always be there, ready to be experienced, and to shape our experience. Perhaps the more a work of art is able to make us aware of this, the more we too will emerge transformed by the process. Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Identification/comments Shared Page Category Notes by EB attributes 1, 2 Cover pages to file “Major section INST 3 CHRD aggregates” [1ST, FIB, Clean master, contains much process info. /PROC MAX, DIV] 4 CHRD “First chord in piece” INST Transformation (top/bottom) “Auto couple chrd, 5 CHRD PROC Expansion schemes FIB” 6 PROC “Events” Possibilities, time, numbers “Divisi sections” INST 7 CHRD (Schillinger, Kaleidophon, Letter D, G chords w/ orch. /PROC 93) “Major sectional 8 CHRD (INST) Letter J aggregates” CHRD “centering chords,” 9 MIXED /RHYT/ “row from Kouss” PROC “CS&CF”, dated: 10 SCOR Pencil score of page 1 “E.B. 72–75” Conducting corrections to 11 SCOR PROC Duplicate of page 12, incomplete printed score, letter M Conducting corrections to 12 SCOR PROC Performing process possibilities notated printed score, letter M Conducting corrections to 13 SCOR printed score, letter N

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category (14)

PROC

(15)

CHRD

(16)

CHRD

17

SCOR

18

PROC

19

SCOR

20

CHOR

(21)

CHOR

22

RHYT

23

PROC

24

PROC

25

PROC

Identification/comments Shared Notes by EB attributes “Events” Duplicate of page 6 “Major section INST Duplicate of page 3, left page aggregates 1” “Fibonacci, Max. INST Duplicate of page 3, right page Spreads, Max. Div.” p. 4 “copy from original manuscript” letter E “Maj. Sect”; “arithmetic chords” “(from family comb. A 1–4, B 1–4, C1 + D2)” “string chord (19v) from divisi sections” “string chord (19v) from divisi sections”

“COMB.” “from notes for Av. II” (Paris 2/62); “Extreme Cases (6 /62)”

Signed and dated by EB GEST

Attack distribution scheme, letter J

RHYT

Written-out versions of divisi sections—all sections are crossed out, some have “o.k.” in orange; rhythms are labeled “I 1–9”

INST

Conductor indications; timbral families—letter N

INST

Duplicate of page 20

(INST) GEST /INST INST

[Reverse of page 20, incomplete] Dyn. and instr., with expressive indications [letter G?] Instrumental transformation scheme

INST

Page Identification/comments Shared 224 Category Notes by EB attributes →Page 26 PROC Note on how conductor signals numbers 27 INST PROC Timbral possibilities 28 GEST “(orch piece)” INST Verbal and graphic description of textures “Solos”: “All 29 PROC вЂcross sectional’ INST Dated November 7–8, 1974 combos” “Cross sections for 30 PROC Dated November 7–8, 1974 Denver S.O.” Role of chord/instr. in basic gesture; verbal 31 PROC GEST description in pen, asterisk in pencil 32 PROC A—“Begin with” INST Process of chordal transformation 33 PROC “Extreme Cases” INST H/L; L/S; F/S “Extreme Cases” 34 PROC INST (back) 35 PROC GEST Dynamic ranges; string chords; cond. signals CHOR Handwritten “Max. divisi” sections, letters H, 36 SCOR “Max. divisi” /INST K, and M /RHYT

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category 37

GEST

38

GEST

39

GEST

40

GEST

41 42 43 44

46 47

GEST GEST INST INST RHYT /CHOR PROC GEST

48a

PROC

48b

PROC

48c

PROC

48d

GEST

49a

PROC

49b

PROC

45

Identification/comments Shared Notes by EB attributes chords: 1st, Fib., Max., Div. CHOR Orchestration of chords, letter J (3 Arith. Prog.) /INST

“parts”

CHOR /PROC /RHYT CHOR /RHYT RHYT INST INST

“range orig. clust.”

INST

“Extreme Cases” “Max Divis”

INST INST INST /GEST INST /CHOR INST

“4 chords” “entire strings: full voice INST (19 parts)” “5 events” GEST “Tutti structure” /INST

Expansion rhythm/orch. [early sketch, letter G?] expansion rhythm/orch. [early sketch, letter G?] p. 2 Expansion rhythm/orchestration Graphic notation of figures Graphic notation of figures Timbral possibilities (brass) Timbral possibilities (strings) Chords, rhythmic figures from letter M, rhyt./chor. not aligned as in final version “Quiet/instr./general contrast” Letter G: time spans, dynamics and instr. Role of percussion Instr.—chord relations Chord transform process String gesture: time/timbre/dynamics presentation of events in score About transformation

Page Identification/comments Shared 225 Category Notes by EB attributes →Page INST 50 PROC “open form” /GEST Instr. and open form established /RHYT INST Tempo, timbre, strings in 3/4 [version of open form 51 GEST “quarter note = 140” /RHYT before letter B?] “Btween. INST 52 PROC Chord exchange Div.-Max.-Fib.” /CHOR 53 CHOR “Maj. Sect.” INST Harmonic and instrument distribution, letter J 54 CHOR “Max S.: Maj sect.” INST “Maj. section” crossed out (incomplete) “S(max); W(max); 55 CHOR INST Descending transformations B(max); orig.” 56 RHYT “quarter = 60” INST Attack patterns, instr. groups A–E CHOR 57 “Chd 1–2-3” Basic orchestration of three primary chords, Letter F /INST 58 PROC “mixtures of strata” INST Plan for motion in register and color

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category

Identification/comments Shared Notes by EB attributes CHOR Nine-part form sketch; graphic, pitch, and rhythm “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9” /RHYT notation mixed; harps at letter N; strings at letter P

59

GEST

60

GEST

Graphic and pitch notation mixed

INST

Graphic and pitch notation mixed; str. at letter P

61

PROC

“good for automatic coupling”

CHOR /INST /GEST

Chords labeled I 1–9

62

PROC

“8-½ x 14 reduction of CHOR 18—”

63

RHYT /CHOR

64

65

INST

GEST

“Max sp. || Max div.”; “Red.= alt. for SCORE perc.”

PROC

INST /CHOR

66

GEST

67

GEST

68

GEST

69

RHYT

70

GEST

71

PROC

“Fib. Chord”

“first INST chord—Fibonacci—open /CHOR form” INST “Max. Div. Trad. RHYT Bal.” /INST

“quarter note = 60”

RHYT

Tutti chords labeled “2, 2a, 3, 4” Max. div. 3/4—letter E “Sequence senza tempo”—letter O “Extreme Cases (very percuss) all structures”; “sequence of up to 20 sonorities”; letters O & P Opening gesture to 1st open form section; w/ twochord progression Form diagram [similar to—not exact—letter G] First chord sketch: dyn., rhythm, instr. Rhythm continues from front of p. 68 Forty seconds of gestures: dyn., rhythm; instr. groups w/ colors Graphic representation of fields in color [similar to—not exact—letter G]

Page Identification/comments Shared 226 Category Notes by EB attributes →Page PROC Graphic representation of Fib. end (instr., dynamics). 72 GEST “Fib.” /INST Letter P [perc card mentioned on p. 3?] [Very early organization of materials] verbal 73a PROC “muted!” GEST descriptions of events “woodwind + perc”; PROC Timbral transformation w/ timings [ref. to Time Spans 73b GEST Tutti /INST techniques] 73c PROC “High chords” Chord transformation 73d PROC Eight-section form w/ timings, characteristics “1st sectionВ .В .В .” GEST 74a GEST “All first chord” INST Five-minute form sketch with dyn. shapes “5 sections of 4’ 74b PROC INST Described verbally each” INST 74c GEST Graphically notated rhythmic/instr. gesture /RHYT 74d GEST “tutti areaВ .В .В .” RHYT Example rhythm described notated

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category 75a

PROC

75b 75c

PROC PROC

76

GEST

77

PROC

78

PROC

79

PROC

80

PROC

81

GEST

82

GEST

83

GEST PROC /INST

84

Identification/comments Shared by EB attributes “for structural sections use . . .” “75 notes”

INST GEST

“Cross Sections and Color Fields” “Cross Sections and Color Fields” “Fibbonacci [sic]—basic stabilizing INST chord” “(same simple sonority) in 7 diff. freq. fields and color juxtapositions” “4 22 13 17 9 11 15 INST 2” 4–1/2′

INST

CHOR

Notes

INST distribution into four families (1–4; A–D) Distribution of instr., elements, and notes Graphic representation of instr. activity in colors [related to letters C and D] Program note sketch [different from the published note] Program note sketch cont’d Attack tempo distribution

Timbral fields identified First minute graphically notated with timings, instr., proportions [beginning in letter A] Dyn., graphic, and instr. info [version of letters A–D] Graphic sketch Timbre/instr./chord sequences

Page Identification/comments Shared 227 Category Notes by EB attributes →Page INST 85 PROC “12 colors” Time/instr./dynamic/attack relationships /GEST “Think of the sound colors in 3 86 GEST PROC Graphic and pitch info Dimensions—acoustic planes of loudness.” 87

SCOR

88

GEST

89 90

GEST GEST SCOR /GEST

91 92

PROC

93

PROC /GEST

“CROSS” [B 72–75] “Major Sect. Aggregates”

“Subject to Maxi Augmentation!” “Maximum Density: 54В .В .В .” “Preliminary sketch,” dated вЂ73

PROC

Manuscript sketch/draft of full score p. 1 with many annotations

INST

Graphic representation of basic texture at letter J

INST

Texture/register sketch; graphic and verbal info Planes and registers: graphic info Fully notated figures and gestural glyphs; early version of figurations at letter E

INST INST

Template: distribution of orch. in time and frequency

INST /CHOR

Graphic and verbal info

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category

94

PROC

95

GEST

96

GEST

97 98 99 100 (101) (102) 103

GEST INST SCOR SCOR SCOR SCOR SCOR

104

SCOR

105

SCOR

106

SCOR

Identification/comments Shared Notes by EB attributes “Denver PO вЂ73–вЂ74”; INST Graphic info and instr. groups “inst. dated 4 Jan. /GEST 1974” Glyphs with timeline and instr. indications [resembles “30” (60”?)” INST textures at letters G–H] Graphic representation of tutti/divisi scheme [resembles textures at letter H] Glyphs, colors Orchestral complement, groups defined Manuscript p. 2 of score [letters A to B] Manuscript p. 1 of score [to letter A] Copy of manuscript p. 1 of score Copy of manuscript p. 2 of score Copy of manuscript p. 3 of score Manuscript—div. parts, p. 1 [material is from, but not as in final score] Letters E, M Manuscript—div. parts, p. 2 [material from, but not as in final score] letters E, H CHOR /INST

Copy—manuscript, open form: letters N, O

107 SCOR Manuscript—div. parts, p. 3 letter H Page Identification/comments Shared 228 Category Notes by EB attributes →Page CHOR 108 SCOR Copy—manuscript, open form materials: letter E /INST 109 SCOR RHYT Copy—manuscript, with annotations: letter K CHOR 110 SCOR Copy—manuscript, open form materials: letter L /INST CHOR 111 SCOR Copy—manuscript, material related to letter D /INST CHO CHOR Formal sketch with timings, dyn., harms and instr.: 112 PROC /INST letter C /INST “any patters on these GEST 113 SCOR Three percussion chords; harp ostinato; letter F notes” /INST SCOR INST 114 “MAX. 4” (Incomplete) /GEST /RHYT “Fib.—Max—Div.; 3 115 PROC INST Instr. arrangement; notes about processes chords*” RHYT 116 GEST /INST Sketches for divisi material, letter D /CHOR 117 SCOR Manuscript, material ca. letter K

Page 223 →Table 8.2. Coded summary of the sketch contents Page Category 118

SCOR

(119)

SCOR

120

SCOR

Identification/comments Shared Notes by EB attributes CHOR Copy of full score w/ cuts, related to letter G /INST CHOR /INST CHOR /INST

(121) (122)

Copy—full score open form, related to letter L Copy of full score w/o cuts, related to letter G [Digital duplicate of PDF 120] [Digital duplicate of PDF 106]

123

SCOR

124

SCOR

(125)

PROC

“ABS original”

RHYT CHOR /INST CHOR /INST

Copy of full score letter K, with annotations Instructions Primary chords w/ orch.—letter G; trad. + mixed balance; some “N.G.”

Page 229 →Table 8.3. Distribution of sketches by compositional phase Phase Phase I Phase II Phase IV III Phase V Openness Entity Environment Surface Identity 6 (14) 4 (9) 3 (15, 10 30

5

16)

31

8

7

49a, b

18

19

58

24

20 (21)

65

25

23

66

26

47

67

27

51

73a, c, d 28

52

74d

29

53

75a

31

54

77/78

32

55

80

33

57

83

34

59

86

35

60

90

43

62

93

44

68

17

11

19

12

22

13

36

99 (102)

37

100 (101)

38

103

39

104

40

105

41

107

42

108

45

109

56

117

59

119

63

122

64

123

69

124

Page 229 →Table 8.3. Distribution of sketches by compositional phase Phase Phase IV III Phase V Openness Surface Identity 87 70 88 46 71 91 48a, b, c, d 72 95 50 74a, c 96 55 76 94 106 (122) 61 81 97 110 73b 82 (17 sketches, plus the final score’s 23 pages, totaling 40 items) 98 111 74b 89 (24 113 75b, c 92 sketches) 114 79 112 116 84 115 118 85 125 120 (121) (32 sketches) (29 sketches) (30 sketches) Phase I Phase II Entity Environment

Page 230 →Table 8.4 Final disposition of materials, type of notation, related sketches To Letter A Letter B Letter C Letter D Letter E Sonic 1st chord 1st chord 1st chord Maximum Divisi Maximum Divisi (contracted) aggregate (expanded) Notation Time-MeterTime-Open Meter-Time Proportional Proportional types Open 3, 4, 10, 32, Related 51, 81, 82, 3, 82 76, 82, 112 3, 7, 76, 82, 111, 116 17, 63, 91, 104, 105 sketches 87, 93, 99, 100 Time 2.5 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 units* Letter F

Letter G

Letter H Letter J Maximum Sonic Mixed (3 Maximum Divisi Major Sectional Aggregates aggregate chords+perc.) Divisi (contracted) Notation Open Time Open Proportional types

Letter K Maximum Spreads Proportional with Open

Page 230 →Table 8.4 Final disposition of materials, type of notation, related sketches To Letter A

Letter B Letter C Letter D 7, 23, 38–39, Related 47, 36, 95, 96, 57, 108, 113 8, 37, 53, 88 sketches 67–71, 105, 107 95, 96, 118, 120, 125 Time 2.5 1 2 1 units* Letter L

Letter M

Letter N

Mixed Mixed (Max. Maximum Sonic (Max. Div. Spr. + 5ths + Divisi aggregate + perc. + cluster) (contracted) harps) Notation Open-Time Open Open types Related 11, 12, 36, 13, 20, 59, 110, 119, 124 sketches 45, 104 106 Time 2 1 1.5 units*

Letter E

36, 109, 117, 123

1

Letter O

Letter P

Fibonacci

Fibonacci

Proportional/ Semi-open (sequence with free timings)

Open

64, 65, 106

59, 60, 65, 72

1

2.5

* Time units are approximate and are expressed in terms of one-minute increments, based on a twenty-minutelong version (Brown suggests the duration of the work will vary from seventeen to twenty minutes).

Page 231 →

Chapter 9 Then and Now Changing Perspectives on Performing Earle Brown’s Open Form Scores Stephen Drury The concept of the “open form” score, with “mobile” elements, expands on a quality that lies at the heart of the Western classical music tradition, which I will call “performance ambiguity”—a flexibility sometimes demanded by and sometimes only hinted at by the written score.1 Earle Brown’s careful, insistent instructions to would-be performers of his music as seen in the published scores—letters, as it were, from the composer to unknown persons in whom he entrusts the performance of his work—are brimming with italics and quotation marks, revealing an abundance of caution, an attempt to overdetermine a performance situation that finds itself at arm’s-length remove from the composer. Any composer from any period has difficulties aplenty with securing proper performances. The history of notation in Western concert music traces an irregular oscillation between prescription and inspiration. Earle Brown says as much in his lecture “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” delivered at Darmstadt in 1964: “It is well known that notation has been a constant difficulty and frustration to composers, since it is a relatively inefficient and incomplete transcription of the infinite totality which a composer traditionally вЂhears,’ and it should not be at all surprising that it is continuing to evolve.”2 The notation of simple, basic aspects of a performance such as the tempo of a regular pulse (in metered music) already invites ambiguity, with or without Page 232 →the often misleading option of a metronome indication. Even considering generally agreed-upon common practices within a historical period (or geographical location in earlier centuries), informed by the best musicological scholarship, a given performance invariably fixes the necessarily polyvalent qualities of a score, for better or for worse, in alignment (or not) with the composer’s intention. The difficulties for progressive composers, occupied with inventing new musical languages, forms, and understandings, will be still greater. One of the great thrusts of the American experimental tradition of the 1950s and 1960s was denial of (the attempt at) the overdetermined rigors in musical notation of postwar Europe. This of course stemmed partly from the introduction of chance into the compositional act, and more profoundly from the reconsideration of the compositional work as a process rather than as a fixed object. The great compositional leap into the unknown that chance operations and the open score of the 1950s intensified (rather than simplified), exacerbated the difficulty that notation presents. To say, “There is no fixed way for this score to sound” but still reserve the concept of fidelity to the score, the distinction of good versus bad performance, raises a conundrum that unfortunately most classically trained performers are not prepared to deal with, ambiguity and blanket permission not being identical. “Does he want it faster, or slower?” is the preferred question. Brown’s open form scores embrace performance ambiguity on many different levels of structural magnification clear down to note-by-note performance detail. Embodied somewhere in these ambiguities is the “heart” of the piece, the expressive content, flow, and inspiration that unleashes Brown’s concept in such a way as to communicate the essence of the work. The emphatic directives of Brown’s introductory texts indicate his urgent desire to aid the performer in this process. Before trying to uncover the best way for the performers to find and unleash a faithful performance, let’s consider in detail the construction and notation of several of Brown’s works along with the multiple possibilities of continuities offered. The largest structural trajectory in works such as Novara (1962) or Available Forms 1 (1961) varies utterly from performance to performance, but let’s for a moment consider performance ambiguity starting from the microscopic level. Within an ensemble passage such as event 2, page 2 of Novara in figure 9.1, the precise placing

of entrances will vary (will the bass clarinet come in before, with, or after the piano’s low F, or even somewhat earlier or later?). From here on the variability and unpredictability in the vertical relationship of any two notes played by the two instruments Page 233 →increase; as trumpet and then flute are added to the event, the number of possibilities at each moment ramps up drastically. The only (relatively absolute) certainty of the event is that starting with several notes of piano solo, bass clarinet, trumpet, and flute are added in that order, and the concluding sonority consists of the three wind instruments holding a chord.3 (See Brown’s note, cited later, concerning the “relative realization” of the vertical alignments in the String Quartet.) These timings, in a performance, Page 234 →need to depend not on a micro-reading of the score with a T-square lining up the notes but on the many factors that always, in any performance, differentiate a merely accurate performance from an inspired one. Fig. 9.1. Novara (1962), page 2. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Just to the left on the same page, event 1 presents a more deliberate level of performance ambiguity: with each instrument repeating its own phrase and growing “out of sync” with the others (as specified by the composer), the moment-by-moment vertical structures become ever more unpredictable. The variations from one performance to the next of these events reside, microscopically, in the cloud of resultant sound. Brown introduces yet another layer of unpredictability for this same event in his performance notes, in the preface to the score inviting the conductor to “introduce fermata, stops, starts, vary tempi and loudness, etc.” Indeed, the conductor is invited to modify the performance of any of Novara’s events in such a manner. Additional modifications can introduce the fracturing of ensemble passages into solo lines (Brown seems slightly uncertain about this, insisting that “the individual lines as solos should be used only as variations on the identifiable events, as scored”) and the superimposition of various events. (This technique is particularly useful in the rehearsal process, as I note later.) This is to say nothing of Brown’s use of truly graphic notation, as in event 5 on page 3 (figure 9.2). While Brown referred to these notations as reflecting his desire to bring the time of composition closer to that of performance, implying a realization in discrete pitches similar to the more traditionally notated passages, there are recordings made under the composer’s supervision where the freehanded squiggles of the score result in wild glissandi more closely resembling the pure graphic shapes. Looming above these statistical variants is the truly “open form” construct of many of Brown’s compositions. The scores for works such as Novara and Available Forms 1 are distributed over several numbered pages that correspond to numbers on a placard visible to the players; the conductor moves an arrow to indicate a given page, and with his or her left hand indicates the number of the “event” to be played as shown in the score. In this way the performance moves unpredictably from event to event, finding its way through the gestures, melodies, harmonies, and musical shapes Brown’s score provides. No two performances will share the same timeline, or proceed along the same musical path. This revolutionary approach to musical continuity, like other aspects of the new experimental music movement that came out of New York beginning in the early 1950s, was likely to completely baffle the average classically trained instrumentalist; hence the overdetermined prescriptionsPage 235 → of the written prefaces to Brown’s scores. A primary concern was that a conductor (in the early days Brown himself or a trusted and sympathetic colleague such as Bruno Maderna or Pierre Boulez) be clearly in charge of the performance, even in the smaller works. Brown described Maderna’s thoughts about the conductor of Available Forms 1 in a letter to Boulez from 1964: “When Bruno first saw вЂAv. Frms. I’ he said that it was extremely dangerous, and I should not allow the piece to be generally вЂavailable’ to conductorsВ .В .В . and that вЂYou should only allow it done by yourself or me or Pierre.’” Brown had also stated, “The big trap in the Page 236 →whole thing is the conductor and although I have developed the process further recently I, at the moment, don’t see any way round the fact that a musical work needs a вЂproducer’ of that work.”4 Compare BartГіk’s early instructions from the score of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, a piece that is now standard repertoire and can be treated as true chamber music assembled by a community of equals: “One of the pianists should lead the whole ensemble. In addition, he should supervise the percussion players during rehearsal and see that the requirements of the score are strictly observed.” Brown was by all accounts a

masterful conductor of his own works, as testified by a number of observers as well as players under his baton. In the environment of the time, a figure of authority, who was sympathetic to the score and its unfamiliar, brand-new musical conception and mechanics, and present as a guiding hand in rehearsals and performances, was an absolute necessity. However, as I hope to demonstrate, these concerns have been superseded by the evolution of today’s new music player. Fig. 9.2. Novara (1962), page 3, event 5. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. A contributing factor to my own approach to Brown’s music came, as these things do, in reverse chronological order. History, after all, works in both directions, current or more recent events influencing (our understanding of) the past. My work presenting John Zorn’s Cobra (1984) profoundly informed my understanding of the possibilities inherent in Brown’s music. The role of the conductor (or, as in Zorn, the “prompter”), the freedoms, capabilities, and contributions of the instrumentalists, and even the performance situation for Brown’s music are all colored by Cobra and similar works of Zorn. Zorn is, of course, deeply indebted to and aware of Brown’s works, aesthetics, and formal inventions. Cobra is concerned, formally, with two aspects of open form composition. The composer expressly set out to write a compositional object for nonreaders, that is, improvisers who work directly from their ears and imaginations, inventing sounds in the moment rather than reifying notation. How to compose for a performer who will not be “reading” your work? Zorn, in Cobra and other works of the period, works principally with combinatorial structures: at this moment, two players; then several; then one player after another in “single file”; duets form and vanish and are superimposed on other duets. At no point is anyone given information from the composer about the actual sounds to produce. The “calls,” communicated through hand signals and cue cards visible to all players, are principally concerned with how many performers and which performers play, and whether these aspects are fixed or flexible. Occasionally and unpredictably, blocks of sound reappear. And the actual ordering Page 237 →of these structures, as in Brown’s open form, comes differently in each performance. The prompter is sometimes traffic cop (pace Boulez), sometimes muse, sometimes first among equals, sometimes enforcer, but primarily a facilitator, enabling the instrumentalists to communicate efficiently with each other in creating the moment-bymoment form of the performance. Additionally, the total “size” of any iteration of Cobra—the duration, the complexity, the number of calls—can vary radically from performance to performance. (The size of the ensemble hovers around a dozen players.) I have heard performances of Cobra directed by the composer built out of a single “call”; on tours with Zorn’s ensemble, structures would frequently arise of labyrinthine complexity. A “set” would involve several discrete performances of Cobra. Specific works from three other composers also shed some light on the aesthetics and practical issues of performance in Brown’s music. Lee Weisert’s New England Drift (2011) shares with much of Earle Brown’s work mobile elements integrated into a larger fixed form. Weisert requests a conductor but also offers a provision for independent activity during which the players seize control of the details of the performance. A crucial difference from Brown’s work is that the instrumental parts in Weisert’s piece are essentially textural; rather than outlining melodies or rhythms with distinct profiles each instrumental event contributes an identifiable weave or sound color. The result of the play of part against part is closer to watercolor than pencil sketch. In Christian Wolff’s Microexercises (2006), on the other hand, overt concern with texture is almost completely abandoned; the specificity of the details as they abut and overlap warrants our full attention, and a conductor is not called for. The Microexercises range from fully written-out melodies and counterpoints, in which only the instrumentation is not fixed, to radically indeterminate fragments; within these extremes are many pieces that recall Brown’s open form assemblage. Wolff’s aesthetics of sound are in many ways much more radical than either Weisert’s or Brown’s; greater freedom is entrusted to the players to create soundscapes in which details become contradictory, puzzling, provocative, quixotic, or radically unfamiliar. Finally, Terry Riley’s In C (1964)—the primal musical embodiment of an anarchic situation steeped in the politics of the 1960s—invites performers to proceed individually through a series of fifty-three melodic

fragments, creating through a communal effort the ever-shifting details of the work’s morphology, the broad outlines of which are provided by the score, which fixes the order of the fragments. In C is one of those works that suffers Page 238 →repeatedly the indignities of underprepared or ill-informed performances. The ease with which the score can be read too often leads ensembles to assume that rehearsal can add nothing to the quality of the performance, thus failing to develop the very collective unconscious that the piece celebrates. Notoriously, a recording of In C was made by the Shanghai Film Orchestra (using traditional Chinese instruments) led by a conductor (Wang Yongji), which raises all sorts of political/aesthetic issues. The performance—slow, heavyhanded, ponderous—is clearly being steered by a dictatorial guiding hand, rather than evolving as the democratic/anarchic result of the individual players’ contributions.5 My experience directing and performing these works has both opened up new structural possibilities for presenting open form works and given me new respect for the performance intelligence of players within the ensemble. Today’s performers (not all, perhaps, but those willing to play these works—let’s leave those poor tenured symphony orchestra jobbers undisturbed) swim easily in the flexibility required by Brown’s and Zorn’s scores. They have in their ears, as Zorn noted when developing Cobra, a multitude of musical aesthetics, sharpened from listening to musical traditions from around the globe, listening to Cage and Monteverdi and Ravi Shankar and Hank Williams and Steve Reich and the Sex Pistols and Balinese gamelan and Throbbing Gristle. A rainbow of textures, articulations, formal strategies, and humor lies close at hand. Even hardcore conservatory-trained Carnegie Hall aspirants have breathed in this atmosphere. They develop, as it were, internet connections with each other in performance. For the performer, the struggle to create a continuity lies at the heart of the challenge of Brown’s scores. While the dialectic between the identity of the individual events and the score as a whole should be made clear, this can too easily disintegrate into isolated gestures—“one damn thing after another.” Brown’s mature works are generally, in essence, moment form (to borrow Stockhausen’s terminology), as is Cobra. Similar to performing Cobra, pauses can be treacherous—if not set up properly, silences deflate the continuity, becoming tedious, rather than dramatic, calm, or enigmatic. (Zorn notes that in a performance of Cobra, silences are welcome, but not “awkward” silences.) This music invites us to invent a truly new concept of continuity, neither smoothly flowing nor lurching and jagged, neither conventionally dramatic nor meditative, but flowering with juxtaposition and discovery. We need to make the music sound new, embodying but not spelling out in performance the fact that this is only one of many possibilities (unlike Stockhausen in KlavierstГјck XI, Brown avoids requesting Page 239 →multiple performances of a given work in the course of a single concert, escaping Stockhausen’s didacticism; although why not present a “suite” of consecutive movements in a performance of Novara, for example, each with its own specific character?). As in Cobra, not every event notated in Brown’s score need be played. New thoughts require new forms, but the retrograde is also true. Again from “Notation and Performance,” Brown writes: “There is a curious feeling of returning to a musical condition which prevailed in times past which is apparent in aspects of rhythmic flexibility and the increase of performer involvement on a creative level; more accurately and to the point, on the level of creative collaboration.”6 I would argue that the instrumentalists themselves are more suited to taking on this aspect than any single conductor. Multiple sets of ears and musical imaginations, perceptive and interacting, constantly aware of the total sound body, can “crowd source” details of the performance in ways beyond the capability or imagination of the maestro, with more subtlety and flexibility. Part of the ease that today’s players bring to the table has, of course, to do with the more generally agreedupon quality of the scores: Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, and Alvin Lucier are no longer suspect radicals, new kids on the block, but acknowledged masters; their scores are treated with respect and a desire to master the techniques and embody the aesthetics—to make the music sound good. Having the imagination (fed by exposure to variety), the attention (sharpened by high-speed listening), and an instrumental command that encompasses extended techniques brings familiarity to today’s performances.7 Brown’s score instructions at times seem a relic from the age of reluctant new-music performers. (When confronted with a visiting conductor, a professional orchestra’s first job is, according to one Boston Symphony player, “to teach the conductor how we play the piece.” Brown’s orchestral music, unfortunately, has not yet entered

the standard symphonic repertoire, so this particular option awaits further exploration.) What, now, is the function of the conductor? The mechanics remain largely the same, but the micromanaging required in the early years has now been rendered redundant to a large degree by the players’ own expertise. Explanations of procedures, cueing systems, functions of the left hand and of the arrow indicator on the podium are absorbed quickly even by players new to Brown’s music. Gestures become self-explanatory. What’s more, in certain instances, the conductor may not even be necessary. Let’s take an extreme case—Times Five (1963), for flute, trombone, harp, violin,Page 240 → cello, and four channels of prerecorded sound. Times Five, unique in Brown’s oeuvre, includes prerecorded sound that functions, in effect, as a timekeeper—unlike Tracer (in which the four prerecorded sound channels are each individual loops, starting and stopping anywhere, theoretically capable of infinite duration).8 The electronic sound in Times Five proceeds from beginning to end, not in open form but fixed. Anticipating the spoken text track of John Cage’s Roaratorio, the prerecorded sound is a given through-line that paces the work. Around this, the players are provided with materials that are variably open—larger sections are outlined and fixed; within each section ordering of details is sometimes fixed, sometimes not, and vertical juxtapositions are variable and not notated. Substantial silences for each player and for the ensemble as a whole are implicit but not fixed. Brown gives a “suggested” time scheme that details possible textures and variations within each section and calls for a conductor whose cueing function can apply to individuals or the whole group. These cues can also control the texture, clarify the movement from each of the work’s five sections (implicit in the tape’s progress), and indicate specific fragments in sections 3, 4, and 5 (figure 9.3). However, the play of fragments and timbres that results from inspiration and impulse and brings the score to life can be made vivid by the players themselves, reacting instantaneously to the tape and to each other, developing textures, colors, and antiphonies, open to surprise, and to the gift of happenstance. The score can create a direct and immediate collective unconscious among the players in the same way as Cobra or In C does, without the intercession of a conductor. It’s instructive to compare Times Five with the String Quartet of two years later, in which no conductor is required. The String Quartet (1965) is also a continuous score, with the larger sections performed in fixed order. While the material within these sections is ordered for each player (with the exception of the final section), vertical alignment is frequently somewhat free, as a result of Brown’s “time notation.”9 Only in the coda does Brown feel ready to turn the reigns over to the instrumentalists and even here his written performance directions insistently attempt to clarify their responsibility: This section is, in effect, a free coda, to be assembled spontaneously by the quartet. The section includes very articulate materials (all parameters described), very inarticulate materials, “belowbridge” sounds, and sustained sounds. These can be spontaneously assembled in any sequence and position. But through sensitive ensemble Page 241 →listening I believe that spontaneous “rational” continuities of techniques will arise so that, for instance, a statistical area of inarticulate sounds moving into a “below-bridge” area, into an area of primarily articulate material or any other sequence of statistical similarities of texture and style, is created. I prefer that such ordering should come about in this intuitive-conscious manner spontaneously during each performance. A completely pre-performance ordering of these materials—which I could very well arrange myself—would eliminate the possibility of the intense, immediate communication of ensemble collaboration which is an extremely important aspect of music making as I see it.10 Fig. 9.3. Times Five (1963), page 2. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Even writing for a string quartet, an ensemble whose members should certainly be dependable in terms of listening and responding to each other closely, the composer barely cracks open the door to liberating the performersPage 242 → to this extent. Outside of the standard ensemble of the string quartet, three seemed to be the largest number of performers Brown felt ready to trust without a conductor. An outlier here is Nine Rarebits for one or two harpsichords in which each “rarebit” is (more or less) fully notated but their ordering and number of iterations throughout the performance are free (“the work is вЂopen form’ but the materials

within the nine вЂbits’ are highly controlled”). Somewhat related is the early 25 Pages for one to twentyfive pianos, where all of the material is played exactly once. One of the most important functions of the conductor—perhaps the crucial function—is preparation of the ensemble. The first priority is to make the operational procedures of the given Brown score clear—even ensembles with extensive experience performing Brown’s music will discover new wrinkles and variants in each score’s precise and unique mechanism. At the same time, today’s ensembles grasp the route through an open form score much more easily and intuitively than in the past. My own most significant takeaway from years spent teaching the music of both Earle Brown and John Zorn is simple: get the players playing immediately. Carolyn Brown’s letter detailing the first rehearsals of Available Forms 1 relates the excruciating pace: “After quite a lot of explanation by the conductor to the musiciansВ .В .В . they got through only the first page in two hours!”11 At the next rehearsal there was “about one hour of talking before one note was played.” My first experience teaching Zorn’s Cobra was similarly frustrating—a two-hour talk session, explaining rules and signals that were immediately forgotten. Musicians learn new music by playing, the same way a pianist learns the PathГ©tique sonata. In Cobra, the first thing is to introduce the concept of calls, the cueing of the calls by the prompter (similar to role as conductor), and how the players request particular calls. I then introduce the first four calls in the score, which clarify options of when to play, when to quit playing, when to change what you play, and when you have a choice. Then we play a much-simplified version of the piece using only these four calls (out of a score that offers nineteen calls, five tactics, three levels of “guerilla” operations and more). As those calls become familiar, more are added. Similarly, when preparing a Brown work such as Novara, after a brief explanation of the cueing system,12 events that don’t specify precise timing between the players such as page 4, event 2 (figure 9.4)—a collection of unpredictable, nonperiodic loops with the players in ever-shifting relations with each other—are tried out, here by the piano and string players. Next, events that require more closely planned coordination between Page 243 →the players’ passages, such as page 4, event 1, are assembled. Certain hand signals from the conductor can now be brought into play, cueing events, solos, fermatas, and stops. The conductor can then begin the process of overlaying events and solos, placing a solo flute line derived from event 1 over the sustained pianissimo dissonance of the violin and cello in event 4, or placing the repeating piano weave in event 3 underneath an ever-shifting selection of string pizzicati from event 2. After the ensemble has become comfortable with the work, however, there could be ample opportunityPage 244 → for the conductor to turn over the reins to the instrumentalists themselves, allowing the players to take ownership of the means of production. Loops such as events 2 or 3 on page 4 are easily recognizable by other players who could join up with or depart the event at will. Solo lines fragmented from event 1 can be overlaid onto textures without the time-lag of a conductor’s cue. Fig. 9.4. Novara (1962), page 4, event 2. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. In larger works, or the vast majority of Brown’s works that lack the “performance clock” of the prerecorded sound in Times Five or String Quartet’s time line, performance issues arise that make the conductor indispensable.13 But even here, the role of the conductor, rather to insist, has become to liberate and inspire. (Think of a performance of Ravel’s La Valse by the Boston Symphony Orchestra—this orchestra here, really, hardly needs a conductor; they can play this piece in their sleep. After the upbeat is given, the BSO is perfectly capable of proceeding without a conductor’s assistance.) The players feed off the encouragement provided by the conductor. Starting and stopping the piece remains a crucial function, of course—organizing and cueing larger ensemble events (the tutti events on page 3 of Novara) and certain continuities or textures demand the services of a conductor—but I would suggest that today’s best players are perfectly capable of performing Times Five without a conductor and that the resulting performances may even be better for it. Even in midsize works such as Novara or smaller versions of Event: Synergy II (1968), the conductor can, chameleon-like, assume a variety of roles, frequently seeking to vanish into the (sonic) environment, enabling the players as a

partner. (Boulez speaks of learning to dance with the orchestra in his later years as a conductor.) Let’s consider now a larger work such as Tracking Pierrot (1992), described by the composer as a “closed form piece with вЂopen’ interior structures.” For six players plus conductor, the music consists of eleven ordered score pages. Nearly every page has up to five open form events, to be ordered and layered by the conductor, who also cues the transition from one page to the next. The note to the musicians in the score suggests that Brown trusted his players to a much greater extent; the didactic insistence is gone, replaced by invitations to “freely vary instrumental timbre and octave placement” and “loosened” rhythms. The conductor is asked to control “general and/or individual loudness, speed, as well as variations in texture and instrumentation.” Given players with experience, sensitivity, and the right attitude, why not also leave these decisions to the players themselves? The conductor’s singular vision is removed, replaced by a collaborative seeking that may come closer to the “open form” aesthetic. Page 245 →Speed of reaction and more subtle, evocative shadings are made possible. In Tracking Pierrot there are still decisions that can only be made by the conductor (timing of the move from page to page, attacks in unison from the ensemble, a few passages in traditional notation that are greatly simplified with a conductor’s beat) but much of what Brown expects from the conductor, much of what may have been necessary even as late as 1992, now seems suitable for the players themselves to handle.14 Fig. 9.5. Tracking Pierrot (1992), page 1. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. For example, from the first page: since all the musicians play off the full score, this page needs no conductor; after the first system (instrumentalists coordinating the chamber texture among themselves) the open form event labeled 2 can flow freely from player to player, improvising entrances, overlaps, and silences (figure 9.5). The conductor can then, at what seems to be an appropriate moment, signal the move to page 2, and the players proceed to individually contribute and develop the texture, the piano moving freely between event 1 and event 2, providing a sense of thematic awareness that Page 246 →recurs throughout the piece. On the third page (figure 9.6), players can organize the nonpitched textures of the first three events jointly through eye contact and hand gestures, or with the aid of the conductor, punctuated by players individually escaping into event 4, underscored by the piano and percussion motivic chords of event 5. (The pianist and percussionist can be cued by the conductor or agree to move through mutual eye contact. There is even the possibility that the pianist can begin event 5 alone, to be joined by the percussionist as soon as the piano chords are heard clearly, since the percussion player is instructed to improvise on the piano chords.) Even the chorale on page 4 can be organized through mutual eye contact among the players. The conductor, through much of Tracking Pierrot, can assume a role closer to that of the prompter in Cobra—a consigliere, a first among equals. Fig. 9.6. Tracking Pierrot (1992), page 3. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. In the largest of Brown’s works, from the chamber orchestra of Available Forms 1 on up through the ninetyeight-player Available Forms 2 (“for large orchestra four hands [= two conductors]”), this ideal chamber ensemble way of proceeding is not practical, although opportunities for unleashing Page 248 →the players’ creativity will likely still arise depending on the performing group. In the eighteen-player ensemble of Sign Sounds (1972) an interesting opportunity presents itself. Most of the players have notations with similar structures: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion share certain characteristics. Page 1 consists of ensemble writing in proportional notation, page 2 is more sparse and invites somewhat looser player-to-player coordination, page 3 offers fragmented, pointillistic passages, and page 4 is one or more series of chords for each group. However, the events for celesta, piano, and harp (listed as “soloists” in the published score in figure 9.7) don’t follow this scheme, each having six or seven short events, a couple to be looped, and none in coordination with another instrument indicated. The score seems to invite a concerto grosso approach, allowing the piano, harp, and celesta players to go rogue, roaming freely between their events, each player directed by his or her own musical instincts, ears, and understanding of the piece. Why conduct such players? (Here there is a corollary to the “guerilla” option in Cobra, where an individual player—or team of three—can go outside the rules, play

freely, ignore the calls, and disrupt what could threaten to be a static series of ensemble moments.) Page 247 →Fig. 9.7. Sign Sounds (1972), percussion part. Copyright В© 2007 by Henry Litolff’s Verlag. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of C. F. Peters Corporation. Brown’s open form works, especially when understood and realized by today’s lively and informed players, insist on the validity of the now moment, a uniqueness that can only be discovered once and then forgotten. There is a risk embedded in the rehearsal process—that “tricks” will be discovered and come to be relied upon, becoming habitual or dependable. Performances—players—must discover the moment: this is the self-nature of the open form work. This new work, hopefully, negates the goal of the “perfect” performance that has become the curse of Western classical music. The legions of pianists and violinists belched forth from our conservatories, striving to perfect that Chopin or Paganini Г©tude for the next competition, fixing their performances in stone, are given the lie by performances of Brown’s music, with its necessary awareness of the uniqueness and unpredictability of each moment.

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Chapter 10 “Let’s Hear Some Sounds” Earle Brown at CalArts George Brunner Every young composer travels on a journey of learning and searching. Often on that journey, you are asked to show ensembles and institutions your scores. That’s your music. “Do you have music?” You say, “I have my music.” We get used to that, and have to be prepared for that. Prior to attending CalArts in the early 1980s, I studied composition and electronics with Joel Thome and analyzed scores by Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, VarГЁse, Crumb, and others. I also attended rehearsals and performances of the Orchestra of Our Time, conducted by Thome, and it was during that time that I first became aware of the music of Earle Brown. Atonal music and chance processes had both appealed to me, and I composed pieces using both techniques. This experimentation continued at CalArts, and, possibly because I was on the West Coast, chance operations emerged as more interesting for a time. My background in rock music and the importance of improvisation may have also played a role. In rock, there was a combination of song structure and improvisation, and exactly how a song would turn out in performance was not entirely predetermined but recognizable every time. That indeterminacy of outcome was what eventually led me to the door of Earle Brown. The time I had with Earle was unique. There were connections on various levels that did not exist with other faculty. I had started out playing electric guitar in a rock band; Earle played trumpet in jazz groups. Early Page 250 →on in my time at CalArts, I learned audio engineering and landed a job as a recording engineer in the concert recording program; during that time I became aware of the fact that Brown had worked in the recording business. I was happy to discover that I had another connection with Earle Brown. When I learned that Brown was coming to CalArts for an extended period, I immediately knew I wanted to study composition with him. There was a great deal of attention on American Music at CalArts. With the New York School, it was all about Cage, Brown, and Feldman. Those were the big three and the main focus of study. We certainly knew about Christian Wolff and David Tudor but the New York School meant Cage, Brown, and Feldman. When Brown taught the class Music Since 1945, it was clear he was a living part of history. Brown was well-read, but when he spoke of composers, artists, poets, and videographers, it was because he knew them. When discussing, for example, Mark Rothko or Nam June Paik, Earle would make a casual remark about having met them somewhere or having had dinner and discussed something that was going on in New York or elsewhere. Earle was very interested in painting especially. I remember him discussing the importance of Jackson Pollock because of the immediacy of his work. Hurling paint, splattering paint-dipped brushes, or making gestures with color and density were all important to Brown. Immediacy was crucial in Brown’s sound creations, and this resonated strongly with me because at the time, in my view, a score was not so immediate. When the first private lesson came, I was nervous. Earle was quite famous. At the time, CalArts was a land of musical giants, and here was one now, my composition teacher. I had a backpack full of books, as students do, I had an armful of scores, and somewhere in all of this stuff that I had brought, I had a couple of audio cassettes of my music. We met, he invited me into his office, and he was very cordial, very welcoming. Greeting me, I sat down, looked at him, and he said to me, “Let’s hear some sounds.” I looked at him, and I said, “I have scores.” He said, “I know. Let’s hear some sounds. We’ll get to the scores.” This started a relationship between teacher and student that lasted for a long time. I was completely taken by Brown’s approach that day because the quandary I had as a rock musician was that my interest in rock was all about sound, and not so much about score. Later, when I began cello studies, it was all about the sound and the score. I certainly had mixed feelings, so when Earle said to me, “Let’s hear some sounds,” I thought, “First, sound. Second, score.” That meant a lot to me.

CalArts had a very well-known composition program as well as electroacousticPage 251 → program. In the time that I was there in the early 1980s, there were about forty-five composition majors. The principal teachers were Morton Subotnick, Mel Powell, Barry Schrader, Stephen “Lucky” Mosko, and a host of guests with whom we had the opportunity to study, take lessons, or have seminars. These guests included composers like John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, Steve Reich, Charles Dodge, Charles Amirkhanian, John Adams, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Jacob Druckman, Louis Andriessen, and many others, including, of course, Earle Brown. In addition to those very exciting composers and guests, CalArts had a very strong world music program, and it was equally exciting to meet Ravi Shankar, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan, Sabri Khan, Kim Duk Soo of SamulNori, and others. The philosophy at CalArts was about the creation and realization of art across the five schools. Some of the composers participated in everything possible. We had festivals of contemporary music, electroacoustic music, and world music every year, and with countless concerts in between. At any given time in those several years of earning a bachelor of fine arts degree and a master of fine arts degree, I was doing composition studies, studying cello, studying sitar, Ghanaian drumming, rehearsing monkey chant, and composing for the end-of-the-semester concert, the composer’s concert, and usually a piece for the electroacoustic music festival. In composition seminars and lessons, we composed pieces using established techniques. We gathered yarrow stalks, threw them, and read them in consultation with the I Ching oracle. Of course we also tossed coins and explored other chance procedures. It was a place and a time for experimentation on the West Coast. In New York, we knew of the uptown scene (Babbitt, Carter, etc.) and the downtown scene (Ashley, Frith, Glass, Branca). Among the composers at CalArts, not all composers were interested in the process of a magic square, atonality, I Ching, or, for the most part, early minimalism. To whom were we drawn? Well, that left those people, and there were many, who weren’t part of an uptown or downtown group, and one who stood as a giant for many of us, for not being part of that, was Earle Brown. The following passage comes from Earle’s “Form in New Music,” where he describes two paths toward achieving form: The first, and the more conventional in that it is a “method,” is basically “constructivist”: the generating of a rational distribution of units, aggregates, densities, and qualities of sound elements; the Page 252 →numerical manipulation of micro-elements or structures of musical materials to obtain a rational evolution and generation of a macro-Form as a quasi-organic “growth” process. The second approach is to Form as a function of a complex process of not totally rational developments within a chain of cause and effect extending from the original conception of the work, through the graphic representation as “score,” to performance realization as actual sound. It is difficult to describe this process because at every point it is more or less a combination of rational and irrational signs and actions.1 That spoke volumes to me and addressed much for those of us who did not want to surrender to pure process. While many spoke about the liberation of sound, I remember Earle telling us the following in our Music Since 1945 course: “Sounds cannot be more free than they are, but they can be liberated from their conceptual inheritance, and we from ours.” He also spoke about synergy: two elements coming together to produce a resultant element or force greater than the sum of the individual elements or forces, often unpredictably. In chemistry, hydrogen and oxygen can be fused, and they form water. Buckminster Fuller refined the term: “The dynamic state in which combined action is favored over the difference of individual component action. Behavior as whole systems unpredictable by the behavior of their parts taken separately known as emergent behavior.”2 Earle’s interest in synergy resonated with me. I had seen many graphic scores—Cornelius Cardew, Sylvano Bussotti, Stockhausen, Cage, La Monte Young, and so forth—but the connection to that concept through Earle was extremely significant, and I began working on a piece called Ear Shot, which was influenced in part by Folio. In Earle’s later open form pieces, he understood that sound in its natural state is as dynamic as it is in its recorded state. Time in its natural state is dynamic. To deny the dynamic state of sound and of time is to deny

nature, and Brown embraced nature. So in pieces such as Novara (1962) or Windsor Jambs (1980) (I was studying with him when he composed the latter), he didn’t relinquish his responsibility as a composer. Lucky Mosko once told us an interesting story about Morton Feldman doing his box or graph pieces. I think it was a violinist who had a box on the upper line, and it said “3.” The violinist played three notes, which were the notes of “Three Blind Mice” and Feldman went to the performer and said, “What are you doing?” The violinist said, “It says three.” Feldman replied, “Well, you played Page 253 →three notes, but they’re the wrong three notes.” Violinist: “It doesn’t say that.” Feldman never went back to the box pieces again. An attractive trait for me at CalArts was the fact that Earle Brown did not relinquish his responsibility as a composer. My thoughts were that a composer leaving choice of pitch, duration (rhythm), and timbre to a performer abdicated his or her responsibility as a composer. Seldom do composers give credit to the musicians improvising their music. So who is the composer? Earle did not relinquish this responsibility. Duration varies in any type of notated music. Countless recordings of Bach’s Cello Suites reveal this clearly. Brown gives specific pitch for specific instruments and approximate durations that can be controlled, and he encouraged practice and planning. What varied were the events in time, the combination of two or more sounds. Combining the overtone series of a bassoon and a clarinet, or, of a cello and a clarinet, created synergy. That was unpredictable and a really good example of creating a third stream from two joining streams. You multiply that with combinations of this group of players and with that group of players and you’re creating something that you don’t know the sound of until you get it. The pitches were constant, as were the instruments and approximate durations, but the combinations changed. Open form created that kind of synergy, a third stream, and it was natural, it was dynamic, and exciting. I was told that you can never put your hands in the same river the same place twice, meaning the river is the always the same but always changing (Heraclitus). Earle Brown’s music was like thisВ .В .В . it was distinctly Earle Brown and it was always changing. At the micro level, various techniques were used, but organizing material was not first. Brown wanted to get to the core of sound creation, and that was the gesture. How did he do that? He wanted something that preserved the signature of the work. To this end, he might scribble on paper as Jackson Pollock made gestures with paint and use various techniques such as Schillinger to flesh out these things, but first came the gesture. He talked about the kinds of things that he did—large, bold gestures or subtle and small gestures—and understanding that was important. I heard Lucky Mosko conduct Available Forms 1, and it was very well done, but when Earle conducted the performances were so compelling and graceful. With his long fingers, he would signal with his left hand “three,” and point to a player. It was magic what Earle could achieve. He could grasp an ensemble in his hands and mold it into something that was exceptional. In my experience, never did I hear a performance of his music that worked as well as when he conducted it. Working with players was Page 254 →important to Earle. It wasn’t something that randomly happened. He’d work with individual players and say, “This is how you do this, this is your procedure, before you get there.” As I studied with Earle over those years, many ideas and techniques became complete for me. He was a mentor and a friend, and for that I value the time that I had with him. I’ll close with two recollections about Earle’s presence at CalArts. We had a grad composition seminar with Earle. As I recall, it was in the spring semester on Friday afternoons from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. or 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. Thirteen or fourteen grad composers were in this class. At the first class, Brown asked us, “How should we proceed? What is typical for a grad class like this at CalArts?” We responded that since we were all grad students, it was typical that the teacher bought a case of beer and that we would drink it for three hours and discuss music. Of course Earle knew this was not true. He also knew that Subotnick did not drink alcohol. The grad seminar teachers would normally be Mel Powell, Mort Subotnick, and now Earle Brown. Nevertheless, in the spirit of good fellowship and leadership he said, “Anyone have a car? OK, here, can someone go get a case of beer?” One of us did and that began the seminar. Although we never did the beer again, it started the class in such a good wayВ .В .В . a positive feeling. The class proceeded with one student composer each week presenting his or her work to the class, and with the guiding and constructive hand of Earle followed by the rest of the class,

we learned and helped each other and became a fairly close-knit group of grad students. Also that spring, as the weather warmed, we naturally wanted to be outside. Earle played some tennis when he was at CalArts. Someone mentioned a softball game. The two teachers who were interested in sports were Mel Powell and Earle. They both did grad seminars . . . it was perfect. Both agreed, but only under the condition that they would be the pitchers for their respective teams. “Let’s play ball!” We did. This was another great example of the camaraderie and good fellowship that abounded at CalArts. Whether in performances, rehearsals, classes, meetings, socializing with faculty and students, or anything else, Earle Brown was right there in the middle of it all . . . with us.

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Chapter 11 Farewell to the Closed Form Earle Brown and the New York School Hans Zender Translated by Felix Koch Earle Brown was one of the last surviving composers from the group surrounding John Cage that is sometimes referred to as the New York School.1 During the past two decades, he and Christian Wolff may have been outshone by John Cage and Morton Feldman; if one wanted to draw a parallel to the abstract expressionist painters, one could compare the two to Clyfford Still and Franz Kline, whose work still fails to enjoy the same status in the public mind as the work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. When I first met Brown in the early sixties, things were different in this respect. At that time he had already left significant traces in the work of some European composers (the work of Bruno Maderna would hardly be conceivable without his influence), and he was widely discussed. Over the course of our long friendship I came to value him as a most likable man, endowed with a sense of humor, buoyant, not the least bit neurotic, and even (rare among composers) open to the work of his colleagues. Over time, I conducted nearly all his pieces for orchestra or ensemble, and together we conducted his Modules, a work that requires two conductors. He wrote for me what remains perhaps his most radical piece: Time Spans, all of whose individual parts are derived from a single orchestral sound, resulting in a striking simultaneity of extreme stasis and an equally extreme, even chaotic, freedom of movement. Fig. 11.1. Hans Zender (r.) with Alan Pierson (l.), 2011, Ensemble Modern workshop, Frankfurt am Main. Photo by Thomas Fichter. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 256 →This brings us straight to the unique problematic of the “New York School.” The label stands in need of interpretation, since despite their common aesthetic intentions, the members of this group pursued quite different paths. What they shared above all was their resolve not to follow in the footsteps of the European tradition, including the European avant-garde. Arnold Schoenberg and, behind him, the looming shadow of Beethoven: that is what “Europe” meant to these musicians. It meant a conception of music as a fully worked-out construction, but also as the medium of an expressive will that seeks to communicate to the listener the emotional nuances of the composing subject, down to the last psychological detail. It also meant a conception of music as conveying a heroic love of mankind, inseparable from the intellectual penumbra of German idealism. All these associations were ones that the members of the New York School wished to avoid, and it is no coincidence that in the early stages Page 257 →Stravinsky served as a guiding light for all of them. Within European music as a whole, it was Stravinsky whose work was the most remote from German music. But what the “American school” ended up producing was incomparably more revolutionary than the cool objectivity of Stravinsky’s classicism. Their works were so novel that one is tempted to say that the Americans’ creative potential has not yet nearly been exhausted by their own pieces. It is enormous enough to keep many future generations occupied. The project undertaken by these musicians amounts to nothing less than a rethinking of musical time. Before them, hardly anyone thought of music as anything but a seamlessly “progressing,” future-directed temporal process. But what if a composer breaks this continuity into pieces and requires the interpreter to move or jump not just forward but also backward on the temporal axis? With the exception of Charles Ives, another American, nobody ever conceived of polyphony and the interplay of voices as other than temporally coordinated, ordered by means of bars. But what if one comes to think of the temporal distance between the different parts not as equal to zero, but as equal to X? Furthermore, a piece always used to be thought of as a self-contained whole, as a structure mirroring the life of an individual conceived as an organic process, by offering a beginning, a gradual unfolding (perhaps leading up to certain points of culmination), and a closing

(placed at the “right” moment, formally speaking). But what if some music has neither a beginning nor an ending, so that no development can take place? What if there is no discernible identity or similarity among individual moments, so that no proportionate form emerges? What, therefore, if one encounters musical time, or indeed seems to consciously encounter it for the very first time, without finding it to transport any “meaning” (be it the meaning of a message, a shape, or at least a characteristic continuity)? Given the assumptions of the European tradition, these dizzying possibilities were not even thinkable. It would be a task for a philosopher to show how the axioms of the musical work in Europe were determined by classical metaphysics, and how a change in those axioms accordingly calls for some other philosophical paradigm. The American musicians resorted to quite a different kind of solution, which was suggested to them by their cultural environment. During World War II, and especially in the 1950s and 1960s, New York had internationally become the most vibrant center for the visual arts. Here too there was an engagement with, and a disentanglement from, the European tradition, which came to fruition in abstract expressionism. All the composers in the group around John Cage Page 258 →were deeply involved with the visual arts, either through their relations with painters or because they themselves produced works of visual art (as Cage did). The result was that these composers, who no longer wanted to rely on the traditional structural principles of their own artistic medium, looked to the visual arts to find their formal paradigms. In other words: They transposed spatial ideas into a temporal medium. What this meant in a particular case can be exemplified by considering Earle Brown’s relationship to the work of Alexander Calder2—a relationship that Brown continued to invoke throughout his life. The mobility of Calder’s sculptures allows viewers to experience his works in ever-changing constellations and optical intersections. The possibility of viewing a sculpture from different angles—a possibility inherent in the medium—is thus supplemented by the shifting of proportions within a work. Brown discovered his wholly novel formal idea of assembling a musical piece from movable parts through his contact with Calder’s works. The temporal succession, overlapping, and repetition of the component parts remain undetermined. In contrast to Calder, who merely expands the traditional possibilities of sculpture, Brown’s pieces suspend the received axioms of musical aesthetics, which required the control of polyphonic simultaneity, the determinacy of temporal succession, and a closed, proportionately ordered sequence. To describe the relation between the music of the New York School and the art of abstract expressionism, it is not sufficient to point to formal analogies. The same formal strategies present themselves quite differently to the eyes and to the ears, because temporal and spatial perception are fundamentally different. They convey two different kinds of “message” about the world, for which there is no common denominator. When a musician ceases to treat the real temporal continuum as the basis of his doings and imaginings, and comes to treat time as a space that allows one to move in different directions, he abandons our familiar notion of time. We should think of this as a type of abstraction, since such a musician abstracts from a basic property of time: its irreversibility. The forms he creates no longer depict linear movements on the temporal axis, instead describing imaginary, nonlinear temporal progressions or temporal leaps. In Earle Brown’s music, for example, the parts of a work (which may last only seconds, or much longer) are often assigned numbers. Musicians communicate by hand signals about which part to play for how long, and which additional modifications to introduce regarding tempo, volume, and orchestration. Each performance creates a changing mosaic from the existing Page 259 →building blocks. The conductor takes on the role of a magician, but also the role of a trickster. He manipulates time and handles the energies bound in the composer’s notation. It is this manipulative aspect of the new American music that first captured the interest of the European avant-garde. When we look at what the Europeans made of Brown’s playful and nonacademic approach, we often encounter the dead surfaces of a pseudocomplex aleatoric music, where any distinctive harmony or rhythm is submerged in an amorphous bustle. The work of John Cage suffered a similar fate during its initial reception. The most important aspect of his work, with Cage’s own words—“sounds as sounds themselves,” the deliberate absence of form—was not understood, or misunderstood as Dadaist or Surrealist, or even interpreted in terms of a Hegelian negative dialectics. This is unsurprising, since the tradition of Zen Buddhism from which Cage’s thinking developed was virtually unknown to the average educated person in Europe, or was at best perceived as an exotic practice on

the basis of superficial information. Similarly, the music of Morton Feldman—an artistic genius who during his lifetime was generally regarded as a bizarre misfit—was initially perceived as mannerist and ornamental. The fact that this music entertained a fundamentally novel kind of relationship with time was lost on most listeners. Considering Feldman, in particular, may afford us a deeper understanding of the novelties developed by the Americans. Feldman stated: “My music dies a natural death.” This is the key to understanding his works. We might describe his musical temporality as “entropic,” and contrast it with the “ectropic” temporality of the European tradition. Listening to Feldman’s music leads us to first appreciate the extent to which the European musical work is an epiphany, a seemingly timeless depiction of the organic temporal structure of a life—what Georg Picht has described as an “image of the gods.” In the works of the Americans, we first encounter mortality and inescapable oblivion as paradigms. Nothingness takes the place of being, and a unifying logic of construction is replaced by a nonlinear openness. All this is achieved by strictly internal means, by way of musical form (rather than through words or other kinds of nonmusical content), since in music, form is nothing but the way in which sound is related to time. The tendencies that came to replace this high point of abstraction—Pop art in the visual arts, minimalism in music—were initially felt to be liberating, because they were ways of overcoming formalism. But looking back from a greater historical distance, this reversal can instead appear as a capitulation and a flight from the enormous aspirations of American art Page 260 →in the fifties and sixties. It can appear as a fatal lapse from a newly achieved intellectual peak into the lowlands of entertainment and decorative plastering, which is where the increasingly commercialized trends of pop and minimalism soon ended up. Meanwhile, over the past thirty years, a docile and simple-minded Europe has had nothing better to do than to cram its art markets, museums, and musical temples with easily consumable products of this sort. Yet other tendencies over the past thirty years also testify to a certain startled recoil from the extreme positions of the Americans (and I cannot quite claim an exception for my own work here)—a retreat to more closed and “secure” bastions as a “reprieve” from the existential shock inflicted by those works. And yet something developed in Europe that had not been accomplished by either the American or the European avant-garde: a new relationship to history. This new relationship consists not in the kind of direct, linear connection to the tradition that had been radically exorcised by both these avant-gardes. Instead it consists in viewing the historically received forms as a quarry or as raw material for new designs, as a copresence of widely differing but equally valuable forms from all ages and cultures, supplied to us by what Bernd Alois Zimmermann has called the “spherical shape of time.” With this “relativism” characteristic of postmodernity, Europe seems to have outgrown the image that the younger Earle Brown and his friends had of it: as dogmatic, idealist, metaphysical, and Eurocentric. Giving an aesthetic shape to this intertwining of past and present requires nonlinear formal strategies. This sets the stage for the next phase of European engagement with the American aesthetic innovations. If the aim is to display “history” as an unfinished, essentially open process, and to depict the individual as a link in a larger chain (rather than as a “world unto itself”) without thereby destroying the individual, one needs to find aesthetic forms that present the empty horizon of a complete openness, while at the same time giving space—and time—to a multiplicity of different, variously closed or open structures set against this horizon. The aesthetic desideratum, then, is not to integrate open structures into a closed nexus but rather to achieve a (paradoxical) simultaneity of “openness” and “closure.” Here we reach a point where artistic imagination meets philosophical speculation and the search for a new worldview. The philosopher Jean Gebser speaks of an imperceptibly emerging “integral consciousness” that would supersede the archaic, magical, mythical, and mentalistic-scientific Page 261 →forms of consciousness of the past, not by replacing them but by integrating them into itself.3 And as early as the 1950s, the engineer and scientist Christian Kellerer spoke of the gradual emergence of a higher or highest cultural consciousness that would comprehend the limitations of previous worldviews and achieve a synoptic perspective on them. He believed that this type of consciousness had already been realized in East Asia’s Zen culture. Advanced art

might play its part in propelling the development of such new forms of consciousness, for it acts not only as a seismograph of its times but also as a moving force in its own right—as the example of the New York School demonstrates. *** Der Abschied von der geschlossenen Form Earle Brown und die В«New York SchoolВ» Hans Zender Earle Brown war einer der letzten Komponisten jener Gruppe um John Cage, die manchmal als В«New York SchoolВ» bezeichnet wird. Er und Christian Wolff standen in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten vielleicht etwas im Schatten von John Cage und Morton Feldman—wollte man eine Parallele zu den Malern des Abstrakten Expressionismus ziehen, so kГ¶nnte man sie mit Clyfford Still und Franz Kline vergleichen, deren Werk im Г¶ffentlichen Bewusstsein immer noch nicht den gleichen Stellenwert hat wie das von Barnett Newman und Mark Rothko. Als ich Brown Anfang der 60er Jahre kennen lernte, war das anders; er hatte damals schon deutliche Spuren bei einigen europГ¤ischen Komponisten hinterlassen—das Werk Bruno Madernas etwa ist ohne ihn kaum vorstellbar—und stand im Mittelpunkt der Diskussion. Ich lernte ihn in den langen Jahren einer guten Freundschaft als einen besonders liebenswerten Menschen schГ¤tzen—humorvoll, lebensfroh, vГ¶llig unneurotisch und sogar (unter Komponisten Г¤uГџerst selten) offen fГјr die Arbeit der Kollegen. Im Lauf der Zeit dirigierte ich fast alle seine StГјcke fГјr Orchester oder Ensemble, mit ihm zusammen seine В«ModulesВ», ein Werk das zwei Dirigenten verlangt. Und er schrieb fГјr mich sein vielleicht radikalstes StГјck: В«Time SpansВ», in dem alle Einzelteile aus einem einzigen Orchesterklang abgeleitet sind; das verblГјffende Ergebnis ist die Gleichzeitigkeit von extremer Statik und ebenso extremer, geradezu chaotischer Freiheit der Bewegung. Page 262 →Damit sind wir mitten in der einzigartigen Problematik der В«New York School.” Dieser Name bedarf der Interpretation, denn ihre Mitglieder hatten zwar gemeinsame kГјnstlerische Intentionen, beschritten aber sehr verschiedene Wege. Gemeinsam war ihnen vor allem der feste Vorsatz, auf keinen Fall an die europГ¤ische Tradition anzuknГјpfen—wobei diese Tradition auch die europГ¤ische Avantgarde einschloss. Arnold SchГ¶nberg und, hinter ihm als riesiger Schatten, Beethoven: Das war fГјr diese Musiker damals В«EuropaВ»; Musik als bis ins einzelne auskonstruierter Zusammenhang, ebenso aber als TrГ¤ger eines Ausdruckwillens, der die Empfindungsnuancen des komponierenden Subjektes bis zu den feinsten psychologischen VerГ¤stelungen dem HГ¶rer nahebringen wollte. Musik auch als Botschaft heroischer Menschenliebe, nicht ablГ¶sbar vom geistigen Umkreis des deutschen Idealismus. All das wollte man nicht, und es ist kein Zufall, dass fГјr alle Komponisten der Gruppe in ihren frГјhen Stadien Strawinsky der Orientierungspunkt war—Strawinsky, der innerhalb der europГ¤ischen Musik die denkbar größte Distanz zur deutschen Musik hatte. Doch was die В«amerikanische SchuleВ» schlieГџlich an MusikentwГјrfen in die Welt brachte, war unvergleichlich viel revolutionГ¤rer als der kГјhle Objektivismus des klassizistischen Strawinsky. Es war so neuartig, dass man heute versucht ist zu sagen: Das Ideenpotenzial der Amerikaner ist durch ihre eigenen StГјcke noch Гјberhaupt nicht ausgeschГ¶pft. Es ist so gewaltig, dass es in Zukunft noch viele Generationen beschГ¤ftigen kГ¶nnte. Was diese Musiker in Angriff genommen haben, ist nicht mehr und nicht weniger als das Unterfangen, die musikalische Zeit neu zu denken. Kaum jemand vor ihnen ist auf die Idee gekommen, sich Musik anders denn als einen bruchlos В«nach vorneВ», Richtung Zukunft strГ¶menden zeitlichen Prozess vorzustellen. Wie aber, wenn der Komponist diese KontinuitГ¤t in StГјcke zerbricht und seinen Interpreten auferlegt, mit diesen StГјcken nicht nur vorwГ¤rts, sondern auch rГјckwГ¤rts zur Zeitachse zu gehen bzw. zu springen? Niemand—auГџer Charles Ives, auch ein Amerikaner—hat sich Mehrstimmigkeit, Zusammenspiel jemals anders vorgestellt als zeitlich koordiniert, durch den Taktstrich geordnet. Wie aber, wenn man sich den zeitlichen Abstand zwischen den Einzelstimmen nicht als gleich 0, sondern als gleich X vorstellt? Und: Ein StГјck wurde immer als in sich geschlossenes Ganzes gedacht, als ein Gebilde, das in seinem Anfang, in seiner (eventuell zu bestimmten Kulminationspunkten fГјhrenden) allmГ¤hlichen Entfaltung und in seinem (im formal В«richtigenВ» Moment gesetzten) Abschluss das Leben eines Individuums als organischen Prozess spiegelt. Wie aber, wenn eine Musik weder Page 263 →Anfang noch

Schluss hat und infolgedessen keine Entwicklung stattfinden kann; wenn keine IdentitГ¤t oder Г„hnlichkeit von Einzelmomenten feststellbar ist und infolgedessen keine proportionierte Form sich bilden kann? Wie also, wenn man musikalischer Zeit begegnet, ja ihr zum ersten Mal bewusst zu begegnen meint, ohne einem in ihr transportierten В«SinnВ» (sei es einer Botschaft, einer Gestalt oder wenigstens einer charakteristischen KontinuitГ¤t) zu begegnen? Diese schwindelerregenden MГ¶glichkeiten Гјberhaupt nur zu denken, war unter den Voraussetzungen der europГ¤ischen Tradition nicht mГ¶glich. Es wГ¤re eine Aufgabe fГјr einen Philosophen zu zeigen, wie die Axiomatik des musikalischen Kunstwerks in Europa von der klassischen Metaphysik bestimmt war und dass eine Г„nderung dieser Axiomatik auch andere philosophische Paradigmen verlangt. Die amerikanischen Musiker halfen sich zunГ¤chst auf eine ganz andere Weise, die ihnen durch ihre kulturelle Umwelt nahegelegt wurde. New York war wГ¤hrend des Krieges und vor allem in den 50er und 60er Jahren zum lebendigsten internationalen Zentrum der bildenden Kunst geworden. Die Auseinandersetzung mit bzw. die LoslГ¶sung von der europГ¤ischen Tradition fand auch hier statt und brachte als Frucht den Abstrakten Expressionismus hervor. Alle Komponisten der Cage-Gruppe waren aufs Engste mit der bildenden Kunst verflochten, sei es, dass sie mit Malern befreundet waren, sei es, dass sie selber (wie Cage) Werke der bildenden Kunst hervorbrachten. Das fГјhrte im Endeffekt dazu, dass die Komponisten, die in den traditionellen Bauprinzipien ihrer eigenen Kunst keine StГјtze mehr fanden, Grundvorstellungen der bildenden KГјnste als formale Paradigmen benutzten. Das heiГџt: Sie Гјbertrugen rГ¤umliche Vorstellungen in das Medium der Zeit. Was das im Einzelfall bedeutet, sei hier am Beispiel der Beziehung Earle Browns zu der Kunst Alexander Calders dargestellt—einer Beziehung, auf die sich Brown lebenslang immer wieder berief. Durch die MobilitГ¤t seiner Plastiken gibt Calder4 seinen Betrachtern die MГ¶glichkeit, die Teile seines Werkes in immer neuen Konstellationen und optischen Гњberschneidungen zu sehen. Zu der schon immer gegebenen MГ¶glichkeit, sich eine Plastik von allen Seiten anzuschauen, kommt also hier noch eine—limitierte—Verschiebung der Proportionen innerhalb des Gebildes. Brown hat seine gГ¤nzlich neuartige Formidee, ein MusikstГјck aus mobilen Einzelteilen aufzubauen, im direkten Kontakt mit der Kunst Calders gefunden: Einzelteile, deren zeitliche Folge, deren zeitliche Гњberlagerung und deren Wiederholung unbestimmt sind. Im Gegensatz zu Calder, der die MГ¶glichkeiten der traditionellen Plastik lediglich erweitert, setzt Page 264 →Brown mit seinen StГјcken die alten Axiome Kontrolle der mehrstimmigen Гњberlagerung, der determinierten zeitlichen Folge aller Einzelmomente und der Geschlossenheit eines proportionierten Ablaufs auГџer Kraft. Es genГјgt nicht, auf formale Analogien hinzuweisen, wenn man die Musik der В«New York SchoolВ» in ihrer Beziehung zum Abstrakten Expressionismus beschreiben will. Die gleichen formalen Strategien stellen sich fГјr Auge und Ohr ganz anders dar, weil zeitliche und rГ¤umliche Wahrnehmung fundamental verschieden sind: Es handelt sich um zwei verschiedene В«BotschaftenВ» Гјber die Welt, welche nicht auf einen gemeinsamen Nenner zu bringen sind. VerlГ¤sst der Musiker das reale Zeitkontinuum als Basis seines Tuns und Vorstellens und behandelt er die Zeit wie den Raum, in dem man sich in verschiedenen Richtungen bewegen kann, so verlГ¤sst er das gewohnte Bild, das wir uns von der Zeit machen. Man wird hier zunГ¤chst von Abstraktion sprechen mГјssen, denn ein solcher Musiker abstrahiert von einer Grundeigenschaft der Zeit: ihrer IrreversibilitГ¤t. Seine Formen bilden nicht mehr lineare Bewegungen auf der Zeitachse ab, sondern beschreiben imaginГ¤re, nichtlineare ZeitverlГ¤ufe bzw. ZeitsprГјnge. Bei Earle Brown zum Beispiel erhalten sehr oft die Teile eines Werkes Nummern (ein solcher Teil kann einige Sekunden oder auch viel lГ¤nger dauern); mittels Handzeichen kann man sich verstГ¤ndigen, welcher Teil wie lange gespielt wird, welche zusГ¤tzlichen Modifikationen an seinem Tempo, seiner LautstГ¤rke, seiner Orchesterbesetzung vorgenommen werden. Es entsteht ein mit jeder AuffГјhrung sich verГ¤nderndes Mosaik aus den vorgegebenen Bausteinen. Der Interpret bekommt etwas von einem Magier, aber auch von einem Taschenspieler: Er manipuliert Zeit und hantiert mit den Energien, die der Komponist in seiner Notation gebunden hat. Dieser manipulative Aspekt interessierte die europГ¤ische Avantgarde auch als Erstes bei den Amerikanern. Betrachtet man, was in Europa aus dem sehr spielfreudigen und gГ¤nzlich unakademischen Ansatz Browns wurde, so stoГџen wir schnell auf die toten FlГ¤chen einer pseudokomplexen Aleatorik, in denen jede individuelle Harmonik und Rhythmik von amorphem Gewusel aufgesaugt wird.

Auch Cage wurde in seiner ersten Rezeptionsphase in seinen wichtigsten Aspekten—denen des В«nichtklingenden KlangsВ», der В«Nicht-Form»—nicht begriffen, als Dadaist bzw. Surrealist missverstanden, wenn nicht gar im Sinne einer negativen Dialektik hegelianisch interpretiert. Dies war auch gar kein Wunder, denn der Zen-Buddhismus, aus dem Cage sein Denken entwickelte, war dem europГ¤ischen Durchschnittsgebildeten so gut wie unbekannt—oder zumindest nur ein durch oberflГ¤chliche InformationPage 265 → vermittelter Exotismus. Und wenn wir einen Seitenblick auf Feldman werfen, so stellen wir fest, dass die Musik dieses genialen KГјnstlers (der bis zu seinem Tod meist als bizarrer Sonderling angesehen wurde) zunГ¤chst als manieristisch und ornamental verstanden wurde; dass sie ein fundamental neues VerhГ¤ltnis zur Zeit hat, entging den meisten. Vielleicht kann man gerade durch Feldman zu einem tieferen VerstГ¤ndnis des Neuen kommen, das die Amerikaner entwickelten. В«My music dies a natural deathВ», hat er gesagt—und damit den SchlГјssel zum Verstehen geliefert. Man mГ¶chte seine musikalische Zeit als В«entropischВ» bezeichnen; die der europГ¤ischen Tradition wГ¤re dann В«ektropisch.В» HГ¶rt man Feldmans Musik, so begreift man erst, wie sehr das europГ¤ische musikalische Kunstwerk eine Epiphanie, eine zeitlos erscheinende Abbildung der organisch sich aufbauenden Lebenszeit ist—ein В«GГ¶tterbildВ», wie es Georg Picht ausgedrГјckt hat. In der Kunst der Amerikaner tritt zum ersten Mal die Sterblichkeit, das unaufhaltsame VerlГ¶schen als Paradigma in Kraft; tritt das Nichts an die Stelle des Seins, die nichtlineare Offenheit an die Stelle Einheit schaffender Konstruktionslogik; all dies aber strikt innermusikalisch, durch die Form (und nicht etwa durch Texte, inhaltliche BezГјge usw.); denn Form in der Musik ist nichts anderes als Beziehung der KlГ¤nge zur Zeit. Die StrГ¶mungen, die diese HochblГјte der Abstraktion ablГ¶sten—Pop-Art in der bildenden Kunst, Minimalismus in der Musik—hatten im ersten Augenblick ihres Erscheinens sicher etwas Befreiendes, weil diesen Formalismus Гњberwindendes. Aber wenn man aus der heute erreichten historischen Distanz zurГјckschaut, so kann dieser Umschlag doch auch als Kapitulation und Flucht vor dem riesigen Anspruch der amerikanischen Kunst der 50er und 60er Jahre erscheinen; als fatales Abkippen von einer gerade erreichten geistigen HГ¶he in die Niederungen von Entertainment und tapetenhafter DekorativitГ¤t, zu denen die sich zunehmend kommerzialisierenden StrГ¶mungen von Pop und Minimalismus sehr schnell gelangten. Und das in seiner Gelehrigkeit oft doch so dГјmmliche Europa hatte in den vergangenen dreiГџig Jahren nichts Besseres zu tun, als seine KunstmГ¤rkte, Museen und Musiktempel mit den so leicht verdaulichen Produktionen dieser Art vollzustopfen. Betrachtet man die Гјbrigen StrГ¶mungen der vergangenen dreiГџig Jahre, so wird man allerdings auch hier ein gewisses В«erschrecktes AbrГјckenВ» von den extremen Positionen der Amerikaner beobachten (ich kann auch meine eigene Arbeit dieser Jahre davon nicht ganz ausnehmen), ein Sich-ZurГјckziehen in geschlossene, В«sichereВ» Bastionen als В«ErholungВ» von dem erlittenen existenziellen SchockВ .В .В . Page 266 →Und doch hat sich in Europa in diesen Jahren etwas entwickelt, das weder die amerikanische noch die europГ¤ische Avantgarde entwickeln konnte: ein neues VerhГ¤ltnis zur Geschichte. Allerdings handelt es sich eben nicht um einen direkten, linearen Bezug zum Гњberkommenen, wie ihn beide Avantgarden ja radikal austrieben, sondern um eine Anschauung der geschichtlichen Formen als Steinbruch, als Rohmaterial fГјr neue Gestaltungen, als ein von der В«Kugelgestalt der ZeitВ» (Bernd Alois Zimmermann) bereitgestelltes Nebeneinander der verschiedensten und potenziell gleichwertigen Formen aller historischen Epochen und Kulturen. Durch diesen В«RelativismusВ» der Postmoderne scheint Europa dem Bild entwachsen, das sich noch der junge Earle Brown und seine Freunde von ihm machten: als dogmatisch, idealistisch, metaphysisch und eurozentrisch fixiert. Um aber ein solches Ineinander von Geschichte und Gegenwart Г¤sthetisch zu gestalten, sind nichtlineare Formstrategien nГ¶tig; damit ist die nГ¤chste Phase einer Auseinandersetzung mit den Ideen der Amerikaner programmiert. Will man В«GeschichteВ» als einen unabgeschlossenen, ja wesenhaft offenen Prozess zeigen, will man das Individuum, ohne es zu zerstГ¶ren, als Glied einer Kette (statt als В«eigene WeltВ») darstellen, so bedarf man einer Formgebung, welche als Horizont die Leere einer totalen Offenheit zeigt, vor diesem Horizont aber einer Vielzahl verschiedenartiger, in sich geschlossener oder offener Gebilde Raum—bzw. Zeit—gibt. Nicht die Integration offener Strukturen in einen geschlossenen Zusammenhang, sondern die (paradoxe) Gleichzeitigkeit von В«offenВ» und В«geschlossenВ» ist also die Г¤sthetische Wunschvorstellung.

Hier sind wir in einer Region angelangt, in der künstlerisches Konzipieren, philosophische Spekulation und das Tasten nach einem neuen Weltbild sich berühren. Der Philosoph Jean Gebser sprach von einem sich unter der Hand vorbereitenden «integralen Bewusstsein», das die vergangenen archaischen, magischen, mythischen und mental-wissenschaftlichen Bewusstseinsformen ablöst und sie—statt sie zu verdrängen—in sich integriert.5 Der Ingenieur und Naturwissenschafter Christian Kellerer sprach schon in den 50er Jahren von den sich bildenden Stadien einer kulturellen Hoch—bzw. Höchstbewusstheit, welche die Bedingtheit der bisherigen Weltbilder durchschaut und sie zusammensieht—einer Bewusstheit, von der er glaubt, dass sie in der Zen-Kultur Ostasiens schon erreicht ist. Avancierte Kunst mag an der Bildung solch neuer Bewusstseinsschübe beteiligt sein, denn sie ist nicht nur «Seismograph», sondern auch selber wirkende Kraft—wie wir es am Beispiel der «New York School» beobachten konnten.

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Select Texts by Earle Brown Earle Brown labeled the following essay a “Thesis” when he sent the text to his former Schillinger House classmate Ray Grismer (1927–2010) around 1951. Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method had been a topic of discussion in their previous correspondence. Brown was living in Denver at the time and opened a studio for teaching the Schillinger system, which largely attracted students from the University of Colorado in Boulder and Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Also in 1951, Brown had met John Cage in April and had plans to study with Arnold Schoenberg in the summer. While Schoenberg’s declining health prevented Brown’s studies from materializing, Earle and Carolyn Brown continued their contact with Cage and his colleagues and eventually moved to New York City in August 1952. In this text and those that follow, Brown’s writing style is nominally edited. Shorthand references and abbreviations are spelled out, but the idiosyncracies of Brown’s writing—extended ellipses, colons with dashes, multiple question marks, deliberate malapropisms, and word play—remain unchanged.

Why I Am a 12-Tone Composer (ca. 1951) I compose because of a feeling (shall we say need to express??) NO. A need to exploreВ .В .В . a feeling of dissatisfaction with things as they are or perhaps a playing around with sound because I can conceive of something else to do with sound. It is [an] intellectual thing rather than an emotional thing though I get emotion from musicВ .В .В . but it is an emotion of the mind more than of the senses. I take no truck with music being a communicative art in that the listener gets a direct, definite picture that the composer intends. If you hear a Beethoven storm scene can you be certain that it is a storm at Page 268 →sea, on land or in the air, or is it a storm at all in that senseВ .В .В . is it a very angry man storming through the woods to grandma’s house.В .В .В . chipmunks running from a dog on a hot day??? Without the story that the guy had in mind.В .В .В . what in hell does it mean??? If he wrote a novel you’d know.В .В .В . why doesn’t he?? If he doesn’t care if you get the definite picture then he is only using a story as a crutch rather than using his mind to create form. In other words, I believe in pure music rather than program music. Do you? Not that I don’t dig Bach, Wagner, Berg’s Wozzeck, etc.В .В .В . it is just that I want to write differently. This means to me: .В .В .В not using all of the elements we have at hand, on an equal basis. No story; then no picture melodies or harmonies. They are not pictures or they are all pictures but they are my pictures not the pics from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Here we get to my pet theory on reality.В .В .В . if I tried to picture or imply a storm I could do what everybody else doesВ .В .В . pile it up: timps rolling: pleading violins: grotesque brass, etc. But it would NEVER BE a storm.В .В .В . only a feeble imitationВ .В .В . not real—like a realistic painting of a tree.В .В .В . it is not a tree. A Mondrian painting or a Pollock or a De Kooning or any other so-called Abstract painter (they now call them Non-Objectives, which is better) the works of these guys are REALITIES. They exist right there as real things conceived by the painter.В .В .В . not as imitations of anything.В .В .В . they are realists and the realistic guys are abstract painters because they abstract nature. Is this clear? Oh wellВ .В .В . so I am a non-objective composer. No object other than to combine all of the materials at my command into either interesting or uninteresting bodies of soundВ .В .В . and I want them to appeal to the intellect, which doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it. I don’t want to write sop stuff or backgrounds to lovers’ extacies [sic]. I want to be heard and judged by intelligent minds that are interested in the art of sound. This means no preconceived ideas of what a “pretty” melody SHOULD sound like or what a STORM SHOULD sound like.В .В .В . unless it is deeply subconscious, I am NOT afraid to submit my music to this sort of thing if I should care to write itВ .В .В . and I don’t. It is just not interesting to me, and I’m not here to bore myself. Patience Ray: this is all leading up to (I hope) the twelve-tone deal.В .В .В . I think that it is all very necessary—to the understanding of that. So what has transpired: - I desire to write pure music.В .В .В . this means the elements of music (and very definitely as John [Cage] says: they are sound and silenceВ .В .В . rhythm being the midwife) these elements in a pure form—not related to storms, etc.—an Fв™Ї is an Fв™Ї, not the 3rd of D major or the M7 of G.В .В .В . it

is merely the tone between F and G. And it is not even necessarily between F and G in MY scale, which if twelvetone, can put the Page 269 →Fв™Ї anywhere (I realize that in an up and down way it is between F and G but it isn’t related in the usual wayВ .В .В . oh hell; you know this). Anyway.В .В .В . according to the last page I hope you got my feeling of everything being itself.В .В .В . not just the twelve tones but the entire conception of the work and the aesthetic behind it. With this in mind, do you see why I use the twelve-tone principle? According to my beliefs, all things are of equal value (this includes contrapuntal lines.В .В .В . none of the Schoenbergian primary voice; secondary voice; accompaniment part stuff). In order to show the least discrimination between the twelve equal tones, I still believe that it is best to organize them in a twelve-tone seriesВ .В .В . none shall repeat until . . etc. This is as free as I can conceive of the tones being (what a sentence). It seems more free, at first, to not use them in a set series, but in practice, as you realize, they can’t be controlled except by harmonic or pseudoharmonic-melodic systems. This last is OK as long as you aren’t me.В .В .В . and lucky for you. No matter what your aesthetic, you have to have some reason for putting an Fв™Ї down rather than an Eв™-: Beethoven’s reason:it is historically the major 3rd of D (E в™-isn’t) BartГіk’s reason:it sounds better to my ear (either more or less dissonant) ( probably his reason) My reason:because of the original distribution of the twelve tones upon which this piece is based. If a tone appears before all the others have, it is being emphasized unduly and will seem more important than the rest.В .В .В . which it isn’t. This seems to me to keep the tones as free as possible yet not in chaos; and as valid as Mr. Beethoven. I don’t believe the twelve-tone technique to be the easy way out.В .В .В . not if you are conscious of things around you to the degree that a composer should be. I too could write reams of “music” using the twelvetone deals.В .В .В . IF I could shut away Вѕ of my mind. I have been writing in this way for two years now.В .В .В . five piano pieces; Trio for Clarinet, Bassoon, and Piano; three pieces for string quartet and many other diddlings. (Some of the above not completed because I didn’t feel them worth anything.) And these last “Three Pieces for Piano” [1951]В .В .В . this is the FIRST thing that I really consider GOOD.В .В .В . and I consider this payment enuff for the two years of struggling with my critical faculties. Does this sound easy????? The music is ten pages long and took me (counting preliminary planning) about three months to get into completed form. Does this sound like the easy way?? Is Page 270 →it easy for you to write reams of music, using twelve-tone techniques that you honestly consider good, written with all of your faculties at the peak of their abilities?? If you don’t feel the need for the purity and equality of the sound possibilities then you can’t understand why I do it. The triad is meaningless to meВ .В .В . it is not that it is just old hat but actually meaningless in sound. The same goes for the 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, в™-9th, etc., except in arranging (which I still do for my students), which has to conform to the norm to a great degree. I don’t believe that with integrity you can write reams of music my way. I can’t anywayВ .В .В . witness my two-year bout with it. Listen to a lot of itВ .В .В . study it. Then try to do better.В .В .В . not just MORE. Try to add something of importance to the existing principles.В .В .В . Schoenberg said that a creator is one who brings forth something that was not there before.В .В .В . that’s a hell of a challenge.В .В .В . it’s inherent but bring it to realization with integrity and honesty. I’ll read your letter again and maybe write again soon.В .В .В . worn out now. PLEASE WRITE SOON and pick all this apartВ .В .В . no one knows enuff to criticize around hereВ .В .В . you’re my only hopeВ .В .В . nobody gets anywhere without someone to think on an equal plane with him. Brown’s correspondence with Ray Grismer slowed after his move to New York in 1952, but Brown resumed contact in 1957 during a pivotal time. Having recently returned from his first trip to Europe, Brown summarizes the many successes of his travels and of his earlier years in New York. Brown also describes the historic improvisation sessions that he helped to organize for Edgard VarГЁse at the Greenwich House Music School. In spite of the many opportunities enumerated in his prГ©cis, Brown is introspective and voices ambivalence about

the direction of his music, signing off from this lengthy missive with the following: “wish to hell we could talk together.”

Letter to Ray Grismer April 4, 1957 Great to hear from you. You continue to be the one person to whom I can write quite naturally without it seeming to be a chore rather like writing to myself, which is also chore-some at times. Answering all your questions may best be done by going back to about the time I last wrote you.В .В .В . Finished “Indices,” for orchestra of.В .В .В . flute, trumpet, horn, amplified guitar, vibes, glockenspiel, marimbula, 5 bells, 3 brake drums, 3 Chinese Page 271 →drums, 3 gongs, piano, violin, cello and double bass.В .В .В . in December 1954. Still technically on electronic music grant (just before Indices, wrote my second electronic piece: “Octet II”). Grant ran out January 1st, ’55, after some “[Music] for Cello and Piano” (using my “time” notation) during first few months of ’55.В .В .В . on no money and going into debt. “Went about as fer as I could go” (as Oscar said) in this direction, and then went looking for money-type work.В .В .В . having starved on $40 a week bookshop salary per grant, I decided to be real nervy and try for some money worth my time (which I consider priceless). On electronic work, had done much tape editing stuff and worked with tape machine (did I ever tell you about University of Illinois concert [1953]??)В .В .В . so with this piddling experience and guts, I went the rounds of the recording companies here in NY looking for a tape editor’s jobВ .В .В . which I heard tell of paying money like (to me) WOW. Found that even with little actual electronic experience that I had (officially) there was a lot of interest in me.В .В .В . seems that there are a lot of schooled electronic technicians but damn few good musicians with electronic experience or who are mechanically inclined enuff to get the drift and do good work.В .В .В . either musical or technical. I eventually got to Capitol Records and found someone really interested in my qualifications.В .В .В . greatest guy; manager of NY studios of Capitol, Don Plunkett.В .В .В . he worked on the official powers of Capitol (those who think only in terms of paper-qualifications) to get me hired, for about three months.В .В .В . finally made it. The one official gimmick I did have was one year of engineering at Northeastern University and that probably got me by.В .В .В . anyway; I went to work there in May, ’55.В .В .В . doing all of classical editing and working in the disc-cutting rooms (tape to disc mastering) quite interesting and then a bore as most things like that, but good pay (about $110 week) and hours that I liked (nites.В .В .В . I compose best either just after I get up (11 am to 4 pm) or very late at nite (midnite to 4 am) as it worked out I made money between these two composing periods). Did piano reduction of Indices (ugh, what a tedious job) and more composing. During this time did editing and mastering for a little less than a year and then got put into mixing.В .В .В . which means twirling the dials on the live studio sessions and getting the right balance and sound.В .В .В . more money and much more interesting (about $150/week).В .В .В . this is the job that Plunkett had in mind for me to do and is 95% musical and 5% electronic (just about my style).В .В .В . and I feel that it should always be done by a musician.В .В .В . nonmusical ears really can goof up a session. This I did for about a year, getting less and Page 272 →less of my own work done.В .В .В . eventually got so bugged at not writing that I quit and went to Europe. I had been planning for quite a while to take my orchestral and chamber music scores to where such things can be performed.В .В .В . saved money from Capitol and went (Carol stayed hereВ .В .В . had dancing engagements and not that much saved). Mixing is a very interesting job, mostly, with good pay and varying hours but it is also a nerve-racking and dangerous job.В .В .В . so easy (even with ear) to blow somebodies [sic] $2000 bucks.В .В .В . some oafs consider this not pleasant to be happening to their loot, yet (will get on with Europe but let me clean up this money stuff). Back to NY with only a few bucks left for writing on, but with plenty of recording industry job offers (luckily, I guess). Capitol wants very much for me to go back to work for them.В .В .В . also Atlantic Records and another private recording studio.В .В .В . all these are mixer. The best offer is from Mercury Records.В .В .В . to work for them as an A & R man.В .В .В . this is a great offer but would tie me up tight as far as time is concerned.В .В .В . am currently trying to get them to take me as a producer (of sessions) only.В .В .В . which is more [nerve-racking] than mixing (telling everyone what’s what and being completely responsible for the date, but would only involve me for a few hours per week at a great salary). Don’t know what will

develop but this last deal would be best all around. Got to Europe on December 29, [1956] via boat (ugh)В .В .В . Paris for a week with Boulez.В .В .В . as beautiful a city as is saidВ .В .В . food, streets, buildings, etc., so wonderful, old, quiet, and exciting. You remember that he liked my “Perspectives” very much at that time, and at this time still likes my work.В .В .В . although it has gone further in a direction that he does not personally go for. Although there is much in common between us (the complete involvement of all sound components) we differ greatly in “ideas of order.” .В .В . but we get on very well and had many interesting talks.В .В .В . He is going to present (and conduct) my “Indices” at the [Salle] Gaveau in Paris next season. (Don’t know how much you [know] about the European situation and don’t want to be every kind of bore but . .) Boulez is [an] extremely strong person over there.В .В .В . he has organized the “Concerts [du] Domaine Musical” in Paris.В .В .В . four concerts a season of the most advanced and related-to-advanced (like Machaut) music he can findВ .В .В . and believe in. Started in small theatre and already is giving concerts at the Gaveau [В .В .В .В ].В .В .В . has very large audience and now practically controls European Contemporary Music Festival situation.В .В .В . extremely powerful (Stravinsky came to him: for instance). He wrote letters for me that opened doors all over Europe.В .В .В . Page 273 →I’m even boring me, and that ain’t easy.В .В .В . remind me to continue trip from Paris if you’re interested.В .В .В . went to Baden-Baden, Zurich, Milan (electronic studio), Vienna (Universal Edition), Munich, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Cologne (Stockhausen and electronic studio), and London. “Music for Cello and Piano” will be performed in the Darmstadt Festival this summer and “Indices” as above; plus Tudor touring with piano music and two or three pending performances of Indices.В .В .В . lots of requests for scores; could have had three or four played if I had had them (orchestras I mean) . . will write a few soon I hope.В .В .В . many groups ready and willingВ .В .В . fantastic situation in terms of the impossibilities of orchestras here. Universal is still considering Indices but will do “Three Pieces for Piano,” “Perspectives,” “Music for Cello and Piano,” “Four More” (for piano), and “Music for Violin, Cello and Piano.” Don’t know prices yet.В .В .В . only just received their “Request for permission to publish.” .В .В . HA! . . imagine refusing.В .В .В . scores at the moment will be offered in “facsimile” (from my transparent manuscripts)В .В .В . in series called “Music of Younger Composers”.В .В .В . Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Maderna, Hambraeus, etc. They want Indices manuscripts too, but it’s HUGE, and want them to printВ .В .В . too complicated to futz around with transcontinentaloceanic transparencies sending.В .В .В . unless I change my mind. Anyway, I’ll let you know when and how the scores are available.В .В .В . I can use all the buyers I can find.В .В .В . Hope you’re interested and know others who might be.В .В .В . volume of sales will help to keep them interested and get them more interested.В .В .В . many people in Europe will send for them too.В .В .В . met many wonderful peopleВ .В .В . will tell more later. Would love to hear your piano now.В .В .В . must be great by now if you say it’s getting better with timeВ .В .В . currently I like the [Jimmy] Giuffre stuff.В .В .В . very talented and bright guy . . yes? .В .В .В with funk!! Finally getting to the “implicit” rather than “explicit” beat. Your dad and his, “someday we’ll all be rich,” sounds like John [Cage]’s father.В .В .В . an inventor with same “someday” kick and wild, complicated, and good ideas. Glad you got to hear the “Marteau [sans MaГ®tre]” [by Boulez].В .В .В . not the greatest of works and rather conservativeВ .В .В . a la “Pierrot [lunaire]” [by Schoenberg] but pretty good. Germanic Expressionism of Stockhausen “[Gesang der] JГјnglinge” leaves me cold but again, an interesting work.В .В .В . certainly better than the [Pierre] Schaeffer, etc., stuff. My personal views on this whole European-American music situation are too involved to write here but will tell in another, less newsy letter. Page 274 →I don’t know what you really mean by your statement that “jazz is trying hard to return to its roots” but it sounds prattle criticle [sic] (or is it cuticle) I’m certainly not knocked out by what is going on

in jazz but I like the fact that a lot of people are trying.В .В .В . George Russell, George Handy, Teddy Charles, Giuffre, Gil Evans, among others. I came back from Europe with a determination to try to involve the best of the jazz musicians in the kind of thing I do and in contemporary music in general.В .В .В . Webern, Boulez, etc., .В .В .В to see if eventually it would be possible to have them perform such works in concerts that I or someone else might organize.В .В .В . I may be too optimistic but it’s worth a tryВ .В .В . I’ve almost given up entirely on the so-called “serious” musician in America.В .В .В . If “playing for the love of playing” exists anywhere in America it is in the jazz performer.В .В .В . how broad his outlook can be made is the thing that must be discovered. In the past six months or so I have become very friendly with VarГЁseВ .В .В . (he asked me to write an article with him, on the state of contemporary music in the world). I see him or talk to him on the phone two or three times a week.В .В .В . on the basis of his interest and my belief (in the possible salvation of the scene), he and I are assembling a group of the best jazz musicians for an experiment.В .В .В . this Sunday. Teddy Charles, Hall Overton, Ed Shaughnessy, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Teo Macero (weak link), Eddy Bert, Barry Galbraith, and Milt Hinton. I worked with all of these people as mixer at Capitol and know that they are interested and capable.В .В .В . it’s all very unofficial and outside the union so don’t talk it around, but we’re going to experiment with a loosely scored, simultaneous improvising thing.В .В .В . no chords, everybody in different tempi, meter, etc., with at times all or any combination of them blowing at the same time, loudly, softly, high, low, etc., etc. We don’t have it all worked out yet but I see VarГЁse tomorrow about details.В .В .В . this is something I’ve always wanted to try and was a little surprised to find VarГЁse also interested.В .В .В . John is also involved but not too much.В .В .В . strangely enuff, he is very conservative and un-experimental about this project. Write me and let me know what you think of it.В .В .В . will keep you posted.В .В .В . wish to hell we could talk together.В .В .В . about a thousand thingsВ .В .В . have not answered about books but not much to tell.В .В .В . another time—best. Earle Page 275 →Brown was first asked to write an essay on Edgard VarГЁse (1883–1965) by Wolfgang Steinecke in 1957 for a volume of DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik. Brown had also met with William Glock of The Score magazine in London during that time about an issue dedicated to VarГЁse. As described in the previous letter to Ray Grismer, Brown had been in regular contact with VarГЁse during 1957, and one observation that Brown developed during his travels to Europe in previous months was the overemphasis on Webern as “the future” of music and the paucity of information on VarГЁse, whom he felt was equally, if not more, significant. Brown was not able to complete an essay for either periodical, but what follows is an introduction that Brown drafted in 1961 as a preface to a series of previously published statements by VarГЁse. Brown sent this introduction to Glock in February 1961, but it was returned in June 1962 because The Score had suspended publication.

Varèse (1961) Gertrude Stein said that it was not until they were well into the war that the generals realized that it was a war of the twentieth century and not a war of the nineteenth century. She pointed out that this was similar to a problem that many artists and most people had in relation to art. One can very well measure the authenticity and power of a work by its truth to its time. . . . And art should be an intense and real way of living one’s life, actually and not retrospectively. —Donald Sutherland in Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work, Yale University Press [1951] Measuring authenticity is not my business, but living my life actually is. My accomplishments in this endeavor are only of passing interest here, but in going about my business I retrospectively observe the involvements of others, which I feel to be more or less actual and true to the time in which they are existing. The work and life of Edgard Varèse are outstandingly compatible with the implications of the above quotation. This is not a measurement but a conviction. Measuring is for the hindsight of history, but history (either past or future) must not be allowed to

intimidate our awareness of, and relationship to, the ambiguous process going on around us. Being unintimidated and conscious of the process are characteristics that made VarГЁse the first musician to describe an integrally twentieth-century compositional situation. Page 276 →Centuries and their definitive conceptions do not always change on a numerical cue, but last time they almost coincided. There was something of an upheaval in the way life is conducted in a practical way, and more than something of a “poetic” revolution in the conceptual and perceptual basis of art. Whether it is actual or merely a chauvinistic illusion, we are in a seemingly accelerated relationship to the rate of change, which history has led us to expect. This is not the place to elaborate on it, but we are involved in what Max Ernst felt would be “the crisis of consciousness due in our time.” In all the arts there has been a radical change in viewpoint (not relative to the nature of art but in the nature of our relationship to it), which is true re-vision and not merely a development or a modification. The development and modification point of view (as a “cause”) is what has produced, up to now, a primarily inertial nineteenthcentury musical vocabulary and aesthetic, rather than an indigenous twentieth-century musical approach. It is not an easy thing to come by; as Gertrude Stein said, “Anybody can make it more complicated but it takes a genius to see things differently.” Contrary to possible appearances, I don’t intend to use this space for authoritarian pronouncements, or to “explain” the words and works of VarГЁse; the works speak for themselves and the words will do so more clearly, humanly, profoundly, and revealingly than I could hope to. VarГЁse has not felt the necessity to expound upon his techniques, working methods, or philosophy in the polemical or propagandistic sense, or to create a climate of influence in other ways. He is not a publicist, nor is he naive or insecure enough to think that the verbalization of his point of view will justify his music or his mind either to himself or to others. If the music needed verbal justification or explanation in order to fulfill itself it would not be music as VarГЁse means it to be. Statements were made but seem to have been neglected out of sheer indolence and characteristic dullness on the part of the “official” musical society. Fortunately, in art, a minority of one is a force to be reckoned with, if not at once, “sooner or later,” if it is truly a force and not just forced; and ultimately each one is majority enough. The statements that exist have been asked for by others and are from interviews or from occasional lectures. As you will see, the lack of verbal material is not for lack of erudition, wit, or articulateness but perhaps because of a general impatience with analysis, “necrophilia,” and theorizing: “Which came first, botany or the flower?” He has no aversion to expressing himself when asked, frequently in no uncertain terms, but never with malice or bitterness. The reasons for composing and the methods involved are a personal matterВ .В .В . the music is public. Page 277 →These are not the only quotations available, but I have chosen the earliest ones that seem to me relevant to our current situation, which, upon inspection, has been the urgent and “new” situation since 1916. In 1916 alone we have requests for “the help of machinery specialists,” the development of instruments “with all the resources science may offer,” the need for “new mechanical mediums which can lend themselves to every expression of thought,” not to mention only those relating to electronic music. (Electronics as such was not even a formulated science in 1916.) Most striking to me with regard to compositional attitude is the impatience with “mannerisms,” which “lead us back to contrapuntal and harmonic artifices of which modern musicians are trying to rid themselves” (1916). With a numerical permutation of the date, this, as with virtually all of these quotations, applies as much to 1961 as to the year of origin. For my part, the implication of the work and thought of VarГЁse, more than any work to date (with very few and very recent isolated exceptions), outlines a set of circumstances in terms of “organized sound” (his term), which will “sooner or later” establish itself as the basis of new music. This music is not an extension of previous harmonic or polyphonic-contrapuntal linear principles whose function was narrative in the sense of

“story,” but a music that approaches “organization” from the basis of the infinite spatial and temporal continuum of audible possibilities and their inherent possibilities of association and dissociation in an integral contextВ .В .В . integral to the sound and to the nature of the human mindВ .В .В . its conceptual, aceptual, de-ceptual, and experiential inherent nature. As usual, it is already later rather than soonerВ .В .В . but we’re slowly progressing toward our past-present-future. In February 1964, Earle Brown and Leonard Bernstein conducted Available Forms 2 in five performances with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall. Brown first contacted Bernstein about conducting the American premiere of Available Forms 2 for ninety-eight musicians and two conductors in July 1962, following a successful world premiere at the Venice Biennale that April. After initial exchanges with Bernstein, his assistant Jack Gottlieb requested Brown’s score. In this and other letters to Bernstein and Gottlieb from 1963, Brown insisted on a minimum rehearsal time of three hours for a proper performance of Available Forms 2. This letter opens with Brown inviting Bernstein to listen to a recording of one of the “best” performances of the work from a February 1963 concert at the Musica Viva festival in Munich that Brown conducted Page 278 →with close friend Bruno Maderna (they had also conducted the Venice premiere). While Brown ideally preferred nine hours to the one and a half hours of rehearsal proposed, he came to an agreement with Bernstein and Gottlieb on his minimum three hours. This letter comes from the personal archive of Carolyn Brown.

Letter to Leonard Bernstein July 9, 1963 Dear Mr. Bernstein, The tape of our Munich performance of Available Forms II has arrived and I would like very much for you to hear it. This performance is perhaps the best we have done of the work and to me it conveys the basic “art-musicpoetic” character of the piece very well although the balance and articulation of the figurative events could be much more accurately expressed. I think that it comes off as music, by most definitions, and the unusualness of the concept and techniques of performance become secondary to the audible fact and effect of the musical result. The intense feeling of two conductors spontaneously conversing with sounds and building a collaborative formal structure is very strong in performance and I’m pleased to hear that it is effective even without the videodrama. Since our conversation I have been seriously considering two factors with regard to a possible performance. The first is quite naturally the rehearsal problem. Being American I am much more realistic about this problem than most of the Europeans tend to be even though I am working with comparably complex and intricate (controlled but flexible) results. I’ve been using this notation and spontaneous performance techniques since 1952 because it seemed to me a direction which would lead to control of great complexity within realistic limits of accuracy. I think that the notation works very well in this way, from a technical point of view; the spontaneous thing is an aesthetic matter (very much influenced by Pollock’s “compositional” approach, incidentally). At one point in our conversation Mr. Gottlieb asked if I thought the piece be done in one and a half hours of rehearsal. Whatever I said then, upon reflection, I must now say that I think that this would be impossible and as disastrous for you as programmer as for me as composer. One could hardly get the explanation of conducting techniques and the voicing and balancing of the chords in that time. The figurative events Page 279 →would be a complete loss, and if so would seriously limit the varieties of sound-character and subtleties of articulation. It would come out either very static or appallingly messy. It has to reach a point at which the musicians are reasonably secure with all of the event so that the conductors can work freely and rapidly with forming and molding the material. Unlike a chance score, or one in which the sounds can be improvised by the musicians, the musicians here have definite, notated responsibilities, which they will be very shaken-up about if they don’t have time to get it in their hands and ears.

I seriously suggest a total of three hours as a minimum rehearsal time. Even so, much will be skimmed pretty lightly but it will at least allow the conductors and musicians to feel that they have the full palette to work with even if the lines and colors are not fully developed. The other point, directly relevant to rehearsal time problems, is that it would seem most desirable and efficient if I were to conduct the second orchestra. I’m not trying to take advantage of the situation, it merely seems reasonable; unless there is a formidable official difficulty which I haven’t considered. You needn’t give me billing as a conductor, put me on the payroll or anything else that official but it would seem to be a good idea for me to be around, and if so, to be as useful as possible. It would also seem natural to have the composer creatively involved, especially under the conditions of this piece in which conducting is composing. Besides having written the thing, I have already gone through the conducting of it three times and can therefore anticipate and eliminate a lot of problems. I hope that you are sympathetic to this suggestion; I’m sure that it would increase the actual “music-making” time in rehearsals. Since I started writing this opus (about two weeks ago) I have heard from AMP [Associated Music Publishers] that you have contacted them about the piece. Whatever that means, (and they are pretty unclear about it) I hope that you will seriously consider these thoughts before making a final decision. I would, of course, like very much for the piece to be done but it wouldn’t be fair to either of us to allow you to commit yourself to a situation which wouldn’t come off satisfactorily for either of us. With three hours of rehearsal I can assure you that we would have a good, representative, and successful performance of the work. If the conditions are not favorable to this now I hope for your continued interest and a performance in the future. Whatever develops I respect your decision. I would like very much to see you and discuss any of this with you further if you wish, at any time. It was a great pleasure to talk with you Page 280 →about this score and about the “new” music scene in general. I hope to hear from you soon. Warmest regards, Earle Brown Brown delivered the following remarks in New York in 1966 for a meeting of the National Music Council, just after spending most of the prior year abroad on a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to complete his String Quartet (1965), Nine Rarebits (1965) for two (or one) harpsichords, Calder Piece (1966) for percussion quartet and mobile, and the beginnings of Modules I–II (1966–67) for orchestra. Brown reflects candidly on European concert life, having been asked to speak on the subject of “The Promotion and Performance of American Music Abroad.” The text summarizes some of his commitments and whereabouts during the 1960s, but also addresses the more acute question of his motivations for developing his career as a composer, conductor, and record producer outside the United States. Beyond the many opportunities and prestigious commissions Brown had received, he emphasizes the importance of cultivating relationships. The remarks are printed here by permission of the National Music Council and The Earle Brown Music Foundation, and originally appeared in the National Music Council Bulletin 27, no. 2 (Winter 1966–1967): 6–9. Brown in fact had a subscription to this bulletin as early as 1946.

Remarks Delivered to the National Music Council New York City (1966) I assume that I’ve been asked to speak on the subject of the promotion and performance of American music abroad because I seem to spend a great deal of time in Europe in particular. Various people say that I am one of the most performed of the younger American composers in Europe, and so I probably have some experience which might be of some interest and value. I first should say that I am not an ex-patriot [sic]; I do not live in Europe. I live in New York, but I go very frequently to Europe because it’s where a great deal of work is for

me. First, perhaps, I should speak of how my music came to be known in Europe. My first experience with European musicians/composers was with Page 281 →the composer Pierre Boulez, who came to this country as the conductor/director of the Jean-Louis Barrault / Madeleine Renaud company in 1952 or 1953.1 We met at that time, and Boulez saw my work and was interested in it, and took some of it back to France with him. He said that when I came to Europe to be sure to come to see him in Paris. My first trip to Europe was in late 1956 [to] early 1957. I stopped in Paris and saw Boulez and he wrote letters of introduction for me to quite important people in Europe. One of the letters was to Dr. Otto Tomek, who was then the director of New Music Editions for Universal Edition in Vienna. Dr. Tomek is now director of New Music Concerts for the Cologne Radio. Another letter was to Hans Rosbaud, the conductor in Baden-Baden at the SГјdwestfunk. Another was to Dr. Heinrich Strobel, the director of the SГјdwestfunk, and another was to the director of New Music at Hamburg Radio, Dr. [Herbert] HГјbner. In general there are quite a few of these letters which were a tremendously important introduction for me into the performance possibilities of my music in Europe. I made quite a tour at that time, and other people that I met through the trip were Luciano Berio, whom actually I had met here in New York in 1952, but I saw him again in Milan, and through Berio I met Bruno Maderna and [NiccolГІ] Castiglioni, and younger composers who were then studying with Bruno Maderna. Later I went to Vienna, where I met Dr. Otto Tomek, and later to Munich, where I met Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and very many people all over Europe—composers, conductors, and musicians—which was the purpose of my trip, to meet these people and see what was going on in European music, all at my own expense, of course. The final thing was meeting William Glock, who is now the director of BBC programs. All of these meetings, it seems to me, that in one way or another I made during that 1957 trip, were the beginnings of my ability to work as a recognized American composer within the situation of Europe. My contacts are still maintained with some of these people. For instance, I have had a commission from Boulez to write a piece for Domaine Musical in Paris—that was in 1958 [Pentathis]. I have had a commission to write a work for the Rome Radio Orchestra for their performance in Venice [Available Forms 2, 1962]. The SГјdwestfunk just last year commissioned a string quartet [String Quartet, 1965]. The Bremen Radio commissioned a work for three pianos [Corroboree, 1964] two years ago, and there have been private commissions for such things as harpsichord music [Nine Rarebits, 1965]. In France, I have had two commissions from the French Radio, one for a tape work with instruments in 1963 [Times Five], and at the present time I am working on a work for large orchestraPage 282 → for the Orchestra National of the French Radio. I leave the end of January to conduct this work [Modules I–II] on February 7 with the R. T. F. Orchestra [Orchestre national de l’Office de radiodiffusion-tГ©lГ©vision franГ§aise]. Another thing that happened was that I had a full program of my work, and conducted a work of mine, for the BBC. All of these things, the SГјdwestfunk commission and the BBC commission, are due to people I met beginning in 1956, and these things continue. I think it’s quite normal and reasonable to assume that if one writes music and believes in its ultimate value and its performance potential, one does make such efforts by oneself. In addition to this kind of thing, there have been many, many performances, of course, and I have conducted the Cologne Radio, Rome Radio, and Munich Radio Orchestras, and many times in Paris. I have conducted in Venice, Madrid, Argentina, London, the BBC, Darmstadt Festival, Munich, Geneva, etc. This is the kind of activity, which I seem quite normally to find, that I am able to work with in Europe, and I spend the time there because I tend to write for large orchestra, and pieces which need rehearsal. These things are presented to me there, and I go there not as a tourist, and not as a promoter, but whenever I have a contract, or when I have been asked to write a piece, or conduct music, speak, lecture, or teach. Basically, I am not terribly sympathetic to the word “promotion,” and I don’t really believe that you can promote art. I think you can try, and I think a lot of bad art is promoted, but that doesn’t mean that I believe promotion is the way that one goes about getting performances. As I said, my meeting with these people in Europe—Nono, Berio, Maderna, Boulez, and Stockhausen, whom I also met in 1957—are the people who will promote my music if anyone does. They were interested in my music, and they have done incredibly valuable things for me in just speaking about it.

Another thing about the promotion of music is that I had a commission from the Rome Radio Orchestra for a performance in Venice. Now this is the Venice Biennale, a large festival of modern music, and I wrote the piece for the Rome Radio Orchestra and conducted it in Venice.2 These large festivals are extremely well attended by program directors of radios and orchestras, and all kinds of composers, publishers, conductors, directors, and everyone all over Europe, who go to the Venice Biennale, Donaueschingen Festival. This has served as a promotional function for my music. Again I say I don’t really like the idea of promotion. I think performance and people hearing it is the only honorable way music can be promoted and performed elsewhere. For instance, the premiere of Available Forms 2 for Page 283 →very large orchestra in Venice was heard at that time by Dr. Otto Tomek of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne and by Karl Amadeus Hartmann of the Munich Radio. Now both Munich and Cologne have modern music series within their general programming during the season—it’s not a specialized thing. Cologne has a series called Musik der Zeit—Music of the Time—and Munich has Musica Viva, and these two within-the-season series are where I subsequently conducted the piece. The piece got to Cologne and later to Munich because of having been heard in Venice by the directors of these two radios, and through the good words of friends and conductors and composers who know my work very well in Europe. This is the basis, I believe, of how my music is performed abroad, and whatever success it has is responsible for my having further commissions and requests to lecture and conduct. That is basically how I feel the promotion aspect should be approached. If you don’t know, I think it would be important for you to know that my music is not what you would call conventional by nature. It is what the Europeans call new music, which is to say music that works with new means of expression [and] ways of poetic expression, which I think are important and which I want to use. There are new performance techniques, new kinds of sounds, new structural formal principles, even new notations at work, so my experience with these things that I speak of, of the festival situation in Europe, and the normal concert situation which I’m mentioning because I think we can learn a great deal from it (we shouldn’t imitate it, but I think we can learn from it because of the amount of activity and the success of that activity, which I’ll try to express), [is] something that I think would help us over here in order for us to have a reputation for new music, which would help, in turn, our new music being taken to Europe. In other words, the promotion and performance of American music abroad would be accelerated by the acceleration of our home activities in this direction. My experience, as I say, will be with new music festivals, which is not to say that it’s not with the normal season, but the festivals are basically new music. As a matter of fact, I don’t know of any festivals of music in Europe which deal with a kind of neoclassic music. These are the ones that I know, and I think I know most of them are involved with new music and fresh concepts, and new and exciting means of composing and expressing as an artist. The Europeans that I know are interested in fresh concepts. They have Hindemith and Stravinsky, they know Milhaud, they have, as we know, a tremendous background of the sort of middle years, the thirties and forties, of a kind of neoclassic music, or music which comes out of Page 284 →Stravinsky and Hindemith; and primarily the things that are very powerful over there (powerful not in the sense that everybody in the world is crazy about them, but in that they create a great deal of excitement within the festival situation) are the developments out of the music of Webern and VarГЁse and some of what has been done in this country since 1950. Basically, I think that this kind of new music concept is what I can speak about. I guess it’s a rather old-fashioned idea that I have to try to make my life as a composer, conductor, and lecturer. I resist as much as possible going into a university or to teach. I want very much to do this kind of work—traveling and being able to accept a commission wherever it is—and to go there to work and be free to conduct the work, and then to lecture when that possibility occurs. The possibility of lecturing occurs a great many times, but unfortunately it’s not always possible to accept it from the financial point of view. Part of the thing that makes my music acceptable in Europe, and this again I hope is relevant to the whole thing of what kind of music is over there and why, is that I had training in the Schillinger system of musical composition, and that is a great background to understanding and creating sympathy [with] the music of Europe, which grows out of Webern’s work and the work of Olivier Messiaen, and is generally termed “serial music.” This is very close to Schillinger.

Another thing that has happened, and this probably has to do with my being there frequently, is that my music, starting in 1950—and the music of John Cage and also that of Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, which is generally misunderstood in this country and considered to be very, very far out and extreme—really had a tremendous influence on the contemporary music situation in Europe, and it really transformed the severity of serial thinking. Now it did other extreme things. I rather disagree with the musical compositional points of view of Cage, but I think he’s a very important person in art, and he had a tremendous influence in Europe. My work has also influenced the Europeans. This, I believe, is the first time the influence of the musical culture has gone from this country to Europe, and this is primarily an influence of what is generally called but badly misunderstood, the “aleatoric” approaches, and there are many, many different points of view, from the extremity of chance music on the one hand to the subjective ambiguity, for instance, of Feldman and the open form work that I pioneered. Anyway, within this area there was a great deal of influence. Of course, there has been a great deal of influence from the music of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and VarГЁse, but again, these are influences that are in new ways of seeing and hearing and approaching. Many people Page 285 →here in this country work with aleatoric concepts, but primarily it seems to me that that was a sort of reverse influence from Stockhausen. They seem not to realize that the principles of open form began here. It seems not to be realized that Stockhausen’s Piano Piece No. XI [1956], which is an open form work, was predated by [three or four] years by open form works of mine, which were the basic influence on Stockhausen for that work. Anyway, that’s a personal matter, but it illustrates the point that we have had a tremendous influence on music in Europe, but it has been in these dubious areas of aesthetic validity. But nevertheless, that is American music, and it is wanted and much done over there. As to things that might be done, it strikes me that I sound very egocentric about much of this, but it seems to me that my experience is all I have. I have many ideas, but my experience seen through other eyes perhaps may be valuable, so I must say that one of the things that can be done is to realize that there is more opportunity over there than we in general know about. I am sure there are many composers other than myself who have had requests to lecture and to perform, or even merely to attend some of the festivals in Europe. For instance, I have an invitation now to the 1967 Zagreb Biennale, but I cannot afford to get myself there, and Zagreb cannot afford to bring me. But this is an opportunity for American music there, and letters from Zagreb Biennale to me, other than speaking about our personal considerations of my performances there, have asked me if I could do something about helping the contact between Zagreb and American orchestras. Now, I cannot contact orchestras or individuals in America that might be of interest to Zagreb, and why they asked me I don’t know. This seems to me to be something that should go through the embassy or through some general organization, if there is one in this country, which observes and is conscious of the desires of Europe in general and in particular, and then does something to expedite Europe’s ability to get Americans over there. It happens frequently that I have outstanding invitations to Zagreb and Warsaw, both difficult places to get to, even if one is in Europe, at least in my condition without some help. Naturally, I am paid when I go to conduct, but they want me to come there to speak, and that is not always something that they can afford to do, but the opportunity is always there. Another thing is the possibility of making electronic music. Other people here must also have had invitations to study the equipment and to make electronic music. For instance, the two invitations that I have at the moment are to work in the Milan studio and the Siemens Studio in Munich, but I am very seldom in a position where I can go and live in Munich for Page 286 →a month or two to write the music. They offer the facilities, which is no small matter, but they cannot always pay for living. Sometimes they can; in France, for instance, the R. T. F. did pay for my time in Paris while I was composing the work for them [Times Five, 1963]. Anyway, my basic point is that I think there are many, many more possibilities for the promotion and performance of American music abroad, and I can’t consider myself that unique about it. I think there must be many people in this position, and that generally we should become much more aware of where we are wanted, as an American group of people, and have some way of expediting the transportation and taking care of those things. Another thing, which is also personal, and which I think is very important, is the distribution of records of American music abroad. My practical profession, which is to say the profession that makes me a living when I cannot make it with commissions or with conducting or lecturing, is as a recording engineer and a producer of records, and I have, since 1960, produced a series of records on Time Records (an American company) called the

Contemporary Sound Series, and I made those records all over the world, with recording sessions here in New York, and in Hamburg, Paris, London. It’s a very international series. I think there are something like eight Italian composers and ten American composers represented, as well as one Greek composer, three French composers, three German composers, one Korean, three Swedish, and a Polish composer.3 In other words, a very international series. And I find in my travels in Europe that those records are there. They are there with European and American music on them. One of the things that gets American music there, even if they are chauvinistic about it, is that they can’t buy a piece of European music and scrape the American one off the other side. If records are made from an international point of view, and I believe music should be approached internationally, then all of those eleven Time records are available with American and European music on them, and I see them in Europe constantly, in Rome, Milan, Basel, in Paris. I think that one thing that helps things along is that the Europeans whom I recorded know that I am not narrow-minded or nationalistic about the music. I have recorded so many different kinds of things, some things which I am not personally poetically committed to, but I think it’s necessary that they be represented in any upstanding series of recordings—upstanding in the sense of a series of recordings which does not look like they are pushing one little area of musical opportunity. There is a great, great range of things. They naturally reflect the music that I respect, but that doesn’t put it within any stylistic clichГ©s. Page 287 →Anyway, records are important, and I just emphasize the fact that the series I did, because of its international character, is internationally distributed and sold, and I think that’s a good idea. Another thing I would say just briefly is that I think the situation in Europe is a healthier one for modern music. For instance, some of the things to mention are the festivals in Venice, Zagreb, Warsaw, Darmstadt, Royan, France, Donaueschingen, Palermo, to mention a few. These festivals are not as chauvinistic or personally restricted to countries as sometimes one would be led to think. For instance, I looked up in this regard the number of American composers who had been performed at the Darmstadt festival between 1948 and approximately the present time, and there were forty-three different American composers represented. People all the way from Walter Piston to John Cage, Morton Feldman, [Norman] Dello Joio, etc. It’s a great, great range. A tremendous number of American composers have been represented at festivals—forty-three at just this particular one—so their breadth of outlook is rather notable I think. The other thing, as I mentioned before briefly, is the modern music during the regular seasons. I mentioned the Cologne Musik der Zeit, and the Munich Musica Viva. I’ve been performed on both of these. I must impress that the Donaueschingen Festival, which is a long weekend of perhaps three or four days, is absolutely sold out every year, and the festival in Darmstadt is very crowded. What I’m trying to say is that these festivals are extremely well attended and the notorious unpopularity of modern music is just not supported if you do it on a high and important level. If you don’t present it importantly, then people will not think it’s important; but over there, the Venice Biennale has the Rome Radio Orchestra, Darmstadt has the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, Donaueschingen has the SГјdwestfunk Orchestra. All these things have large orchestras committed to them, and they play large works in a very strong manner. At these festivals you also have performances of Ravel, Debussy, Webern, VarГЁse, Stravinsky—the very modern music—but also the music of the recent relevant past. This stops it being a “shoving it down their throats” kind of approach, which I think is all wrong. Modern music should be placed within a contemporary, historical context. For instance, for a performance that I remember had a work of mine on it last year, works were also played by Webern, Debussy, Milhaud, and Charles Ives, and this is the kind of breadth of approach which I think is one of the reasons why the Cologne Radio Orchestra fills its hall when it produces a Musik der Zeit series. This I consider sensible programming, and there is a great deal of activity in the Page 288 →audience as to likes and dislikes. I really do say, without any pro or con, that the situation is very, very healthy there. The number of rehearsals for a performance is something which is particularly important to me, because my pieces need good, serious rehearsal time, and I am given it there. I like to work for large orchestra, and I am given that possibility of working and performing and rehearsing there. I think that we must really expand the possibilities that we have here, and have more rehearsal time, and more serious festival activity, with new music from all over the world being done in America by orchestras, in a very important way, so that it is important to the public. When it’s shuffled off into a little compartment, it’s

very easy to lose that compartment. So basically I think that for the promotion and performance of new music abroad, the best thing we can do is to do better with rehearsals, performances, and festivals of our own music here, and show more interest in the music of Europe and perform it here, and then when we get more on a level with the seriousness and breadth [of] the many concerts and festivals of Europe, when we can match that in some way in our country, then Europe will look with more interest at our music. One thing that they sometimes say is, “How can music come out of that country when the orchestras don’t play it?” The music of a country is stimulated by the musical culture of that country in making opportunities for its composers to work and to perform, and to present their work with strength and conviction, and in a highly honorable way. I think that when this happens in America, and we can exchange and play their music, they will play ours. We will have better music if this happens, the exchange will really be accelerated, and we will no longer have to have a meeting wondering how we can promote America music and performances abroad. The presentation of it is what promotes it—people hear it and they respect it—and then they do something for it. The letter that follows was one of several documents in which Brown challenged historical narratives to recognize the influence of American experimentalism on the European avant-garde, particularly with regard to the precedence of his own open form. The essay by Richard Toop in this volume further addresses Brown’s polemic with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Page 289 →

An “Open Letter” to Some Critics and Friends October 15, 1973 A kind of “open letter” to some critics and some friends . . . (and each a bit of both at best) about a momentary and continuing bother . . . I am at the moment both composing and performing to pressing deadlines, which may produce “over-reactionsensitivity” and related dementia, but it seems to me that these thoughts might interest you . . . (us). A dimension of this which I will try to expose, and then eliminate, is the fact that my reactions are deeply selfinvolved: I have a “personal interest” in the subject at hand . . . the details of which I will describe (relevantly, I hope) when it seems called for. Within two or three recent days two things have come to my attention that seem to me to be blatant travesties on historical accuracy and violations of what we know (and can prove) to be the “truth” re: American Music . . . (and/or related phenomena). Not to bug anyone in particular, but I have frequently (and very much now) wondered why American music critics and/or musicologists don’t take American music seriously? There is a clear (and ancient) tradition of inferiority to EUROPE in the habits of hiring conductors, concertmasters, etc., and insecurity with regard to European tastes and publicity as being our guidelines to the “acceptable,” “the significant,” but I had thought that the foggy dew had lifted a bit and that someone out there could take a chance on believing that we had contributed something to the common (un-common) cause; uniquely and more or less “poetically,” and humanly. The silence over here is getting a bit heavy and more like a vacuum, into which rushes EUROPE and its magic publicity machine . . . expressly to re-write history as they would like it to have been (and have been allowed to expect it to continue to be); and if no one corrects it we might as well send all of the young composers over to Paris and the Cologne music school to be told what success is all about and how they can get some too . . . Not to knock Nadia [Boulanger] or the Cologne Musikschule or the real things that Stockhausen (von beispiel) has really done but I’m getting terribly sick of the lies and distortions that the European “machine” is

generating. Like (von beispiel), the Peter Heyworth New Yorker profile on Boulez (not, I believe, a culprit to the confusion), and the Karl H. WГ¶rner (ostensibly) book on Stockhausen.4 Page 290 →And (and here I get very personally involved, as promised) most recently and personally galling, the liner notes to the Bosquet recording of Stockhausen’s KlavierstГјck XI and the Boulez Third Piano Sonata, which states that these works (the earliest of which is “XI” (1956, at the earliest, according to the latest dating info) are the prototypes for “open form” work—“which has been widely imitated by others” ..! I am fucking sick of being thought to be a vollower [sic]of Stockhausen!!! (Tudor please note!) As Tudor and Cage know full well, my “Twenty Five Pages” (if not FOLIO), written in the spring of 1953; first performed by Tudor in early 1954; taken to Darmstadt by Tudor and seen by Stockhausen (fastest gun in the East! ) before he even thought about “Klav. XI,” or “open form,” much less write it in 1956–57. The point is (if anyВ .В .В .), that I’m sick to death of the “rip off” .В .В . not to diminish the real (and they are!) contributions from elsepeopleВ .В .В . Basically, I think that “paying attention” is good! Among other things, it is incredible to me that we have no “musical press,” apart from the “factional” .В .В . (sometimes to be confused with the “fictional”). I very much respect the books by [Eric] Salzman and [H. Wiley] Hitchcock which attempt to view the “historical” and the “American music” scenes but I do not understand why no one in this country writes books about WORLD music from a knowledgeable and detailed standpoint—talking to composers, looking really at the scores (rather than settling for the myths of others), instead of sitting back and letting European critics and their composers tell US “where it’s really at” .В .В . their version!5 It seems to me that it should be the critics (musicologists) here who should be a little more interested in, and informed of, the fantastic influence that our concepts have had on WORLD music and stop this shit that’s hitting the fan and burying us in distortions and the same old paranoia re: “the olde world.” P.S. If I seem “down” on European accomplishments it is not because I don’t accept and recognize the contributions and accomplishments; it is only that I am fed-up with the tacit acceptance of “poetry, invention, and relevance” being, continuingly, elsewhereВ .В .В . E. B. Page 291 →Brown was often asked to speak autobiographically about his musical development when invited as a composer-in-residence or lecturer in the United States, Europe, and South America. In his own words, Brown gives a detailed account of his life, from his childhood in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and his fascination with Ives’s Concord Sonata, to his love of jazz, and his experiences with the American and European avantgardes. This particular address was delivered in Europe around 1976.

Earle Brown, Composer (ca. 1976) I was always involved with music, though as a kid growing up in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, fifty miles from Boston, I had no idea I’d become a composer. My home was full of music. My mother used to play the piano, and my father, to this day, sings in church choirs. Also, I remember him listening to the New York Philharmonic broadcasts on Sundays. I started piano lessons early and hated them. Maybe it was the teacher. Later, when I was about ten, I began studying trumpet and loved it, so the trumpet became my “professional” instrument. In high school I organized my own little dance band, with kids from neighboring towns. As a teenager, I remember haunting a record shop in Fitchburg—the only one near my home. I’d listen

mainly to jazz records, and buy as many as I could afford. Oddly enough, this small town store had the old 78 version of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. That record made a profound impression on me. I would frequently take it into the listening booth, put it on and wonder, “My God, what is going on? What kind of music is this?” The pieces sounded so wild at first that I said to myself, “How can anybody play this?” Even more puzzling, how could anybody write it? I hadn’t heard any Ives before, but after listening to the sonata a few times, I was hooked. I kept going back to the shop to listen to it until the owner finally said, “Nobody else ever touches that album. Why don’t you buy it?” My answer was simple: “Twelve dollars is more than I can pay.” But when he offered it to me for half price, I couldn’t resist and I still have that record. The Ives sonata was the first piece of “new” music I knew well. I felt a special kinship with Ives, since we were exposed to many of the same musical influences. I heard the town band time and again, as Ives did, and I played trumpet in it for years. Naturally, some of the musicians weren’t too competent. I became all too familiar with the out-of-tuneness and rhythmic unsettledness that Ives captured so effectively in his music. Page 292 →Aside from Ives, my early influences came from the popular music world. I didn’t grow up immersed in the classics. When a kid in Lunenburg, Massachusetts starts playing the trumpet, he idolizes people like Bunny Berigan, the jazz trumpet player. After high school I studied mathematics and engineering at Northeastern University, and thought I’d become an aeronautical engineer for airplanes and flying, but no sooner did I enter the Air Force in 1945 than World War II ended and I gravitated instead toward the Army–Air Force orchestras. I played mostly in Randolph Field, Texas, for two years. And I started studying music on my own; I began to study arranging and went through Hindemith’s books on composition by myself. In the bands we played everything from classical music to big-band jazz to combos to marches. The experience meant deep absorption in the trumpet again and I loved it. When those two years were up, airplane flying seemed like bus driving, and I was converted to music as a profession. I remember sitting on my bunk in Texas, holding a trumpet in my hand and saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could make my entire life with just this!” But my interests soon shifted from performing to composing. When I got out of the Air Force in 1946 I went to the Schillinger House School of Music in Boston, now called the Berklee School of Music. It’s primarily jazz-oriented today, but at that time I mainly studied the Schillinger theories and techniques of musical composition, which I still admire, although I find them fraught with aesthetic difficulties. They involve numerical and mathematical generation, construction, and distribution of materials; it’s a highly “structuralist” approach. Simultaneously, I studied composition privately with Roslyn Brogue Henning on the history of compositional forms—conductuses, motets, madrigals, fugues, and so on. She is a twelve-tone composer, and also a terrific teacher of older polyphonic forms. While studying theory and composition, I also took trumpet lessons with a very good professional teacher in Boston named Fred Berman. He was famous and very influential as an exponent of the “no pressure” school of trumpet playing. When I got out of the Army, I was very eager to catch up on recent musical developments. As yet, I’d barely heard any Schoenberg or Webern and certainly no VarГЁse or Cage, though I did have a piano reduction of the Berg Violin Concerto and a Schoenberg score, probably Pierrot lunaire. But postwar Boston was boring musically; it was very hard to get new scores or to hear any recent music. I often think that this musical vacuum stimulated my curiosity in other arts. I spent a lot of time in a little poetry shop on Boylston Street, where I discovered Kenneth Patchen. His poems were a revelation to me, and became a very important influence on my music. I Page 293 →have a commission now to write a piece for orchestra and chorus, and I’m using Patchen texts.6 They are quite graphic, full of fantastic sonic potentials and relationships. During this period in Boston (1946–50) I also discovered the abstract expressionist school of art. Much of my aesthetic orientation comes from an early exposure to Jackson Pollock’s techniques and paintings and Alexander Calder’s mobiles. I clearly remember reading an article in Life magazine in 1949 on the abstract expressionists, in which Jackson Pollock’s “spontaneous” technique was described. Of course Life put

it down, calling Pollock “Jack the Dripper.” The press was very nasty to poor old Jackson at first. Somehow Pollock’s paintings reminded me of musical polyphony: the lines, textures, densities, and the details were the kinds of things I heard in my head. I discovered I had quite a visual sonic imagination; I could almost see orchestral textures and colors. Pollock’s spontaneity and immediacy (as in my experience with jazz) were tremendously influential; his direct confrontation with the canvas—what Harold Rosenberg calls “action painting”—led me to scoring a kind of “action music.” Calder’s mobiles also directly affected my outlook. Calder, and other founders of the kinetic movement in the visual arts, held to the basic premise that a work of art needs never to look the same from moment to moment. When I first saw a slowly moving Calder mobile, I thought, “Whether I move or stand still, the relationships within the work, and between myself and the work, constantly shift. It is one work of art, yet an integrally modifiable one. It doesn’t sit still like a Henry Moore sculpture.” And even a Moore presents different aspects as you walk around it. I had been thinking that in music, the concept of absolute fixity—that is, rigid adherence to a written score—was a comparatively recent development. From the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when PГ©rotin and Machaut wrote, up until two hundred years ago, the performance of Western music was more flexible and open. Improvisation and individual approach were a part of it and encouraged. But the prevailing deterministic philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to more precisely determined art. By the twentieth century, we’d made a full circle. The indeterminacy principle in physics and various other relativistic points of view in science and philosophy led me to feel it was natural to create mobile, nonrigid works of art, to set musical materials in motion in such a way as to allow for fluidity and flexibility in performance. Philosophy, science, and the visual arts all pointed the way; I felt it was time that “classical” music followed suit. As I began to hear more and more recent music, the works of two Page 294 →very different composers, Edgard VarГЁse and Anton Webern, stuck in my head. VarГЁse once made a valid distinction between his kind of music and Webern’s, by dividing composers into two basic categories—“note” composers and “sound” composers. For example, a note composer may start with one note, then write a second, third, fourth, and so on, in a horizontal progression or use a twelve-tone row; sound composers would tend to think more acoustically, in terms of chordal blocks and texture. In the history of recent music, Webern was a note composer and VarГЁse a sound composer. Ives was a sound composer; Milton Babbitt is a note composer, for example. I had an early VarГЁse recording, including IntГ©grales, Ionisation, and Hyperprism; although not much of my music sounds anything like VarГЁse’s, I suspect that his blocks of sound were an important influence on my own very intricate polyphonic webs. As for Webern, I loved the transparency and delicacy of his musical textures, though they seemed a little thin, and his manipulation of the twelve-tone row a little obvious. While these poetic, artistic, and musical strands floated around in my mind, I finished my Schillinger studies and became an authorized teacher of the Schillinger system in 1950. I went west, looking for a place to set up a studio or teach Schillinger techniques, perhaps in university extension courses. I ended up in Denver; I liked the climate and the people, and I liked to ski. I lived in Denver two and a half years, between 1950 and 1952. During this time I experimented with many kinds of composition. I did three works in an extended twelve-tone Schillinger serial mode, but then I began to move away from structuralism. I did some painting, to learn what it felt like, and to comprehend the control of colors, because in a way composing is also the control of color. I also composed graphic scores—scores which were themselves not only sets of musical instructions, but also drawings. I did highly experimental things with improvisation and spontaneity as part of the performance process. And in 1953 I composed what I consider, and I guess everybody now considers, the first really mobile, open form composition, called 25 Pages. One of my key experiences in Denver was meeting John Cage. Cage, who is [almost] fifteen years my senior, was already a “presence” in the musical world. He came to Denver to play his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano—not my kind of music at all. But for all our differences, we found we had much in common: Jackson Pollock intrigued us both, and we had an instant rapport on many questions of music and aesthetics. I was

Page 295 →lucky to meet Cage when I did. He buoyed my self-confidence and gave me courage to carry on. At Cage’s suggestion, I sent a score of Three Pieces for Piano to David Tudor in New York and he performed it, giving me my first New York performance. Later, Cage invited me to New York to work with him and Tudor on their electronic music project. Those were exciting days. Cage and I worked together all day; then we’d have a beer at the Cedar Bar, where other regulars included Bill de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. They all became great friends of ours and we had a lot to talk about. Later, the painters were quite bewildered [by] their rather rapid rise from virtual anonymity to widespread acclaim, seemingly overnight. They were not sure that it was quite “proper.” It raised real moral questions for these “rebellious” painters when their works suddenly became so bloody valuable. I remember back in the early fifties, when I used to help Bob Rauschenberg cart his paintings to and from his studio for an occasional show. For a long time nobody bought his paintings. He was giving them away—to me, to Cage, to his other friends, and it really surprised Bob when the value of his paintings went sky high. I’ll never have that problem. Composers and music can never be negotiable like visual artists and their work. We may be puzzled all right, but not because our compositions are suddenly worth a fortune. Cage, for instance, is in a curious double bind: on the one hand, he is famous and notorious; on the other, many people who praise Cage’s ideas and theories really don’t like his music. He is a philosopher as well as a composer; sometimes his music doesn’t sustain itself as “music.” Being in the musical avant-garde presents contradictions to all of us sooner or later. In the early fifties, Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and I were the four oddballs in American music. If my music hadn’t defined my aesthetic position by itself, my association with Cage would have put me immediately outside the mainstream. Cage was considered a nut even among composers, admired at a distance by nearly everybody and at the same time deemed a “dangerous” character. So working on the tape project with him and writing graphic improvisatory scores tended to isolate me from my contemporaries. Also, American composers usually studied at a conservatory or university with [figures] such as Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, or Milton Babbitt, but I went a different route. I didn’t mind being out on a limb, working in highly experimental ways, because I was clearly oriented about what I wanted to do in music. I never Page 296 →wanted to write, say, six related string quartets that added up to “Earle Brown’s Quartet Literature.” I don’t write music only for music’s sake; I’m motivated by concerns with broader artistic questions. Many of my innovations have been in the area of performer involvement, or adding the performer’s creativity to the composer’s as an integral part of a piece. In my Folio scores of 1952–53, for instance, I tried to find a notation that would give musicians a creative role in the performance process. Whenever I talk or lecture about this concept, I sound like an old-fashioned, nostalgic trumpet player: I simply love the act of performing. From the start, audiences and performers “understood” what I was driving at more readily than critics. Critics worry about whether what I do is “valid” as “ART.” They get particularly confused when the forms of some of my pieces are not clearly delineated until the works are performed. Some critics react with, “It sounds terrific, but if it’s going to sound different the next time, how can I tell whether it’s any good?” That’s not my worry, though I think only a good piece would sound good at any given performance. And I’ve had enough experience—twenty-five years’ worth—of writing open form and mobile improvisatory pieces to be able to judge—although by no means all of my music is improvisatory or in open form. The jazz critic Nat Hentoff was one of the few to see immediately what I was trying to do. It didn’t worry him that I didn’t write out every detail and control every nuance; to Nat, a jazz expert, the act of composition includes the performance as well as the score.7

To continue with my life story—as a result of working on the electronic music project between 1952 and 1954, I gained some experience using machines and tapes. So between 1955 and 1960 I supported myself as a recording engineer for Capitol Records. That job involved recording everyone from Count Basie to Nathan Milstein. What a great experience for the ears! Every two years, while working at Capitol, I’d save enough money to take a leave of absence and go to Europe. I have always had a very positive response to my music in Europe. I was able to break into the European musical scene in the fifties largely because of Pierre Boulez. Boulez saw my Perspectives piece when he [was] visiting the U.S. in 195[2] as conductor of the Jean-Louis Barrault / Madeleine Renaud company. He was impressed by this work, though the “improvisatory” pieces of mine displeased him; he thought they were irresponsible, and left too much to the musicians’ whims. Nonetheless, he asked me to come see him whenever I came to Paris. When I got there in ’56, Boulez wrote [several] important letters of introduction for me. One was to Otto Tomek Page 297 →of Universal Edition in Vienna, who soon after became music director of the Cologne Radio. Another was to Hans Rosbaud, one of the greatest conductors of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. One was to Karl Amadeus Hartmann, the director of new music in Munich, and yet another was to William Glock, until recently the head of the BBC. When I first got to Europe, my music was still too far out for Boulez and even for Luciano Berio. On the other hand, a musicologist named Heinz-Klaus Metzger was very struck by it. Metzger was a student of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, the famous German philosophers from Frankfurt. Metzger’s outlook was strongly antiauthoritarian. When he saw my scores and heard me describe them, he said, “Ah, finally someone has written music that does away with the conductor and the composer as authoritarian figures! You, Earle Brown, allow everyone to do what he wants.” “No,” I responded, “there are rules, definite instructions to be followed.” To this day, Metzger and I disagree on the implications of my scores. It can be said that I had a subliminal societal motive—to make the musician more autonomous—but Metzger considers my scores revolutionary, calculated to destroy the social “nonsense” of an orchestra and a conductor, while I just wanted to do something poetic with sound and give performers a chance to participate actively and spontaneously in the making of my music. In a way, Metzger has misunderstood my graphic works. He recorded an entire set of pieces (Folio) in Germany, in a box set entitled Music Before Revolution [1972]. Well, I thank him for bringing about some decent performances of the Folio pieces. Unfortunately, the playing in some cases was molded by Metzger’s misunderstanding of my motives. His idea was to put twenty-five people in a room, let them start playing whenever they wanted, play as long as they cared to, and then stop, doing anything they chose along the way. At one of the recording sessions, I asked the musicians to listen to one another, which was always my intention. Metzger would reply, “No, you must let free individuals do their own thing.” In the notes to the record, which is on the German Electrola label, Metzger criticizes me for giving the musicians such suggestions. My response is, “Fine—but if they ignore the score and each other, don’t call the resulting piece an Earle Brown.” Sure, I’m aware of the political and social ramifications of my musical tendencies, but I never self-consciously seek to “liberate” people. It would be pretentious to think that by bringing musicians to my score I could “liberate” them. I believe in freedom, but there is no such thing as total freedom. Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music made a strong impression on me Page 298 →long ago. In it, Stravinsky contended that having some restrictions, outlining your areas, made for the greatest freedom, because then you and others know where you are, and what is real and what is not. Cage and I have long had a similar disagreement. I recall an early conversation after I looked at a new score of his. I didn’t think musicians would respond too favorably to it because Cage went so far as to say, “Play the piece if you want to, and don’t play it if you don’t want to.” In other words, the musicians, if so disposed, could sit and do nothing for the duration of the piece. Now, that is too ambiguous. It doesn’t define the work or honor the musician, though Cage thinks it’s a tremendous honor to free the performer to choose whether to do something or nothing. I told Cage, “You’re really not interested in experimental music; you’re creating eccentric social situations, not musical ones. You’re more a musical sociologist than a composer.” Bemusedly, he agreed with me.

I’m not willing to go as far as Cage does, though I believe that great art is subtly subversive. By quietly undermining artistic values that have gotten distorted or exploited, the best art makes a tacit, rather than a violent or aggressive, attack on social stagnation and corruption. Art is not the most effective weapon for revolution of any kind, but it can signify or encourage change. Art necessarily has varying and unpredictable effects on people. I’m convinced that in a healthy society, artistic norms should be constantly under question, which is not, our course, to deny the need for continuity. I feel that my Folio pieces are reasonably within a tradition. When writing them, I was influenced by Western and non-Western heritages as well as jazz. Later, I learned a lot by sitting in now and then on a course at the New School that Henry Cowell called Music of the World’s Peoples, which covered Indonesian, Balinese, and Japanese music, among others. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic sometimes find it hard to follow my musical influences from diverse cultural traditions, but I generally have a much easier time abroad. I am forever indebted to Boulez for introducing me to important musical figures throughout the Continent. Apparently, my scores made an impression on European composers in the fifties, many of whom were still locked into writing tightly controlled twelve-tone music. They saw and appreciated that I could write their kind of music, and go off in new directions, asking my own poetic questions. My pieces intrigued—and frightened—some of them. I think that the open form and flexibility principles that I developed and the notation that went with them helped to loosen up the European musical status quo. Since the fifties, I’ve had many performances in Europe, and nearly all Page 299 →my commissions come from there. The city of Darmstadt commissioned Available Forms 1; the Rome Radio Orchestra commissioned Available Forms 2; the city of Kiel commissioned a piece for large orchestra called Time Spans, which has never been played in the U.S. [at the time of Brown’s writing]; and I had a lot of performances on German radio in the sixties. I first conducted Available Forms 2, a piece for large orchestra and two conductors, with Bruno Maderna in Venice in 1962. Bruno said I had a flair for conducting. Several people I know think I ought to become a full-time conductor, but I don’t agree. It is important to me to be able to conduct my own works, but I don’t have the energy or the time or the inclination to study all of the standard repertoire. European invitations have never stopped coming. Two years ago I was guest composer and lecturer-in-residence at Rotterdam Conservatory. I conducted a piece of mine with Edo de Waart and the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Last year, I taught some special courses at the Basel Conservatory in Switzerland, and altogether the European experience has been most fortunate. Besides Boulez and Maderna, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen have been real friends. As an American, I’m in a neutral positioning vis-Г -vis the inevitable faction fights; I am very friendly, say, with Nono and Stockhausen, who consider themselves in different camps and rarely speak. I am still much closer to my European colleagues than my American. I know Copland quite well; I like him and his music and I think he likes mine, but I’m still an outsider to the American music “establishment.” Some American composers are jealous of my European performances, but it’s not as if I went over like a traveling salesman and demanded them. My music was performed abroad because key figures in European contemporary music respected it; over here my techniques and aesthetics have been seen as a threat to the twelvetone bastions at Princeton and Columbia—though someone like Shulamit Ran at the University of Chicago has her students compose in the manner of my Available Forms 1, which was the first open form piece for orchestra. I’ve consciously remained independent of any permanent academic connection, with all the paperwork and bureaucracy it involves. Nonetheless, I am very interested in teaching young American composers how to listen and how to think creatively. Most of them need help opening their minds after strong doses of narrow-minded teachers or restrictive schools. I don’t care what style a composer works in, as long as he’s serious and consistent. If a student wants to compose like BartГіk, I’ll help him do Page 300 →it successfully; at the same time I’ll prod him a little: “You know, it’s really not all that exciting to rewrite the music of BartГіk or Hindemith. Have you heard anything by Ligeti, or Boulez, or me, and explored the possibilities we open up?” Naturally I never push anyone into writing music my way.

I travel about the country as much as I can; I like to meet all kinds of composers and other artists. I was composerin-residence at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore for five years; I often spend the fall semester at the California Institute of the Arts, near Los Angeles. During the spring, I do many three-day residences at different campuses; I give a lecture, conduct a workshop, then go to classes and talk to students. I try very hard to break down the idea that composers are unapproachable. I work closely with students, both through talking and music making. In a three-hour workshop I can teach kids so much about one of my scores. They may not play it exactly right, or at concert level, but they’ll get to understand a lot about my attitude, the notation, how to play flexibly, and how to feel a phrase. Teaching music students is one thing; teaching audiences is something else again. To some extent, audiences need to be educated. There’s a common complaint that if a person doesn’t have much knowledge of contemporary music, it’s very hard for him to tell whether something new is good or bad. My comment on that is, sure, it’s also hard to understand Seiji Ozawa when he’s speaking Japanese if you don’t know the language. But education isn’t everything. There are people who come up to me after a concert and say, “Gee, I liked your piece. It was really terrific. But I don’t understand it.” My response is, “Don’t try to understand it. I’m not writing music for you to understand, but to listen to, as a sound event in time.” It does my heart good to hear people say they enjoyed a piece of mine, whether or not they “understood” it. Concert audiences need more than familiarity with and exposure to new music, namely, self-confidence when they listen. Ultimately, it is up to them whether they like or dislike what they hear. Of course, judging the music of one’s own time is no easy matter. After listening to a tremendous amount of recent music, I have found that one can ask essentially two questions: Is the compositional technique capable, and is the piece original—does it have poetic freshness? It’s much easier to meet the first criterion than the second. It’s not so difficult to write a well-structured piece. If this element works and that one fits, you have a “good piece” in some historical sense. But I’m more impressed when I hear something that gives me a fresh viewpoint, when I say to myself, “My God, listen to those unusual sonorities,” or whatever. The form may or may not Page 301 →be conventional, but if the piece works poetically, it takes me down a new path from beginning to end. Each piece should be like a journey—and every journey is different. The one thing I demand in a composer is some degree of poetic originality; I’m not so concerned about whether what he’s written is a “masterpiece” or not. Somebody once asked Gertrude Stein what she thought about history. She said, “History takes time.” Designating masterpieces also takes time. Stein wrote a fantastic little [talk], What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them? [1936]. There aren’t many in any period, though we’ve had a handful in recent years. Often I would rather hear a piece that may not be “great” but that provides a fresh approach. It’s crucial that contemporary music of all sorts be integrated more systematically into institutionalized concert life. I’m for progress, which includes all kinds of music, from very conventional to very new—this is more common across the Atlantic than here. One of my favorite concerts took place in Munich a while back; Available Forms 2 was on the bill with Debussy’s Jeux, Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Ives’s Three Places in New England, and a piece by Nono. Now there’s an interesting mixture: Debussy, Ives, Webern, Nono, Brown. But if you zap listeners with five very new works at one shot, you’re going to boggle their minds. I remember when Available Forms 2 was done—fantastically—by Lenny Bernstein in 1964 on an avant-garde series. He spread works by Xenakis, Babbitt, Wolpe, Feldman, Cage, and me (among others) over several concerts. The concert which included my music and Cage’s started with Vivaldi’s “Winter” from The Seasons, was followed by Tchaikovsky’s PathГ©tique Symphony, then intermission, and then the three new works. That’s not integration—that’s abrupt juxtaposition. I’m sure that this does not work as well as the Munich type of programming. Boulez, with the New York Philharmonic and especially with his Domaine Musical programs in France, tried to program more logically. Pierre is sensible. He’s an avant-garde composer, but he doesn’t overdo his bias. Pierre has a very good grasp of how to bring an audience into the twentieth century. So did Bruno Maderna. He once did my Available Forms 1 on a program in Holland, along with works of

Pérotin (in Bruno’s own arrangement), Beethoven, and Mozart. I said, “Bruno, you’re going to get both of us hounded off the stage.” Instead, everybody loved the concert. That was very gratifying.

Page 302 → Page 303 →

Work List A more detailed work list and a chronology can be found at www.earle-brown.org. Date 1949 1951 1952 1952 1952–54

1953 1953 1954 1954 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1961 Page 304 →1962 1962 1963 1963

Work Instrumentation or media Home Burial Piano Three Pieces for Piano Piano Perspectives Piano Music for Violin, Violin, cello, piano Cello and Piano Folio and 4 Variable Systems October 1952 November 1952 (“Synergy”) December 1952 MM - 87 MM - 135 (March 1953) Music for “Trio for Five Dancers” (June 1953) 1953 4 Systems 25 Pages 1–25 pianos Octet I 8 tapes Octet II 8 tapes Flute, French horn, trumpet, violin, cello, double bass, piano, guitar, Indices percussion Forgotten Piece 1–4 pianos Music for Cello and Piano Four More The Kind of Bird I Am Pentathis Hodograph I Available Forms 1

Cello, piano 1 or more pianos Orchestra Flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, tenor trombone, harp, piano, violin, viola, cello Flute, piano, percussion Chamber orchestra

Available Forms 2 Orchestra with 2 conductors Novara From Here Times Five

Flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello Chamber orchestra, optional chorus Flute, trombone, violin, cello, harp, tape

Date 1964

Work

Instrumentation or media

1965

Corroboree 3 (or 2) pianos Music for Galerie Sound installation (sound files) Stadler String Quartet 2 violins, viola, cello

1965 1963–66 1966–67

Nine Rarebits Calder Piece Modules I–II

1967–68 1969

Event: Synergy II Chamber orchestra with 2 conductors Module III Orchestra Small Piece for Chorus Large Chorus

1964

1969

1 or 2 harpsichords Percussion quartet and standing mobile Orchestra

ca. *Folio II Variable 1970–2000 1970 Syntagm III Flute, bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, harp, percussion 1971 New Piece Chamber orchestra 1972 Time Spans Orchestra 1972 New Piece Loops Choir and/or orchestra 1972 Sign Sounds Chamber orchestra 1973 Centering Solo violin and chamber orchestra Cross Sections and 1975 Orchestra Color Fields 1978 *Lunenburg March Concert band (arr. Tony Fox) 1979 Wikiup Sound installation (sound files on movable pulleys) 1980 Windsor Jambs†Voice, alto flute, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, percussion 1983 Sounder Rounds Orchestra 1985 Tracer Flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, cello, double bass, tape 1992 Tracking Pierrot Flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion 1992 Oh, K Flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, double bass, piano, percussion Summer Suite 1995 Piano вЂ95 1999 Special Events Cello, piano †Brown identified an earlier version of Windsor Jambs as “Transients” beginning in 1976, scored at the time for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion. * = unpublished

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Notes Foreword 1. Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, Christian Wolff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 55–56. 2. Earle Brown, interview with Cornelius Dufallo and Gregg Bendian, May 5, 2002, http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/rafiles/interviews/interview_brown.ram. See also MD50, The Earle Brown Music Foundation. 3. John P. Welsh, “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967),” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 254–90. 4. Morton Feldman, “Earle Brown,” BMI Portrait Bulletin, 1966; rpt. in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 42–49. 5. Earle Brown in Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard Dufallo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 113.

Preface 1. Max Ernst, “Beyond Painting” (1939), in Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1948), 25. Earle and Carolyn Brown drove to his uncle Carl’s ranch in Sedona after they wed in Massachusetts on June 28, 1950. Carl’s wife Daphne was an artist, and they were friendly with their neighbors Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. In 1957, Brown again drew inspiration from Ernst when the two met in New York at the Alexander Iolas Gallery, where Ernst asked Brown, “What kind of bird are you?” Brown’s response was a one-page orchestral score written the same day, The Kind of Bird I Am, signed April 26, 1957. 2. Earle Brown, “Earle Brown, Composer” (ca. 1976), full text published in “Select Texts by Earle Brown” in this volume. Brown was stationed in Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas, during the majority of his active service, which began June 5, 1945, at Ft. Devons in Massachusetts, and took him to Lowry Field in ColoradoPage 306 → for weapons and basic training, and for a time to Keesler Field, Mississippi; he was discharged from Randolph Field on October 21, 1946, at the rank of corporal. Brown belonged to the 619th and 633rd U.S. Army Air Forces Bands during active service. 3. Earle Brown, album notes to Feldman-Brown, Time Records 58007, LP. 4. The Earle Brown Music Foundation possesses a “String Quartet” that Brown preserved in an envelope labeled 1951, in which there are mainly two notated movements based on a twelve-tone row and rhythmic cellules; see f. 1-163, EBMF. At present, EBMF does not possess Brown’s precompositional sketch in “action notation.” Brown’s logic for transposing action notation to staff notation was as follows: “It didn’t seem at that time that anyone could actually perform from such a notation, so after sketching an entire piece within a few seconds I went back and put actual notes where the graphics fell and rationalized the rhythm.” Earle Brown, preface to String Quartet (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). The penultimate section described here is a one-minute section of gestural lines on a staff marked as “small, transient, inarticulate sounds.” Brown referred to this notation in painterly terms as “action notation” in the preface of the score. 5. Further underscoring the connection between Folio II (ca. 1970–2000) and his earlier Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54), Brown wrote the following about Syntagm III, another work he composed in 1970: “Syntagm III is an extension of my early graphic, improvisational scores such as Synergy I and December 1952 [both from Folio (1954)] in combination with aspects of open form (Twenty-Five Pages (1953)) and more recent scores such as Synergy II [Event: Synergy II for two conductors from 1967–68] in which I have combined all of these вЂexperimental’ scoring and performance techniques.” Earle Brown, preface to Syntagm III (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007).

6. This last phrase comes from Brown’s early 1950s notebook, in a passage in which he again spoke about reading Max Ernst’s “Beyond Painting”; f. 2-31, EBMF. See also Earle Brown, “The Notation and Performance of New Music” (1964), Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (1986): 197. Brown expressed new optimism about the collaborative relationship between performer and composer in the preface to Syntagm III and acknowledged, “Recent developments are encouraging, finally.” Syntagm III was commissioned by Fondation Maeght and composed in Berlin during Brown’s DAAD fellowship year, 1970–71; the premiere was given by Lukas Foss and Domaine Musical, July 20, 1970, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. 7. Earle Brown, preface to Tracer (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2008). Earle Brown, preface to Modules I, II & III (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007); excerpted from Earle Brown, letter to Toru Takemitsu, May 22, 1968, f. 2-1, EBMF. 8. On the distinction between observation and test in Cage’s experimentalism, see William Brooks, “In re: вЂExperimental Music,’” Contemporary Music Review 31, no. 1 (February 2012): 37–62. 9. John Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 37–38. Morton Feldman, preface to publisher’s catalog, Earle Brown (New York: Broadcast Music Incorporated,Page 307 → 1966); rpt. in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 42–49. 10. Printed in Notations, ed. John Cage and Alison Knowles (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), n.p. 11. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo, 1980), 60–67. Anthony Coleman also spoke about Brown’s repute among musicians at New England Conservatory around the time of Bailey’s monograph who knew about Available Forms 1 as “the first important piece that used modular thinking.” Anthony Coleman, interview with Michael Goldberg, Bomb 96 (Summer 2006): 81. 12. Donal Henahan, “Earle Brown: They Love Him in Baden-Baden,” New York Times (June 21, 1970), 15, 18. 13. Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1952): 127–34; Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, ed., Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); John Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994); Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, ed., Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Alistair Noble, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); and David Cline, The Graph Music of Morton Feldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). See also Thomas DeLio, The Music of Morton Feldman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996); John P. Welsh, “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967),” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 254–90; and Steven Schick, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006). On earlier surveys, see Stefan Wolpe, “On New (and Not-so-New) Music in America” (1956), trans. Austin Clarkson, Journal of Music Theory 28, no. 1 (1984): 1–45; Keith Potter, “Earle Brown in Context,” Musical Times 127, no. 1726 (1986): 679–83; and Robert Zierolf, “Indeterminacy in Musical Form” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1983). 15. Joan Rothfuss, Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014); Benjamin Piekut, ed., Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Benjamin Piekut, Experimental Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Robert Adlington, ed., Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Steven Johnson, ed., The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard VarГЁse, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Routledge, 2002); and George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91–122.

16. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5, Music in the Page 308 →Late Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Piekut, Experimental Otherwise. 17. Pierre Boulez, interview with Susan Sollins-Brown, Juilliard School, May 14, 2010, uncataloged video, EBMF. 18. Morton Feldman, letter to Earle Brown, February 3, 1971, f. 3-39, EBMF. 19. Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, Christian Wolff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); and David R. Nicholls, “Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School,” in New York Schools, 17–56. 20. Pamela L. Quist, “Indeterminate Form in the Works of Earle Brown” (PhD diss., Peabody Conservatory, 1994). Contemporaneous studies included David Denton, “The Composition as Aesthetic Polemic: December 1952 by Earle Brown” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1992); and Olivier Delaigue, “Earle Brown et la France,” in Sillages Musicologiques: Hommages Г Yves GГ©rard, ed. Philippe Blay and RaphaГ«lle Legrand (Paris: Conservatoire National SupГ©rieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, 1997), 289–308. 21. Thomas Fichter, Editing Report (Rye, NY: The Earle Brown Music Foundation, 2013). 22. D. J. Hoek, “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series,” Notes (December 2004): 350–60. 23. Dan Albertson, ed., “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007). 24. Elizabeth Hoover, “вЂI Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It’: Potentiality and Movement in Multimedia Performances by the American Avant-Garde in the 1960s” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2012); David Magnus, “Aural Latency: The Sound Behind the Image in Earle Brown’s Folio, 1952–53” (PhD diss., Freie UniversitГ¤t Berlin, 2013); and David Magnus, Aurale Latenz: Wahrnehmbarkeit und OperativitГ¤t in der bildlichen NotationsГ¤sthetik Earle Browns (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016). On the 1963 joint concert of Earle Brown and Morton Feldman at Town Hall in New York, see Rebecca Y. Kim, “A United Front: John Cage and the Foundation’s First Decade, ” in Artists for Artists: Fifty Years of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ed. Eric Banks (New York: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2013), 60–81. 25. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007); Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and, cited earlier, Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt. 26. Yves-Alain Bois, “Chance Encounters: Kelly, Morellet, Cage,” in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ed. Julia Robinson (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 188–203; and Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec, ed., В±1961: Founding the Expanded Arts (June 19–October 28) (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofГ-a, 2013). Reciprocally, musicians have recently explored Brown’s art-related works in greater detail, such as his 1985 Page 309 →Rauschenberg-inspired electroacoustic piece Tracer. See Ne(x)tworks, Earle Brown: Tracer, Mode 179, 2007, DVD. 27. On the history of Calder’s mobile and Brown’s score, see Thomas Fichter, “Earle Brown’s Calder Piece and Alexander Calder’s Chef d’orchestre,” in Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume and Ann Coxon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 66–75. The publication includes other essays related to the 2015–16 exhibit at Tate Modern. Also significant for exploring the visual and sonic link between Calder and Brown is Marion Ackermann and Susanne Meyer-BГјser, ed., Alexander Calder: Avant-Garde in Motion (September 7, 2013–January 12, 2014) (DГјsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2013).

Chapter 1 1. The following works are published by Associated Music Publishers/Schirmer: Music for Violin, Cello

and Piano (1952), Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54), Available Forms 1 (1961), and Available Forms 2 (1962). Two works are published by B. Schott: Three Pieces for Piano (1951) and Perspectives (1952). For further details on the revised Peters edition of Brown’s scores, see Thomas Fichter, Editing Report (Rye, NY: The Earle Brown Music Foundation, 2013), available through www.earle-brown.org. 2. Earle Brown, interview with James Pritchett, November 16, 1984, MD09, EBMF. 3. Brown completed the thirty-six-page score of Octet II but never realized it sonically. Volker Straebel and Folkmar Hein gave the first realization of the score at the MaerzMusik Festival fГјr aktuelle Musik Berlin in 2009. See Volker Straebel, “Interdependence of Composition and Technology in Earle Brown’s Tape Compositions Octet I/II (1953/54),” paper presented at “Beyond Notation: An Earle Brown Symposium,” Northeastern University, January 19, 2013. 4. Brown planned to work at the ORTF studio from December 15, 1962, through early January 1963. Earle Brown, letter to Pierre Schaeffer, November 4, 1962, f. 6-157, EBMF. 5. Earle Brown, headnote to Times Five (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2008). 6. The first U.S. venue to install Music for Galerie Stadler was Gallery 360 at Northeastern University, January 14–February 26, 2013. 7. Earle Brown, letter to David Budd, July 10, 1963, f. 6-87, EBMF. 8. Hugh Davies made notable mention of Brown’s Music for Galerie Stadler in the preface to his seminal 1967 inventory of electronic music. Although Brown’s work was not included in the inventory because of its sole use of tape to replay prerecorded instrumental music, Davies found the increasingly outof-phase relationship between tracks noteworthy. Hugh Davies, “International Electronic Music Catalog” (“Repertoire International des Musiques Electroacoustiques”), Electronic Music Review 2–3 (April–July 1967): vii. 9. The exhibit was part of Berliner Musiktage, February 15–16, 1980. 10. Reel 142A, EBMF. Page 310 →11. Earle Brown, headnote to Tracer (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2008). 12. Earle Brown, interview with David Ryan, April 2, 1996, f. 2-99, EBMF. 13. The collection has not yet been published, and it includes works written between approximately 1970 and 2000. 14. Earle Brown, headnote to Hodograph I (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2009). 15. Alex Ross, “VarГЁse does jazz,” Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, July 20, 2010, http://www.therestisnoise.com/2010/07/var%C3%A8se-does-jazz.html. 16. Although some of the pieces in Folio II have been performed, recorded, and exhibited, Folio II was never published in Brown’s lifetime. EBMF has not finalized the selection of works to be published as Folio II. At least seven works are known to be part of Folio II. 17. Earle Brown, essay in Merce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), 76. See also Brown’s discussion of “time-sense perception” with regard to time notation in Earle Brown, preface to Novara (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 18. Brown, interview with Ryan. 19. Maurice George Kendall and Bernard Babington Smith, Tables of Random Sampling Numbers (Tracts for Computers, No. XXIV) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). 20. Brown, interview with Pritchett. 21. “Brecht probably doesn’t know that вЂ25 Pgs.’ is вЂassembled’ by random tables. I used random sampling tables to compose Oct ’52, Nov. ’52, Dec. ’52, and others—probably (to my knowledge) the first вЂart’ use of random numbers.” Annotation by Earle Brown on George Brecht’s Chance-Imagery (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), Brown’s personal copy, container 79, EBMF. 22. Brown, interview with Pritchett. 23. Earle Brown, interview with Volker Straebel, August 2, 1995 (Rye, NY), MD05 EBMF. 24. Earle Brown, interview with John Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989 (Rye, NY) and March 23, 1992 (New York City), MD01, EBMF. 25. John Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 37. 26. For more on this distinction, see Earle Brown, “On December 1952,” American Music 26, no. 1

(Spring 2008): 1–12. 27. Earle Brown, letter to Toru Takemitsu, May 22, 1968, f. 2-1, EBMF. 28. Earle Brown, preface to Tracking Pierrot (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 29. Earle Brown, interview in Rome, date unknown, MD37, EBMF.

Chapter 3 1. The foundation for this chapter is the material presented in a workshop titled “Aspects of Earle Brown’s Use of the Schillinger System of Composition” Page 311 →presented at “Beyond Notation: An Earle Brown Symposium,” Northeastern University, January 19, 2013. In order to give a more complete picture of the ways Brown used techniques from the Schillinger system than was possible at the symposium, additional material has been added to what was presented at that time. All of the Schillinger techniques discussed in this chapter are to be found in the two volumes of Joseph Schillinger’s The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, ed. Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling (New York: Carl Fischer, 1946). 2. Earle Brown, interview with David Ryan, November 7, 1999, College of Ripon and St. John, York, England. Originally published as “Calculation and Spontaneity: David Ryan Speaks to Earle Brown,” newsletter of Contemporary Music-Making for Amateurs (February 23, 2000), n.p. 3. Daniel S. Augustine, “Four Theories of Music in the United States, 1900–1950: Cowell, Yasser, Partch, Schillinger” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1979), 528. 4. At the time Schillinger entered, the school was known as the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The conservatory was also known at various times as the Petrograd Conservatory and the Leningrad Conservatory. It is currently known as the St. Petersburg Conservatory. 5. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 1639. 6. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 1639. 7. Joseph Schillinger, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), iii. 8. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 15. 9. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 15. 10. Schillinger, Mathematical Basis, 5. 11. Henry Cowell, “Overture to the Schillinger System,” in Schillinger System, ix–x. 12. Arnold Shaw, “Joseph Schillinger? The Father of Electronic Music, That’s Who,” Los Angeles Times (June 11, 1972), 58. 13. Charles Previn, “Schillinger’s Influence on Film Music,” Music News 39, no. 3 (1947): 39. 14. Frances Schillinger, Joseph Schillinger: A Memoir (New York: Greenberg, 1949), 97–98. 15. Frances Schillinger, letter to Rockwell Kent, April 3, 1943, Rockwell Kent Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm Reel 5231. 16. Schillinger, Joseph Schillinger, 38–39. 17. “Carl Fischer, Inc. and Frances Schillinger Publication Agreement Contract,” May 27, 1944, Joseph Schillinger Collection, Friedheim Music Library, Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. 18. Schillinger, Joseph Schillinger, 179. There has been confusion regarding the actual publication date of the Carl Fischer volumes. According to the contract between Mrs. Schillinger and Carl Fischer, Inc., dated May 27, 1944, Mrs. Schillinger sold to the company the Schillinger system material and its existing copyrights, and Fischer agreed to publish the literary work in two volumes. The agreement includes the following information in regard to existing copyrights: Page 312 →Mrs. Schillinger states that to the best of her knowledge, information and belief a portion of “The System of Musical Composition and Orchestration,” the subject of this agreement, comprising Volumes 1 to 10, was published with claim of copyright on or about the 2nd day of January, 1941, and that two copies thereof were deposited in the office of the Register of Copyrights on the 26th day of June, 1942, and a certificate of copyright registration issued therefore (Entry: Class A, No. 165279) that an additional part of said course, entitled

“Schillinger Theory of Composition,” comprising three hundred and four (304) pages, was published on or about the 3rd day of July, 1942, with claim of copyright, but copies thereof have not been deposited in the office of the Register of Copyrights; that an additional part of said course, entitled “Schillinger Theory of Orchestration,” comprising three hundred and thirty-three (333) pages, was published on or about the 24th day of October, 1942 with claim of copyright, but copies thereof have not been deposited in the office of the Register of Copyrights.

Therefore, it can be seen that Joseph Schillinger himself copyrighted portions of the Schillinger system material in 1941 and 1942, although the two copyrights in 1942 were not completed because he did not deposit copies of that material in the Office of the Register of Copyrights and no certificates of registration were issued. Fischer purchased the three copyrights and listed them in the 1946 Carl Fischer, Inc., published volumes of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. These 1946 volumes are the first complete publications of the Schillinger system. The 1941 copyrighted material is in the Library of Congress and is in the form of ten bound volumes. 19. Merle Montgomery, “Memoirs of Dr. Merle Montgomery” (typescript), Outsized Box 2, Mary Clarke Miley Foundation Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman. 20. Frances Schillinger, letter to Mrs. Walter S. Fischer, November 21, 1951, Joseph Schillinger Files (Archive of Carl Fischer, LLC), Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, NY. 21. David Haas, Leningrad’s Modernists: Studies in Composition and Musical Thought, 1917–1932 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 84. 22. Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling, introduction to The Schillinger System, xii. 23. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 1604–1605. 24. Earle Brown, letter to Frances Schillinger, September 12, 1962, Joseph Schillinger Collection, Friedheim Music Library, Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. 25. Earle Brown, letter to Frances Schillinger, August 18, 1967, Joseph Schillinger Collection. 26. Frances Schillinger, letter to Lawrence Berk, February 21, 1949, Joseph Schillinger Files (Archive of Carl Fischer, LLC). 27. Lee Berk, letter to the author, August 13, 1992. 28. Berk, letter to the author, August 13, 1992. 29. Berk, letter to the author, August 13, 1992. Page 313 →30. Lee Berk, “The Jazz School: Berklee at 25,” Music Journal 28, no. 8 (October 1970): 29. 31. Ed Hazell, Berklee: The First Fifty Years (Boston: Berklee Press Publications, 1995), 24. 32. John YaffГ©, “An Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 290. 33. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 290. 34. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 290. 35. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 291. 36. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 292. 37. Louis Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown about Constructivism and Schillinger’s System of Musical Composition,” Contemporary Music Review 30, no. 2 (April 2011): 176. 38. Schillinger House Student Program and Progress Record for Earle A. Brown, in the Berklee Office of Public Information collection by Alma Berk, BCA-013, College Archives, Stan Getz Library, Berklee College of Music. 39. Lawrence Berk, Schillinger House School of Music Catalog (Boston, 1949), 36. 40. Berk, Schillinger House, 9. 41. Berk, Schillinger House, 15. 42. Berk, Schillinger House, 15.

43. Berk, Schillinger House, 15. 44. Berk, Schillinger House, 16. 45. Berk, Schillinger House, 16–20. 46. Kenneth MacKillop Jr., letter “To Whom It May Concern,” June 13, 1950, in the Berklee Office of Public Information collection by Alma Berk, BCA-013, College Archives, Stan Getz Library, Berklee College of Music. 47. “Student Records for Earle Brown.” 48. Schillinger Institute, “How to Become an Authorized Teacher of the Schillinger System of Musical Composition” (New York: n.d. [Received from E. Richard Haarde, Sebastian, Florida, September 17, 1995]). Some of the Schillinger Institute’s correspondence from 1942 to 1981 can be found in the Joseph Schillinger Files (Archive of Carl Fischer, LLC) in the Ruth T. Watanabe Special Collections at the Eastman School of Music. 49. Over the years, Brown gave differing accounts of how many students graduated out of the original twenty-five who started with him at Schillinger House. His numbers ranged from two to five students. 50. Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown,” 176. 51. Earle Brown, “The Schillinger System of Musical Composition: A Co-ordinated System of New Musical Resources,” unpublished typescript, 2, f. 2-14, EBMF. 52. Brown, “Schillinger System,” 3. 53. Brown, “Schillinger System,” 3. 54. Brown, “Schillinger System,” 4. 55. Brown, “Schillinger System,” 6. 56. Brown, “Schillinger System.” 57. Earle Brown, business card, f. 4-71, EBMF. Page 314 →58. Earle Brown, “Some Notes on Composing” (1963), in The American Composer Speaks, ed. Gilbert Chase (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 301–2. 59. Mark Alburger, “Available Brown: A Chance Interview with Earle” (January 17, 1996), 20thCentury Music 3, no. 5 (May 1996): 2. 60. Earle Brown, “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” Musical Quarterly 72 (Spring 1986): 195–96. 61. Earle Brown, “The Promotion and Performance of American Music Abroad,” National Music Council Bulletin 27, no. 2 (Winter 1966–67): 8. 62. Kyle Gann, “Square Rhythms,” Village Voice 37, no. 17 (April 28, 1992), 94. 63. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 291. 64. Schillinger used the term “chromatic” instead of atonal. 65. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 291–92. 66. Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown,” 167. 67. Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown,” 174. 68. Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown,” 176. 69. Pine, “Conversation with Earle Brown,” 168. 70. Earle Brown, “Program Note,” Tracking Pierrot (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 71. Elena Dubinets and Louis Pine, “Earle Brown and the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, ” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music, Eugene, OR, February 17, 2005. 72. Elena Dubinets, “Between Mobility and Stability: Earle Brown’s Compositional Process,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 409–26. 73. Figures 3.1, 3.4, and 3.5 appeared in Dubinets and Pine, “Earle Brown.” Figures 3.2, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 were adapted from Dubinets and Pine, “Earle Brown.” 74. Brown, “Program Note,” Tracking Pierrot. 75. Shaw and Dowling, introduction to Schillinger System, xvii. 76. Although I also discussed at the symposium what I called “Brown’s technique,” a Schillinger technique for Tracking Pierrot, due to time restrictions I was not able to describe the technique or show how Brown adapted it for his own use.

77. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 1615. 78. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 1611. 79. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 368. 80. On page 744 of The Schillinger System, Schillinger stated that any musical composition, when it is conceived geometrically, that is, put on a graph, can be subjected to quadrant rotation. Schillinger did know of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, but Schillinger did not specifically address tone rows in his system. 81. Richard Bobbitt, Harmonic Technique in the Rock Idiom (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1976), 183–84. 82. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 654. 83. Schillinger, Schillinger System, 46–47. 84. In 2005, Dubinets and I reported that only the first twelve chords of the twenty-four chords that make up the chord progression in event 2, page 4 were derived from the vertical alignment of the notes of the “ALL” Interval rows (see figure Page 315 →3.8). The remaining twelve chords in this event were not discussed. Also, we only reported that the draft of this chord progression in figure 3.8 was for this event. However, on further analysis, I discovered two details concerning this information. One, not only the first twelve chords of this event were derived from the “ALL” Interval rows, but the remaining twelve chords, i.e., the entire event, came from these same rows (see figure 3.22). Two, the draft in figure 3.8 shows not only the chord progression for all the chords in event 2, page 4, but also shows, at the bottom of it, the chord progression for event 2 on page 11 and how it is an adaptation of the same chord progression as event 2, page 4 (see figure 3.19). 85.For the reader who wishes to consult the examples in table 3.3 in more detail, EBMF has made these available at http://www.earle-brown.org/BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. 86. Lawrence Berk, Lyle Dowling, and James McInerney, “Lesson No. I—Harmonizing a Given Melody”; “Lesson No. II—Harmonizing a Given Melody (Continued)”; “Lesson No. 3—Roots and Shapes of Chords”; “Lesson No. 4—Harmony вЂBy the Block’”; “Lesson No. 5—Harmony by Permutation”; “Lesson No. 6—Sonority by Symmetry”; “Lesson No. 7—Sectioning the Melody”; “Lesson No. 8—Variation Techniques in Orchestration”; “Lesson No. 9—Automatic Selection of Timbre for Variation in Orchestration”; “Lesson No. 10—Something About Accompaniments”; “Lesson No. 11—Something About Orchestral Scoring”; “Lesson No. 12—Added Techniques in Instrumentation and Orchestration, ” Schillinger House School of Music Supervised Self-Study Course in Arranging and Composition (1950), Typescript, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Chapter 4 1. The performance was part of a concert I had organized entitled Soundings at the Cochrane Theatre in London. It featured an ad hoc ensemble of improvising musicians directed by Daryl Runswick. Other parts of the concert included music by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Philip Corner, and Ornette Coleman. 2. David Ryan, “Calculation and Spontaneity: David Ryan Speaks to Earle Brown,” Contemporary Music-Making for Amateurs (February 23, 2000): n.p. Published online on November 15, 2000. This was an abridged transcript of an interview with the author after a workshop and informal concert at the College of Ripon and St. John, York, November 7, 1999. 3. Earle Brown, “Form in New Music,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1965): 62. 4. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 63. 5. Earle Brown, interview with William Duckworth, 1989, f. 2-94, EBMF. 6. Brown, interview with Duckworth, 1989. 7. Brown, interview with Duckworth, 1989. 8. Brown, interview with Duckworth, 1989. For more discussion on the philosophical aspects of Folio, see David Magnus, Aurale Latenz: Wahrnehmbarkeit und Operativität in der bildlichen Notationsästhetik Earle Browns (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016). 9. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 60.

Page 316 →10. We could point to December 1952 being presented within Fluxus or “performance” contexts, which might seem far from Brown’s “composerly” intentions. 11. Pierre Boulez, “.В .В .В вЂouvert’, encore.В .В .В ,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 339. 12. Christian Wolff, liner notes, Earle Brown—Chamber Music, Matchless MRCD52, 2003, CD. 13. See James Johnson Sweeney, Alexander Calder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951). This was a revision and reprint of the original 1943 edition. 14. Brown, interview with the author, 1995, unpublished in English, f. 2-99, EBMF. An edited version was published in French as “Y a-t-il вЂecole New Yorkaise’?—Entien avec Earle Brown,” Dissonanz (May 1997): 14–17. 15. Earle Brown, “On December 1952” (1970), American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 4. 16. Brown, “On December 1952,” 3. Brown also noted that his onetime student “Brooklyn” Joe Jones (1939–1993) went on to construct related pieces. Jones specialized in sound sculptures and was closely associated with the Fluxus artists. 17. Brown, “On December 1952,” 4. 18. Calder’s seminal visit to Mondrian’s studio resulted in his suggestion to the Dutch artist that motion was the next step for such abstract form, upon which the latter staunchly disagreed. However, we might think of the late American works of Mondrian as looking in this direction with their sense of optical motion. 19. Sweeney, Alexander Calder, 38. 20. Quoted in Alexander Calder—Performing Sculpture, curated by Anne Coxon and Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, 2015, Tate Modern Exhibition Guide. 21. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 94–95. 22. I’m thinking here of Brown’s discussion of feedback and programming in “Form in New Music” (1965): “One extreme application of the вЂprogramming’ concept would obviously be to programme for the computer, as Xenakis has already done.В .В .В . Another extreme would seem to be to create the intentionally ambiguous graphic вЂinput’ and the вЂprogramme’ of realization, and allow the rational-irrational human computer called вЂmind,’ to fulfill the potentials of the programme.” Brown, “Form in New Music,” 69. 23. Thomas Fichter, “Earle Brown’s Calder Piece and Alexander Calder’s Chef d’orchestre,” in Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume and Ann Coxon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 72. 24. John Berger, “Painting and Time,” in The Sense of Sight (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 209. 25. Earle Brown, “The Notation and Performance of New Music” (1964), Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 186. 26. As Rosalind Krauss has explained: “The rules of cubist practice produced the grid which pointed three ways at once: First to the flatness of the canvas the way graph paper creates a net everywhere taut and seamless; second, to the edges of this flatness with each tessera miming the picture’s frame; third, the microfiber of the canvas, so as to вЂfigure forth’ the very tissue of the canvas weave.” See Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 5–7. Page 317 →27. Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up after Artists: A Memoir (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 94. 28. Brown, interview with the author, 1995. 29. Elaine de Kooning, “Dymaxion Artist,” ARTnews (1952), in The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 113. 30. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 3. 31. Quoted in Brown, “Form in New Music,” 63. 32. Brown, interview with the author, 1995. 33. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 196. 34. Meyer Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957), in Selected Papers, vol. 2, Modern Art: 19th

and 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 213. 35. Clement Greenberg, “Intermedia” (1982), in Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 94. 36. Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” 218. 37. Brown, interview with the author, 1995. 38. Brown, “On December 1952,” 3. 39. Brown, “On December 1952.” 40. Jane Alden, “From Neume to Folio: Mediaeval Influences on Earle Brown’s Graphic Notation, ” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 315–32. 41. Alden, “From Neume to Folio.” 42. Improvisation, within Brown’s output, has led to some confusion, especially in relation to indeterminacy, a term he also used in connection with his earlier work. Martin Iddon locates such confusion in relation to the background of Hodograph I, and the role of Luigi Nono in its commissioning and performance. Hodograph I was played twice, before and after a critical lecture by Luigi Nono, performed by Christoph Caskel, Severino Gazzelloni, and David Tudor, the lecture being a critique of indeterminate practices as espoused by Cage, together with a discussion of “responsibility.” As Iddon has pointed out, the situation was confrontational (almost a comedy of errors, one might add) with Nono suggesting that “improvisatory practice, as carried out by Gazzelloni and Tudor in the presentation of indeterminate music, вЂtoday still occurs in the spirit of oriental cultic improvisation. There it serves as the adjuration of a god, such that today it is one’s own ego which is conjured up.’” See Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 259. The complexities and ironies of this event and commentary aside, we can see the problems, not only in the hostility to improvisation that dogged Brown throughout his career, but also a conflation and confusion of indeterminacy with improvisation. In Brown’s terms, indeterminacy might be applied to the creation of a score through “exterior determinants” (tables of random sampling numbers, for example). On the other hand, the realm of the immediate and spontaneous, whereby performers draw on their reflexes and unconscious reserves, points to the improvisatory elements that Brown wanted as part of the process. Another oft-cited confusion is the mistaken assumption that such pieces are not rehearsed. On the Page 318 →contrary, all of Brown’s works were, and have to be, meticulously rehearsed, while also allowing freedoms at the micro level. 43. Brown refers to this in several interviews. There remains, however, at the time of writing, much confusion around this issue. In 2007, I found a manuscript (f. 1-163) in The Earle Brown Music Foundation of a string quartet from 1951, previously thought lost. This appears to be constructed rather than spontaneously composed, complete with clearly presented note rows and “cellules” (rhythmic cells) in the sketches. It may be possible Brown is referring to an even earlier quartet composed from graphic outlines that he dates to 1950; or, that the 1951 quartet had its origins in such graphic sketches, but was later translated into more determinate and constructive operations. 44. Brown, interview with Duckworth, 1989. A series of freehand sketches by Brown (figure 4.5 and plate 6 are excerpts) can be found in a drawing pad in f. 2-89, EBMF. 45. Ryan, “Calculation and Spontaneity.” In an interview from 1996 with Vivian Perlis, however, Brown swapped the string and woodwind colors (blue represented strings and green represented woodwinds). Earle Brown, interview with Vivian Perlis, December 17, 1996, Oral History, American Music, Yale University; see also f. 2-67, EBMF. 46. Earle Brown, letter to Roger Johnson, October 24, 1976, f. 3-40, EBMF. 47. Some of these pieces were recorded by Eberhard Blum and other performers as Folio II on Earle Brown: Four Systems, Hat Hut 6147, 1994, CD; and on The New York School 3, Hat Hut 6176, 1995, CD. 48. In 2000, Brown said he “sometimes refers to all these later graphic pieces as Folio II.” Brown, interview with the author, 2000. In this chapter I am following that lead. 49. Each of these short and informal instructions to the author were written by Brown on “Post-it” notes attached to the relevant score. 50. Blum, Earle Brown: Four Systems.

51. Claudia Mongini, “Sign and Information: On Anestis Logothetis’ Graphical Notations,” in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, ed. Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 228. 52. Brown, interview with the author, 1995. 53. Ernst van Alphen, “Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Usefulness,” in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, ed. Steve Garner (Chicago: Intellect, 2008), 68. 54. Alden, “From Neume to Folio,” 317. 55. Earle Brown, letter to the author, 2000, f. 5-46, EBMF. 56. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 186. 57. Earle Brown, performance notes to Available Forms 1 (1961) (New York: Schirmer, 1961). 58. Brown, letter to Johnson, October 24, 1976. 59. Cornelius Cardew, “Darmstadt 1964: New Music Has Found Its Feet,” in Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, ed. Eddie PrГ©vost and Richard Barrett (Harlow, Essex: Copula, 2006), 66. 60. Brown, interview with the author, 1995. Page 319 →61. Brown stated the following in 1970: “I have conducted this piece in the same concert as I have conducted a piece by Anestis Logothetis whose graphic music you may know. Logothetis’s graphic music looks totally different than December 1952. And in performance the result is totally different. Now, unless one simply talks a lot, one cannot get from musicians the differences of quality between a score like December 1952, which looks very geometric and pure, and a score of Logothetis, which looks extremely noisy and messy. Two kinds of performances result: one, the December score, results in a rather clean performance, and the Logothetis produces a kind of noisy performance.” Brown, “On December 1952,” 10. 62. Brown’s performances as a conductor were always marked by an extreme virtuosity and often very rapid negotiation of different “available” materials. Sadly, I’ve heard many recent performances with other conductors lacking this vitality, and giving a more “blocked” feel to the material, leading to a slightly leaden effect. This does, of course, bring up the problematic question of performance traditions and authorial interpretation, especially in relation to the open form works. 63. Brown did several chamber orchestrations of the first Folio set for concerts in Europe. See Brown’s 1995 comments in John YaffГ©, “An Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 301. 64. See Brown’s discussion of this notion in “Form in New Music” (1965).

Chapter 5 1. The photo of Wolff, Brown, Cage, Tudor, and Feldman was likely taken in 1961 or 1962. Several images from this session are preserved on negatives from Brown’s camera, f. 8-44, The Earle Brown Music Foundation. 2. “4 Musicians at Work,” Trans/formation: Arts, Communication, Environment 1, no. 3 (1952): 168–72; rpt. The Cage-Boulez Correspondence, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98–109. Trans/formation was an annual journal to unite the arts and sciences into a continuum of ideas, edited by Harry Holtzman and Martin James, who were affiliated with Piet Mondrian. 3. Among the noteworthy performances, Tudor premiered Boulez’s Deuxième Sonate (1948) at Carnegie Recital Hall, December 17, 1950. Tudor also presented concerts featuring Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Boulez (and others), August 19, 1951, at Black Mountain College; and January 1, 1952, at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York (Boulez’s Deuxième Sonate was played again). Music by Brown first appeared in Tudor’s repertoire with works by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff on February 10, 1952, at Cherry Lane Theatre. 4. Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (January 1952): 134. 5. Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 41–44. Cage and Brown temporarily moved all tape-splicing equipment for the Project for

Music for Magnetic Tape elsewhere during the time Boulez stayed in Cage’s apartment. 6. David Nicholls, “Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School,” in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, ed. Steven Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–53. Page 320 →7. Brown had received news of being accepted into both seminars shortly before Cage’s arrival in Denver. See Carolyn Brown’s discussion of the correspondence between Earle Brown and Arnold Schoenberg in Chance and Circumstance, 7. 8. Earle Brown, letter to Ray Grismer, October 3, 1951, f. 3-74, EBMF. Tudor spent five days with the Browns before heading to Black Mountain that summer. For the two piano programs that Tudor gave in Boulder in 1951, see John Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994), 85 n. 1. Brown wrote again to Grismer on December 20, 1951, with news that Tudor would give the premiere of his Three Pieces for Piano on February 10, 1952, at Cherry Lane Theatre (f. 3-74, EBMF). 9. In 1950, Kenton toured with an ensemble of violins, violas, celli, string bass, trumpets, trombones, tuba, French horn, saxophones, drums, guitar, piano, and percussion. See roster of musicians in “Boff Hands Drawn by Kenton’s вЂInnovations’ Preview in L. A.,” Billboard (February 18, 1950), 16. Brown would later feature the historic percussion programs from the 1940s with works by William Russell, Amadeo RoldГЎn, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and John Cage in his first Contemporary Sound Series album for Time Records in 1961. In the final score of Indices, Brown attributed the extended techniques of the piano part to “the music of Henry Cowell and John Cage.” 10. Earle Brown, sketches for Indices, f. 1-116, EBMF. Also in this folder are the names of musicians Brown had in mind for Indices, including Schillinger classmate Ty Frolund for trumpet; Samuel Baron on flute; Gunther Schuller on French horn; and George Gaber on vibraphone. 11. Earle Brown, supplement to 1956 Guggenheim application, f. 6-155, EBMF. It does not appear that either of these works was completed. Several years later, Brown again used amplified guitar in Available Forms 2 (1962) and From Here (1963), and in 1967 he made plans to use it for Event: Synergy II (1967–68) at the Festival de Royan, but abandoned it in the final version. Earle Brown, letters to Claude Samuel, October 22, 1967, and February 20, 1968, f. 3-81, EBMF. 12. In 1957, the part was played by jazz guitarist Joe Puma (1927–2000), whose name Brown listed on a folder with other colleagues he knew from Capitol (f. 7–50, EBMF). This story comes from Brown’s draft toward his essay in James Klosty’s Merce Cunningham (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975), but which Brown did not include in the final publication; see f. 2-75, EBMF. 13. Brown also composed the music in-kind for Cunningham, in return for wife Carolyn Brown’s lessons. Klosty, Merce Cunningham, 75. See also David Vaughan’s account of Springweather in Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (New York: Aperture: 1997), 85, 88. 14. Drawer 32, EBMF. The time structure that Cunningham gave to Brown shows the names of Carolyn Brown, Remy Charlip, Viola Farber, Marianne Preger, Jo Anne Melsher, Anita Dencks, and Cunningham. Based on Carolyn Brown’s account of Melsher’s departure during winter 1954–55, this was an early draft of Springweather and People. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 116–17. 15. Earle Brown, broadcast transcript for Sonderprogramm of Bayerische Rundfunk, Munich, dated January 2, 1961. Brown later sent this typescript to Peter Page 321 →Yates with a handwritten note that stated, “the вЂAvailable Forms’ pieces are very close to the desire I state here. вЂAv.Frms I’ was being written at the time of this вЂarticle.’” Earle Brown, letter to Peter Yates, March 10, 1963, folder 49, Box 2, Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA; EBMF also holds the typescript as well as correspondence between Wolf Rosenberg, Ulrich Dibelius, and Brown regarding the Sonderprogramm exchanged between September 1960 and January 1961, f. 6-68, EBMF. See also Earle Brown, letter to Christopher Gallaher, January 27, 1974, f. 6-146, EBMF. Brown elsewhere referred to the coordinate technique in Indices as a “multi-directional вЂprogrammed-coordinates’ compositional technique” on an early rГ©sumГ©, archived at EBMF. See also his description of “coordinate technique” in Earle Brown, “On December 1952,” American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 5, 8. 16. Brown, letter to Gallaher, January 27, 1974. 17. Maurice George Kendall and Bernard Babington Smith, Tables of Random Sampling Numbers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). The pamphlet was No. 24 in a series entitled Tracts for

Computers, edited by E. S. Pearson and the Department of Statistics at University of London. 18. Kendall, introduction to Tables of Random Sampling Numbers, vii–viii. Brown made special annotations to tables in which there were strings of duplicate numbers. Tucked into his book is also a clipping for a publication of a random number table of 1 million digits. In Brown’s handwriting, the first page is inscribed with the following: “from: Stechert-Hafner Inc., 31 East 10th St., N.Y. 3.” Stechert-Hafner was an international bookshop. See f. 1-83, EBMF. 19. See chapter 6 of James Pritchett, “The Development of Chance Techniques in the Music of John Cage, 1950–1956” (PhD diss., New York University, 1988). Pritchett’s title for Cage’s “The Ten Thousand Things” is based on the rhythmic structures totaling its namesake and was symbolic of the infinite. In a 1984 interview with Pritchett, Brown referred to one hundred thousand total tables. Earle Brown, interview with James Pritchett, November 16, 1984, MD09, EBMF. 20. Brown, letter to Gallaher, January 27, 1974. Programme was also a term from cybernetics, which interested Brown in the 1960s especially, and appeared to relate to Schillinger’s later work, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948). 21. Previously, Brown had recalled the programme taking three months to set up and eight months to execute, in Klosty, Merce Cunningham, 75. When Christopher Gallaher wrote to Brown about the process, Brown’s reply indicated that the programme took one month to create and six months to execute, and he included copies of the tables. Brown, letters to Gallaher, March 13, 1973, and January 27, 1974, f. 6-146, EBMF. Comparable to Indices, Brown’s four-minute Octet I had been as arduous to compose and assemble (later premiered at the Festival of Contemporary Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana, March 22, 1953). 22. Brown, marginalia in Kendall and Babington Smith, Tables of Random Sampling Numbers, 44. This also implies that he used the values in this table to determine the larger structure of his area definitions, before using the same table to derive values for the sound events to be deployed on the staff. 23. Why Brown did not start with table 1 for November 1952, December 1952, Page 322 →Octets I–II, or 25 Pages is a question to be answered, as these works are known to have preceded Indices. It is possible that Brown had begun Indices beforehand. His marginalia show that he began with table 3 to compose Octet I in January 1953. No other date or title appears again until the end of table 16, where Brown wrote, “ended at 4:17 PM Feb. 5, 1953,” and he marked “Octet II” alongside table 17. No subsequent date or title appears until table 31 as noted previously with Indices. In addition to the somewhat arbitrarily chosen starting table for each work, there are also gaps between digits within the table, as Brown did not select every consecutive value, but instead skipped digits in his selection process. 24. Brown, annotation in Kendall and Babington Smith, Tables of Random Sampling Numbers, 30. 25. George Brecht, Chance-Imagery (1957) (New York: Something Else Press, 1966), 10. Brecht later compared Brown’s 25 Pages with the chance-related technique of card-shuffling. Brecht also cited the work of Kendall and Babington Smith, “Randomness and Random Sampling Numbers,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 101, no. 1 (1938): 147–66. 26. Earle Brown, letter to Peter Yates, March 6, 1966, folder 49, Box 2, Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA. 27. Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” 134. 28. Kendall and Babington Smith, Tables of Random Sampling Numbers, vii–viii. 29. Brown, letter to Gallaher, March 13, 1973. In this letter, Brown also indicated that chapter 15 of the two-volume Schillinger System of Musical Composition, entitled “Composition of Density in Its Application to Strata,” was “the single most impressive aspect of the entire study, and вЂthe story of my life.’” 30. On Cage’s interpretation of density in Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952), see Rebecca Y. Kim, “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008), 269–79. 31. Joseph Schillinger, The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 2 vols., ed. Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling (New York: Carl Fischer, 1946), 1314. Brown also cross-referenced p. 1226 of chapter 15, “Composition of Density and Its Application to Strata.” Xenakis and Ligeti had each arrived at a similar observation based on their respective investigations of total serialism. 32. Brown, letter to Grismer, October 3, 1951.

33. Earle Brown, unpublished notes [late 1950s], f. 2-31, EBMF. 34. Brown, Merce Cunningham, 75. 35. Brown, unpublished draft for Merce Cunningham. 36. Brown, letter to Gallaher, March 13, 1973. 37. Earle Brown, letter to Ray Grismer, April 4, 1957, f. 3-74, EBMF. 38. Earle Brown, letter to Henry Allen Moe, February 28, 1957, f. 6-155, EBMF. See Earle Brown, letter to Bruno Maderna, ca. February 1957, f. 6-68, EBMF. In both documents Brown explained that in spite of Maderna’s definite interest in conducting Indices that summer, the possibility was contingent on Brown’s first choice to have Rosbaud conduct the work. Brown indicated that Rosbaud and Strobel were interested only if the Indices performance was a premiere. If Rosbaud agreed, then Brown’s Music for Cello and Piano (1955) would be premiered in 1957 Page 323 →at Darmstadt, and indeed it was, though there was no premiere of Indices that year. To Maderna, Brown noted that he had already received two notes from Steinecke asking whether or not to program Indices at Darmstadt. See Brown’s 1966 remarks in “Select Texts by Earle Brown,” in this volume, on the impact of these travels on his career. 39. For more on the Baden-Baden version, see Thomas Fichter, Editing Report (Rye, NY: The Earle Brown Music Foundation, 2013). The original manuscripts for the ballet, concert, and piano scores of Indices are held in Drawers 32 and 35, EBMF. 40. Earle Brown, handwritten list of tasks [1957], f. 2-31, EBMF. 41. Earle Brown, letter to SolГ-s music store, May 27, 1957, f. 3-29, EBMF. 42. In Brown’s first letter to Steinecke, upon returning to New York after his European travels, Brown explained his situation with Rosbaud and offered the three-movement Music for Cello and Piano. Earle Brown, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, February 26, 1957, Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD). Steinecke agreed to the suggestion in his letter to Brown on March 8, 1957, IMD. See also Otto Tomek, letter to Earle Brown, May 20, 1957, in reply to Brown’s letter from March 14, 1957, f. 6-68, EBMF. 43. Werner Taube, letter to Earle Brown, August 8, 1957, f. 6-68, EBMF. Steinecke put Brown in touch with Taube after initially approaching cellists Arthur Troester and Christine Schotte about premiering Brown’s score. Wolfgang Steinecke, letter to Earle Brown, June 15, 1957, IMD; see additional letters between Steinecke, Troester, Schotte, and Taube between April and June 1957, IMD. Neither Brown nor Tudor was able to attend Darmstadt in 1957 as initially planned. 44. Brown, letter to Grismer, April 4, 1957. 45. After an initial letter to Brown about bringing Indices to Darmstadt, Steinecke asked for Brown’s help in approaching VarГЁse for a profile to be published in DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge or for a work to be performed that summer at the Ferienkurse. Wolfgang Steinecke, letter to Earle Brown, February 24, 1957, IMD. 46. Olivia Mattis interviewed Brown in California in 1990 with regard to these sessions and also includes a visual of the notation VarГЁse gave to Teo Macero around 1957. Olivia Mattis, “The Physical and the Abstract: VarГЁse and the New York School,” in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, ed. Steven Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57–74; and for further details see Mattis, “From Bebop to Poo-Wip: Jazz Influences in VarГЁse’s PoГЁme Г©lectronique,” in Edgard VarГЁse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, ed. Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 312–17. See also the recollection by Bill Crow, From Birdland to Broadway: Scenes from a Jazz Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 204–5. 47. Sam Stephenson, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957–1965 (New York: Knopf, 2009). A good friend of Brown’s in later years, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer (1929–2011), was also active with the jazz loft. 48. Brown, letter to Grismer, April 4, 1957. In later years, Brown spoke highly of his time in the studio: “Some of the very best musical experiences of my life, was working with those people (no competitive snobbism!).” Earle Brown, unpublished letter to the New York Times in memory of Milt Hinton, December 21, 2000, f. 2-75, EBMF. Page 324 →49. Brown, letter to Grismer, April 4, 1957. 50. Earle Brown, letter to Ray Grismer, August 8, 1957, f. 3-74, EBMF. See also John Cage, “Edgard VarГЁse,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 83–84, written for the

Stockholm journal Nutida Musik in fall 1958. See Feldman’s poetic “Sound, Noise, VarГЁse, Boulez,” It Is 2 (Autumn 1958): 46; rpt. in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 1–2. Brown, VarГЁse, Cage, and other composers of electronic music were photographed for the brief article, “Music of the Future?” in Mademoiselle (December 1959), 94–97. 51. David Tudor, letter to Earle Brown, April 15, 1957; in reply to Earle Brown, letter to David Tudor, April 1, 1957, folder 10, Box 51, David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. Later that month, on April 30, Tudor performed Brown’s 25 Pages and 4 Systems at Carl Fischer Concert Hall, each with three other pianists (Cage, Grete Sultan, and William Masselos), on a program that also included works by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff. The printed concert poster did not list “25 Pages for 4 Pianos” by Brown, and Brown penciled this into his copy of the poster, f. 3-74, EBMF. 52. Among Brown’s papers is a handwritten page of memories about Tudor, which ends with the remark, “There is a story of how a comment by David Tudor changed my life” (undated, f. 2-75, EBMF). Brown was likely referring to Tudor’s interpretation of phrases within a time structure unencumbered by the counting of beats, which Brown regularly mentioned (he also cited the “timesense” of dancers as a model for his time notation), but there are other possibilities for the story that Brown intended to tell. What the statement reveals generally about their collaborations, however, is that Brown took Tudor’s remarks as seriously as Tudor had taken Brown’s letter in 1957. 53. On the origins of the conductor’s slider at the premiere of Available Forms 1 in 1961 at Darmstadt, see Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 73. 54. The MCDC press release for the premiere of the Springweather ballet also noted that Brown’s Indices would be performed in Paris on March 1, 1958, by Boulez’s Domaine Musical. Press release dated November 1957 by Isabelle Fisher, personal manager of MCDC, f. 7-50, EBMF. 55. D. B., “Cunningham Gives Dance Program,” Musical America (December 15, 1957). 56. Earle Brown, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, January 29, 1958, IMD. 57. Letter from SWF Baden-Baden, April 4, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. 58. Earle Brown, letter to RAI, March 17, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. 59. Luciano Berio, letter to Earle Brown, May 21, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. 60. Henri Pousseur, letter to Earle Brown, June 30, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. 61. Earle Brown, letter to Henri Pousseur, July 5, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. 62. John Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy” (1958), in Silence, 37. For further analysis on this lecture, see my essay, “The Formalization of Indeterminacy in 1958: John Cage and Experimental Composition at the New School,” in John Cage (October Files no. 12), ed. Julia Robinson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 141–70. 63. Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” 37. 64. Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” 37–38. Cage and Tudor Page 325 →had also been scheduled to perform 4 Systems at Darmstadt in a Kammerkonzert program with music by Brown, Feldman, Wolff, Cage, and Nilsson. See Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 92–93. 65. Earle Brown, interview with John Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989 (Rye, NY), and March 23, 1992 (New York City), MD01, EBMF. 66. Amy Beal, “An Interview with Earle Brown” (1997), Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 343. 67. C. Brown, Chance and Circumstances, 71–72, 198, 557–58. 68. On these ensemble stops, see letters from Brown to Kurt Schwertsik, January 12, 1960; Bruno Maderna, March 20, 1961; and Friedrich Cerha, April 15, 1961 (all f. 6-68, EBMF). Brown specified three holds in Pentathis: at m. 131, m. 141, and just before m. 148. 69. C. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 238–40. Upon the cancellation of Indices, HervГ© Thys, director of the Apelac Electronic Music Studio in Brussels and a friend of Stockhausen’s, arranged to have a ten-minute duet by Cunningham and Carolyn Brown filmed at an estate outside Brussels. While the whereabouts of the never-broadcast film are unknown, Earle Brown took several photos of this session on his camera, the negatives of which I identified with the help of Carolyn Brown at EBMF (f. 8-44), one of

which appears as figure 5.4. 70. In 2014, filmmaker Alla Kovgan discovered the 1958 Hamburg video. I viewed this video in September 2014 through Carolyn Brown and the Cunningham Dance Foundation. On the Hamburg performance, see Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 241–42. From November 2015 through January 2016, Silas Riener reconstructed portions of the choreography based on this video with students from the Boston Conservatory, toward an Event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, in connection with the exhibit, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957. In 2016, the L. A. Dance Project reconstructed the suite in its entirety, for performances at the Hammer Museum during February–April 2016. Additional performances of this reconstruction have followed. 71. See Tudor’s pencil copy of Brown’s piano reduction of Indices, five handwritten pages, folder 2, Box 171, David Tudor Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 72. Earle Brown, letter to Virgil Thomson, November 19, 1958, f. 2-57, EBMF. Brown at last received a Guggenheim in 1965, following multiple applications beginning in 1953. Regarding “Work for Large Orchestra,” Brown may have begun the score in February 1958, based on a letter from American conductor Francis Travis to Earle Brown, April 10, 1958, f. 6-68, EBMF. Travis also asked Brown for Indices in this letter, which they had spoken about by phone. 73. Earle Brown, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, June 22, 1957, IMD. 74. Earle Brown, letter to Otto Tomek, April 17, 1959, f. 6-68, EBMF. Brown was busy proofing the score pages of Pentathis for Schott at the time. Brown clearly indicated to Tomek that he wished for Maderna to give the first performance of his new orchestral work with the Rome Orchestra, though he remained open to other possibilities, including a Cologne performance. See Otto Tomek, letter to Earle Brown, February 23, 1959, f. 6-68, EBMF. Page 326 →75. Earle Brown, letter to Luigi Nono, August 5, 1959, f. 3-54, EBMF. Brown also considered using the title, “Unavailable Forms.” 76. Earle Brown, letter to Mr. Von der Goltz, December 1, 1958, f. 2-57, EBMF. He wrote asking for permission to quote from the two volumes of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, identifying himself as a “former authorized teacher” of the Schillinger system. Brown also spoke about the article to Cowell in a letter dated November 19, 1958, and noted he wished to include Ives in a general discussion of experimental music in America (see f. 2-57, EBMF). In one of Brown’s first major publications, “Form in New Music” for the 1965 DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik, Brown did address Schillinger and experimentalism very generally. 77. Luigi Nono, letter to Earle Brown [July 1959], f. 6-68, EBMF. The date is based on Nono’s reference to the birth of Silvia two months prior. 78. Brown, letter to Nono, August 5, 1959. 79. In Nono’s words: “Sie stammen von zwei MГ¤nnern der amerikanischen Kultur, Joseph Schillinger (eigentlich russischer Herkunft) und John Cage und Гјben direkt und indirect in den letzten Jahren einen EinfluГџ aus, der auf immer mehr verwirrende Weise eine besondere musikalische Situation in Europa bestimmt.” See Luigi Nono, “Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute,” in Texte: Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. JГјrg Stenzl (Zurich: Atlantis, 1975), 34–35. 80. Nono’s lecture was printed with Boulez’s “AlГ©a” (1957) and Cage’s “History of Experimental Music in the United States” (1959) in the third volume of DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik in 1960 (pages 41–47). Another version had appeared as “Die Angst vor der Freiheit” in KГ¶lner Stadt-Anzeiger on October 4, 1959; and an abridged version was published as “GitterstГ¤be am Himmel der Freiheit,” Melos 27 (1960): 69–75. See also Helmut Lachenmann’s English translation, “The Historical Reality of Music Today,” The Score 27 (July 1960): 41–45. Martin Iddon discusses these publications, text redactions, Lachenmann’s coauthorship of the lecture, and the general reception of Nono’s 1959 lecture in New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255–71. 81. My gratitude to Claudia Mayer-Haase of Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt and Thomas Fichter of The Earle Brown Music Foundation for enabling access to the audio of Nono’s lecture and the two performances of Hodograph I from the 1959 Darmstadt meeting. 82. Wolfgang Steinecke, letter to Earle Brown, May 25, 1959, IMD. In his reply letter to the proposal raised

by Maderna and Steinecke to use only the piano reduction of Indices, Brown made it clear that such a performance was “completely unacceptable”: “The reduction is not a self-sufficient piano work and cannot of course express the orchestral structure of the original scoring.” Earle Brown, letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, June 15, 1959, IMD. 83. Brown, letter to Steinecke, June 15, 1959. 84. Steinecke relayed Nono’s idea to Brown in a letter dated July 25, 1959, IMD. Nono wrote to Brown around this time also with regard to the lecture and score performances; see Nono, letter to Brown [July 1959]. Jimmy Giuffre had spoken about his interest in the “implicit” beat of concert jazz over the “explicit” beat of dance bands in the liner notes to his Capitol album Tangents in Jazz, released in Page 327 →June 1955 and referenced by Brown in his letter to Grismer, April 4, 1957. Brown and Giuffre exchanged several letters in 1961 in an effort to collaborate on a recording. 85. Earle Brown, letter to Luigi Nono, August 26, 1959, f. 3-31, EBMF. 86. C. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 308. Tudor and Cage performed December 1952 on October 5, 1960, at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Cologne on the same concert in which Carolyn Brown performed Cunningham’s Hands Birds and Waka. 87. The excerpts that Nono chose to read aloud in 1959 are marked in his copy of Brown’s letter from August 26, 1959, Archivio Luigi Nono, Venice. 88. On the redaction of this passage in an early reprint of Nono’s lecture, see Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt, 263, 269. 89. Earle Brown, letter to Cornelius Cardew, October 14, 1959, f. 3-90, EBMF. 90. Earle Brown, “Performance Note,” Hodograph I (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2009). 91. These instructions appear with Tudor’s score of Hodograph I, David Tudor Papers, folder 3, Box 6, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 92. Cornelius Cardew, letter to Earle Brown [November or December 1959], f. 3-90, EBMF. 93. This is Tudor’s description of Nono’s 1959 lecture. David Tudor, letter to Mary Caroline Richards, September 7, 1959, Mary Caroline Richards Papers, folder 2, Box 26, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. 94. Earle Brown, letter to Ray Grismer, September 18, 1959, f. 3-74, EBMF. 95. Earle Brown, “Performance Note,” Available Forms 1 (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1962). 96. Cornelius Cardew, letter to Earle Brown, December 26, 1960, f. 3-90, EBMF. See also Earle Brown, letter to Mario Bortolotto, September 1, 1962, f. 6-68, EBMF; and Otto Tomek, letter to Earle Brown, March 29, 1962, f. 6-68, EBMF. 97. Donal Henahan, “Earle Brown: They Love Him in Baden-Baden,” New York Times (June 21, 1970), 15. Brown also began his work at Time Records in 1960, which justified some of his travels throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, though with minimal financial gain. See D. J. Hoek, “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series,” Notes (December 2004): 350–60. 98. Earle Brown, letter to William Kraft, August 12, 1962, f. 2-3, EBMF. 99. The performance took place April 16, 2010, in Rottenburg, Germany, conducted by Gerhardt MГјllerGoldboom, and performed by the Berlin group Ensemble Work-In-Progress. The original ballet score has never been performed in Europe. 100. Writing from Paris in spring 1963, Brown told historian Peter Yates, “I have always been influenced from everywhere and hope that I am open to everything.” Earle Brown, letter to Peter Yates, March 10, 1963, folder 49, Box 2, Peter Yates Papers, Mandeville Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA. 101. Earle Brown, “Prefatory Note,” Available Forms 1 (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1962).

Page 328 →Chapter 6

1. D. J. Hoek, “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series,” Notes (December 2004): 350–60. 2. Bruno Maderna et al., Panorama della musica nuova, RCA MLDS 61005, 1964, 3-LP. 3. Amy Beal, “An Interview with Earle Brown” (1997), Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 341–56. 4. Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Echt oder gemacht?,” in Texte zur Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, vol. 2 (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964), 262–63. 5. Chris Villars, ed., Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964–1987 (London: Hyphen, 2006). 6. Maybe this is the place to say something, however briefly, about the special relationship that seems to have existed between Brown and Maderna. It’s not primarily a matter of intellectual engagement, however intelligent the two men involved. After all, Maderna’s English seems to have been rudimentary, and I’ve no reason to suppose that Brown’s Italian was particularly fluent. Nor is it just a matter of musical affinities. The relationship seems to me to be wonderfully expressed in a wellknown photograph of the two men together at Darmstadt in 1960—relatively early days in their relationship. Maderna in particular seems to be just radiating warmth and affection; these are clearly kindred spirits. 7. Beate Kutschke, “Aesthetic Theories and Revolutionary Practice: Nikolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in Dissent,” in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78–98. 8. John Cage and Alison Knowles, ed., Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), n.p. 9. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, program booklet, Music Before Revolution, EMI Electrola, 1C 16528954/957, 1972, 4-LP. 10. Steffen Schleiermacher, liner notes, Earle Brown Synergy, Hat Art 6177, 1995, CD. 11. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Opera aperta, 1962), trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 12. All letters cited are from the archives of The Earle Brown Music Foundation (my special thanks to Rebecca Y. Kim). 13. Raymond Fearn, Bruno Maderna (New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990).

Chapter 7 1. This description is based on an audio recording of Calder Piece from September 8, 1967, at Saint-Paulde-Vence by the First Percussion Quartet of Paris, housed at The Earle Brown Music Foundation; as well as reviews of other performances, including Pierre Descargues, Tribune de Lausanne (March 5, 1967); and Joan La Barbara, “Earle Brown’s Hommage to Alexander Calder,” Musical America Page 329 →(July 1980), 13. See also Earle Brown, “Directions for Performance,” Calder Piece (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2011). 2. The Percussion Quartet of Paris continued to perform the work throughout France in 1967, with concerts at Palais de Chaillot in March, Saint-Paul-de-Vence in September, and Théâtre des Champs-Г‰lysГ©es in October. 3. According to Brown: “Those who are familiar with my work are aware that the original impulse and influence that led me to create вЂopen form’ musical works (which, in 1952, I called вЂmobile compositions’) came from observing and reflecting on the aesthetic nature and lifelike qualities of the mobiles of Alexander Calder.” Earle Brown, “Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic,” Current Musicology 67–68 (Fall 1999): 53. He had also relayed this to Dore Ashton, who wrote: “Brown’s early encounter with Calder’s mobiles was, he says, вЂthe original impulse and influence which led me to create open form works, which, in 1952, I called mobile compositions.’” In Dore Ashton, “Earle Brown’s Continuum,” Arts Magazine (January 1982), 68. 4. Earle Brown, preconcert discussion of Calder Piece, April 5, 1992, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Music Library at the State University of New York, Buffalo, recording NAF 585. This concert was part of the North American New Music Festival.

5. Brown recalled in 1992, “He [Calder] said, вЂOh yes, that sounds like a great idea, that sounds terrific, that sounds very good.’ He said, вЂYou know I’ve made mobiles which do have beaters on them.’ He had made a few mobiles with brass, percussion mallets-like. When the wind moved it, this thing would come and clink against the mobile-thing. And I told him that my idea was to actually have the percussionists play on the mobile and he didn’t object to that at all.” Brown, preconcert discussion of Calder Piece, NAF 585. 6. Brown, “Transformations,” 55–56. Note that in Carolyn Brown’s account, she writes about driving with Earle to Roxbury, Connecticut, to first raise the idea of collaborating with Calder. Upon Earle’s return from France on May 7, 1963, he and Carolyn had lunch with Calder and his wife on May 22, 1963. It appears that the SachГ© meeting with Calder, Masson, and Earle Brown occurred before the Roxbury meeting, with the latter meeting confirming the collaboration. By May 20, 1964, Earle wrote to Carolyn and reported that Calder had completed the mobile, and that the score required completion, ideally in time for a performance in Venice that September. See Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Knopf, 2007), 489; and Carolyn Brown, email correspondence with Rebecca Y. Kim, April 12–14, 2016. 7. “The final scoring of the piece had to wait for the mobile to be finished because various aspects of the score and performance were directly based on the number and color of the elements and their physical placement in the structure of the mobile (however, it turned out to be вЂCalder Red,’ which called for some hasty rethinking on my part).” Brown, “Transformations,” 56. 8. Brown, “Transformations,” 56. 9. Brown discussed the “human performance potential” while explaining the European misappropriation of his open-form music towards political means: “I met [Heinz-Klaus] Metzger and [Hans G.] Helms in Cologne in 1957, at the end of my Page 330 →trip, and I was very surprised, and didn’t understand it quite, but they considered Morty and me and John, our activities were basically politically motivated, and I kept saying, вЂWell, that’s very nice of you, but it wasn’t politically motivated at all.’ It shows my interest in human performance potential, and it shows my interest in multiplicities of beautiful effects from the same material. Because I was influenced by CalderВ .В .В . and you see a Calder mobile and it’s gorgeous, and you see it five times in a row on different days it’s still gorgeous. Form is a function of the object itself, and that process is what I was trying to work with—and I did work with.” Amy Beal, “An Interview with Earle Brown,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 348. 10. Brown, instructions for Calder Piece. 11. Brown, “Transformations,” 57. 12. Brown, “Transformations,” 40. 13. Brown, “Transformations,” 41. 14. Brown, “Transformations,” 41. 15. Attention on December 1952 was often to Brown’s chagrin: “Everybody wants to reproduce December ’52 and the graphic things. Even Grout, used in colleges, universities, and conservatories everywhere, reproduced a page from Available Forms 1—which everyone was astonished by. But I’ve written so much music in so many different ways. I’ve never understood why people want to put me into a box and throw me away.” John YaffГ©, “An Interview with Composer Earle Brown, ” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 309. 16. Earle Brown, “On December 1952,” remarks recorded in Berlin on November 27, 1970. Audio file available at EBMF, MD15; and http://www.earle-brown.org/works/view/12. Transcription published in American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–12. 17. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 301. Yaffé’s 1995 interview clearly underscores the “route” from Folio to what Brown defined as his open form compositions of the 1950s, beginning with 25 Pages. See also Brown’s 1964 Darmstadt lecture, “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” republished in Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 180–201; in the lecture, Brown stated that “FOLIO was composed between вЂOctober, 1952’ and вЂJune, 1953’ (the titles of the pieces are the dates of the composing) and, as far as I know, they are the first examples of вЂmobile’ or вЂopen form’ works” (193). However, in Brown’s 1965 Darmstadt lecture, “Form in New Music,” Brown stated: “December 1952 raises the question of

whether a work whose form and content are different in each performance can be called, вЂopen form.’ My personal answer is no; that to be called open form, a work must have an identifiable content which can then be formed, as in Twenty Five Pages or the Available Forms works. By this definition, December 1952 is not a piece of music at all; it is musical вЂactivity,’ when performed. This creates a further confusion because the moment it is performed December 1952 is as much a musical work as any ever heardВ .В .В . it is only one’s attachment to the academic concept of вЂliterature,’ an art object, that is violated.” Earle Brown, “Form in New Music” (1965); rpt. in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, ed. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27. 18. Parentheses in original quote. Brown quoted in Michael Nyman, ExperimentalPage 331 → Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 70. 19. In his “Specific Performance Instructions” to the score for Available Forms 2, Brown offers one of his clearest explanations of “time notation”: “This system, which I have called a вЂtime notation,’ is a development of the work in Folio (1952–1953) and most clearly represents soundrelationships in the score as I wish them to exist in performance: independent of a strict pulse or metric system. It is a вЂtime-notation’ in that the performer’s relationship to the score, and the actual sound in performance, is realized in terms of the performer’s time-sense perception of the relationships defined by the score and not in terms of a rational metric system of additive units. The durations are extended visibly through their complete space-time of sounding and are precise relative to the space-time of the score. It is expected that the performers will observe as closely as possible the вЂapparent’ relationships of sound and silence but act without hesitation on the basis of their perceptions. It must be understood that the performance is not expected to be a precise translation of the spatial relationships but a relative and more spontaneous realization through the involvement of the performers’ subtly changing perceptions of the spatial relationships. The resulting flexibility and natural deviations from the precise indications in the score are acceptable and in fact integral to the nature of the work. The result is the accurate expression of the actions of people when accuracy is not demanded but вЂconditioned’ as a function within a human process.” Earle Brown, “Introductory Remarks,” Available Forms 2 for Large Orchestra, Four Hands (1962) (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1965). 20. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 190. 21. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 193. 22. YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 299. 23. John P. Welsh, “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967),” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 256. 24. Earle Brown, prefatory note to Corroboree (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2009). 25. Earle Brown, “Program Note,” String Quartet (1965) (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 26. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 26. 27. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 26–27. 28. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 27. 29. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 25. 30. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 24. 31. John Cage and Alison Knowles, ed., Notations (New York: Something Else Press, 1969), n.p. 32. Earle Brown, letter to John Cage, February 12, 1966, f. 3-14, EBMF. 33. Earle Brown, questionnaire (ca. 1985), f. 4-59, EBMF. Brown signed this document from Storkwinkel 12 in Berlin and indicated he would be at the address until March. See letter from Brown to Susan Sollins Brown from this same address, February 28, 1985, f. 3-107, EBMF. 34. Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 13. Page 332 →35. Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage, 11. 36. Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage, 11. 37. Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage, 15. 38. Brown, Calder Piece, 1. 39. Although no precompositional material exists for page 2, it is clear that the page was collaged when

compared to the published and precompositional musical material of the Available Forms. I have not been able to complete an analysis of the page in its entirety, but thus far I have found lines from violin parts of the Available Forms. 40. Earle Brown, precompositional material, n.d., Calder Piece, f. 1-151, EBMF. 41. Brown, “Directions for Performance,” Calder Piece. 42. These systems are labeled as 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, and 4b, following a horizontal reading of the score. For the reader who wishes to view the collage-sketch in figure 7.4 more closely, as well as figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.5, EBMF has made these pages available for study at http://www.earle-brown.org /BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. 43. Brown, Calder Piece, 3. 44. Brown, “Program Note,” String Quartet. 45. Brown recalled, “When our music, like Three Pieces, Perspectives, Morty’s music and John’s music, was played at Carl Fischer Hall, up on 57th Street—David Tudor also played pieces by Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna, Bengt Hambraeus, et cetera; a lot of new European music was introduced in those concerts—invariably the critics would say, вЂThere’s no continuity to this music. It’s just a jumble!’ And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as no continuity. Then I find, in a book called Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson, a statement: вЂDisorder is merely the order that you are not expecting.’ And that’s what the music critics were doing, expecting a Beethovenian order. It was so stupid to say that there was no continuity.” YaffГ©, “Interview with Composer Earle Brown,” 296. 46. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 116. 47. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 117. 48. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 117. 49. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 192. “Work here does not necessarily mean Calder Piece exclusively, but many works after 1952, i.e., Folio and Twenty-Five Pages.” 50. Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (New York: Da Capo 1980), 62. 51. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 27. 52. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 24. 53. I was unable to contact any members of Diego Masson’s First Percussion Quartet of Paris. The percussionists who performed at the Neuberger Museum in 1981 have only recently surfaced in name. In the spring of 2011, I tried contacting two percussionists who performed at Case Western in 1982 (John Kinzie and Ray Breakall) but with no success. I also tried contacting the two percussionists who performed at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival in 1980: Arthur Jarvinen Page 333 →and John Bergamo. Arthur Jarvinen (member of the Antenna Repairmen percussion trio and composer of experimental music) passed away in October 2010. I am grateful to his wife, Lynn Jarvinen, who provided contact information for the other two members of the Antenna Repairmen who performed Calder Piece with him in 1980, Robert Fernandez and M. B. Gordy. I interviewed both Fernandez and Gordy. 54. Robert Fernandez, interview with the author, May 2, 2011 (0:11:56). 55. According to Fernandez, Brown was also present at most of the rehearsals for the CalArts premiere. 56. Brown, “Directions for Performance,” Calder Piece. 57. Brown, “Directions for Performance.” 58. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 27. 59. Fernandez, interview with the author (1:16:50). 60. Fernandez, interview with the author (1:18:30). 61. Brown organized some but not all of the materials for Calder Piece before his death. In folder 1-51 of “Used Calder Parts” at EBMF, there is one complete part for a percussionist, but the other sets are incomplete. 62. See also Elizabeth Hoover, “вЂI Have Nothing to Say and I am Saying It’: Collaboration, Collage and the Meeting of Indeterminacies in American Avant-Garde Performances of the 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2012), 160–67. 63. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1911), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 90.

64. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 91. 65. Fernandez, interview with the author (1:21:18). 66. Fernandez, interview with the author. 67. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 90. 68. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 90. 69. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 91. 70. Bergson, Matter and Memory, xvi. 71. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 126–27. 72. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 126. 73. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 126–27. 74. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 125. 75. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 128. 76. Thomas Fichter, “Earle Brown’s Calder Piece and Alexander Calder’s Chef d’orchestre,” in Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, ed. Achim Borchardt-Hume and Ann Coxon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 66–75. 77. A private performance was also presented in New York on January 9, 2016 at Friends Seminary. 78. Beth Higham-Edwards, interview with the author, August 4, 2016 (36:34–36:39). 79. Higham-Edwards, interview with the author (9:47–10:14). 80. Higham-Edwards, interview with the author (37:00–37:17). 81. Higham-Edwards, interview with the author (11:50–12:42). 82. Rosie Bergonzi, interview with the author, August 4, 2016 (40:29–40:38).

Page 334 →Chapter 8 1. Earle Brown, “The Notation and Performance of New Music” (1964), typewritten manuscript, f. 2-53, The Earle Brown Music Foundation, 15. Originally presented as a lecture at Darmstadt and published as “Notation und AusfГјhrung Neuer Musik,” DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik 9 (1965): 64–86; rpt. Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 180–201. 2. For a detailed survey of Brown’s various approaches, see Jason Cady’s essay in the current volume: “An Overview of Earle Brown’s Techniques and Media.” 3. I wish to acknowledge the generosity of Susan Sollins-Brown and Thomas Fichter of The Earle Brown Music Foundation for making the large quantity of archival materials available for this study; and Jason Cady for his invaluable assistance in helping me navigate the archive. Cross Sections and Color Fields was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and written for the Denver Symphony Orchestra. The score was first published by Universal Edition in 1976, and published in a revised edition by Edition Peters Group in 2008. 4. “Openness” is employed here as a concept that may include a range of possibilities not completely set down by the composer. It may include open form, semiopen form, and any combinations of real-time performance choices on the part of composer or conductor. Since Brown was careful to distinguish his interests from Cage’s chance methods (particularly in later interviews, Brown was uncomfortable with the term “indeterminacy” to describe his methods), I prefer to use “openness” to describe the common impulse of Brown’s various approaches. 5. Many of Brown’s writings and interviews remain unpublished or only partly published. See Contemporary Music Review’s double issue dedicated entirely to Earle Brown’s music as one recent source of information on Brown. Dan Albertson, ed., “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007). 6. In his writings, Brown insists on the British English spelling: “programme.” 7. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 21. 8. Earle Brown, interview with James Pritchett, November 16, 1984, 31. I would like to thank James Pritchett for kindly making his own transcription of this interview available to me for comparison with the transcription by The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page numbers in the latter are referenced in citations hereafter.

9. Earle Brown, unpublished notes for 4 Systems, Perspectives, and Octet. John Cage Notations Project Correspondence, Northwestern University Music Library. 10. Brown, notes for 4 Systems, Perspectives, and Octet. 11. Earle Brown, letter to Bruno Maderna, January 9, 1970, f. 3-66, EBMF. 12. Sketch 26 indicates that Brown considered whether Cross Sections would be another work for two conductors. The sketch numbers referenced throughout the essay correspond to the page numbers of a PDF file generated by EBMF based on my research visit to the archive, from Drawer 27 (f. 1-37) of the archive. The sketches can be viewed at http://www.earle-brown.org/BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. Hereafter, I refer to this file of sketches as the “EBMF electronic file.” Page 335 →13. For comparable analytical findings in these works, see John P. Welsh, “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967),” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 254–90. 14. This page is available at http://www.earle-brown.org/works/view/35, EBMF. 15. Earle Brown, sketches 77–78, unpublished sketches for Cross Sections and Color Fields, f. 1–37, EBMF. 16. Brown, letter to Maderna, January 9, 1970. 17. Earle Brown, unpublished notes for Cross Sections and Color Fields, May 1, 2000, EBMF. 18. Earle Brown, letter to John Cage, February 12, 1966, John Cage Notations Project Correspondence, Northwestern University Music Library. 19. I have included references to many of Brown’s sketches from Drawer 27 (f. 1-37) of the EBMF archive as evidence for my conjectures. For the reader who wishes to consult these in more detail, EBMF has kindly made all of the sketches referenced in this chapter available at http://www.earle-brown.org /BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. 20. Concerning the organization of the drawer’s contents, my conversations with Thomas Fichter revealed that although Brown apparently arranged the basic layout of the archive into drawers for each piece or group of pieces, and oversaw the original distribution, we should not assume anything about the internal ordering within each drawer. 21. Brown’s renewed interest in Cross Sections during 2000 stemmed from performances of the work that year by the New World Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. 22. Earle Brown, interview with Douglas Cohen, October 4, 1994, MD21, EBMF. 23. Earle Brown, “Lecture Demonstration in New Music: Techniques, Sounds and Processes,” presented for the Humanities Seminars of Johns Hopkins University, Evergreen House Foundation, December 14, 1968, MD32, EBMF. 24. Table 8.2 provides a coded summary of the sketch contents. Whenever Brown wrote “titles” or identifying labels on the pages, they are included in quotes in the third column. The other commentaries are my own attempts to clarify how the pages embody their attributed category or to give details about the type of information they contain, including where in the final score the materials appear (when applicable). 25. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 78; previously published as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Г‰ditions de la DiffГ©rence, 1981). The study of Bacon’s process articulates concerns very appropriate to the current exploration of Brown’s working methods. 26. Earle Brown, interview with John Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989 (Rye, NY), and March 23, 1992 (New York City), MD01, EBMF. Parts of the interview appear in John Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1994). Brown constantly referred to Stein’s ideas in his writings and interviews, acknowledging a Page 336 →profound philosophical debt, to the point of incorporating several concepts into his own aesthetic vocabulary, such as entity and intuitive contact as communication. 27. Although the aim of the current work is more directed at process than pure chronology, the dates written on extant sketches point toward an initial phase of work begun in 1972 and continuing through 1974. Whenever evident, I have indicated dating in table 8.2. 28. Earle Brown, “Program Note,” Cross Sections and Color Fields (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2009). 29. Earle Brown, “Form in New Music,” DarmstГ¤dter BeitrГ¤ge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1965): 67.

30. Earle Brown, letter to Pierre Boulez, May 31, 1964, f. 3-66, EBMF. 31. Earle Brown, typewritten manuscript, “Serial Music Today” (signed in Corsica, August 19, 1965), f. 2-24, EBMF. Originally published as “Serial Music Today,” Preuves 181 (March 1966): 39–42; rpt. in Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New Music, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 97–101. 32. Earle Brown, “Notes to Myself for Article for French Magazine: December вЂ52 and Available Forms I and II” (April 11, 1963), f. 2-75, EBMF. 33. On general studies of Brown’s open form concept, see the aforementioned article by Welsh, “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967),” as well as Piotr Grella-MoЕјejko, “Earle Brown: Form, Notation, Text,” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (June–August 2007): 437–69. My goal in this chapter is not to categorize Cross Sections as open form or closed form (the final score employs both in addition to other solutions), but to understand the role of these decisions during the composing process. Brown later used a number of terms to explain aspects of his works and viewed most of his work after 1964 as “closed form with open inner structures.” Brown, interview with Cohen, 46. For a clearer understanding of how these categories are applied to Brown’s output, see in this volume Cady, “An Overview.” 34. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 68. Brown quotes Donald Sutherland on Stein here. 35. For more on this topic, the reader is directed to Fredrick Gifford, “Time-Structuring Musical Processes: Levels of Organization and Temporal Projection in Several Works from the Mid-1980’s” (DMus diss., Northwestern University, 2000). 36. Earle Brown, sketches 77–78, unpublished sketches for Cross Sections and Color Fields, http://www.earle-brown.org/BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. 37. These same processes may be seen in the sketches for Calder Piece and New Piece, which show lists of all the harmonic combinations of the four basic sonorities. 38. Richard Dufallo, Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard Dufallo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114. 39. “Sketch 1” of Available Forms 2, Drawer 27, f. 1-37, EBMF. 40. Brown, interview with Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989. 41. Brown, sketch 77, unpublished sketches for Cross Sections and Color Fields, http://www.earlebrown.org/BeyondNotation/ArchivalSupplement.pdf. 42. Brown, “Program Note,” Cross Sections and Color Fields. Page 337 →43. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 22. 44. The formal idea of beginning from an initial interval structure and constantly transforming (even the specificity of Brown’s transformation methods of expansion and contraction of sonic structures) is similar to VarГЁse. See Jonathan Bernard, The Music of Edgard VarГЁse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 45. Brown, letter to Maderna, January 9, 1970. 46. This sketch page contains a series of derivative structures that Brown notated directly from page 93 of Joseph Schillinger, Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony, 1940. (In the 1994 edition, consulted for the current chapter, see page 84.) For more on Brown’s relationship to Schillinger techniques, see the recent works of Louis Pine and Elena Dubinets. 47. Sketch 59 (figure 8.7) shows various aspects such as voicing and open form treatment of the Fibonacci chord. 48. Brown, interview with Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989. 49. Brown, interview with Pritchett, November 16, 1984, 32. 50. Dufallo, Trackings, 114. 51. Although the current method cannot prove sequential ordering, sketches that contain or develop aspects of other sketches, or the refinement and naming of constructs in multiple sketches, often point to a broad order of occurrence (e.g., the item named “First Chord” in some sketches appears as the fourth sound in another, and in the latter, chords lack names in general). 52. Brown, “Program Note,” Cross Sections and Color Fields. 53. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 22. 54. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 58. Brown made an analogy to the “Liberation of Words or

Objects” as outlined in William Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961). 55. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 61. 56. Brown, unpublished notes for 4 Systems, Perspectives, and Octet. 57. Brown, “Notes to Myself for Article for French Magazine.” 58. Brown, interview with Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989. 59. This is a subtle but crucial point for understanding Brown’s inheritance from jazz. His music approximates neither jazz’s specific techniques of improvisation nor its stylistic vocabulary, but rather its spontaneity and its characteristic shared present wherein communication can become content. 60. Brown, letter to Boulez, May 31, 1964. 61. Although most of the material in the open form sections is sketched in some manner (see table 8.2), their exact appearance (whether they are open or semiopen; ordering of units within an open section; elision with other kinds of material, etc.) is not completely set out until the final score. 62. Time units are approximate and expressed in minutes, based on a hypothetical twenty-minute version. Brown indicated that the duration of the work would vary from seventeen to twenty minutes. 63. The “3 chords” appear to originate rather early in the process of programming the environment (sketch 57). They seem to have been an early sketch for the “First Chord” interval structure, but they appear to have been passed over in favor of the alternating thirds and fifths solution of the symmetrical First Chord. They Page 338 →too are symmetrical (alternating seconds and fifths or fourths), however, and may have been included in the final work as a type of variant of the First Chord. Additionally, the “3 chords” create important relations with both the embedded fifths of the Maximum Spread aggregate and the striking open fifths sonority before letter M. 64. Letter O is a type of semiopen notation that establishes sequence but provides no specific temporal information beyond the “Slowly-irregularly” indication written in the score. 65. Brown, interview with Holzaepfel, June 13, 1989. 66. Amid such numerous and detailed sketches, the absence of precompositional planning about large-scale “form” is notable. 67. Brown, “Form in New Music,” 68. 68. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 20.

Chapter 9 1. The following thoughts come from my own experience preparing Earle Brown’s music for performance with professional and conservatory-level musicians. 2. Earle Brown, “The Notation and Performance of New Music” (1964), Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 186. 3. One additional bit of uncertainty, familiar to any performer confronting a score without the presence of the composer: is that a pedal mark at the end of the piano part? Seems to be, but in his performance note, the composer refers to the “silent” piano here. 4. Earle Brown, letter to Pierre Boulez, May 31, 1964, f. 3-66, EBMF. 5. Performance available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGCp4PPaRSg. 6. Brown, “Notation and Performance,” 182. 7. An interesting note is found in the score to Syntagm III (1970), which Brown describes as “a further attempt to create relevant and responsible aspects of my function as a composer and an optimistic attitude toward performance spontaneityВ .В .В . a kind of вЂprogrammed environment’ of composerperformance collaboration. This is very close to the definition of вЂsynergy’ as I worked with the concept in 1952. Recent developments are encouraging, finally.” Brown, however, was apparently never encouraged enough to extend the freedoms of assemblage beyond the parameters discussed here. Earle Brown, preface to Syntagm III (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 8. From Brown’s score preface to Times Five (1963): “The conductor’s relationship to the tape—beyond the fact that he is in the right section at approximately the right time—is one of spontaneous reaction, collaboration, commentary, conversation with the tape. The tape functions as a kind

of ground upon which the live material is activated and played with.” Earle Brown, preface to Times Five (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2008). 9. From Brown’s score preface to String Quartet (1965): “It must be understood that a performance is not expected to be a precise translation of the spatial relationships but a relative realization made more spontaneous through the involvementPage 339 → of the performers’ subtly changing perceptions of the spatial relationships. The resulting flexibility and natural deviations from the precise indications in the score are acceptable and are in fact integral to the nature of the work. The result is the accurate expression of the actions of people in a situation where accuracy is not demanded but вЂconditioned’ as a function within a human process.” Earle Brown, preface to String Quartet (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 10. Brown, preface to String Quartet. 11. Carolyn Brown, diary extract, September 6, 1961, f. 3-98, EBMF. 12. Brown’s preface to Novara indicates, “The numbers of the score pages to be played from are indicated to the musicians by a movable arrow on a placard displaying the page numbers 1 to 4—the number and arrow being clearly visible to all members of the group, and the arrow comfortably within reach of the conductor.” The specific event on the given page is then signaled with the conductor’s left hand. Earle Brown, preface Novara (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Peters Group, 2007). 13. Indeed, in pieces such as String Quartet and Corroboree, the clock becomes the conductor. 14. We find a more specific need for the conductor in initiating the duets on page 7 in Windsor Jambs; but these could be independently begun through mutual agreement (eye contact, again) in the manner of the DUOS call in Cobra. Larger events such as those found on page 8, however, would be difficult to organize without a conductor. In Windsor Jambs, perhaps, the organizational variability that Weisert offers in New England Drift could prove useful where the conductor sometimes (willfully or not?) cedes control.

Chapter 10 1. Earle Brown, “Form in New Music,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1965): 57. 2. In notebooks from my CalArts years, I’ve written that Brown pointed us to Fuller’s I Seem to Be a Verb (1970) and Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) for these quotes.

Chapter 11 1. Originally published as “Der Abschied von der geschlossenen Form: Earle Brown und die вЂNew York School,’” Neue ZГјrcher Zeitung (October 19, 2002). Revised and reprinted in Hans Zender, Die Sinne denken: Texte zur Musik, 1975–2003, ed. JГ¶rn Peter Hiekel (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & HГ¤rtel, 2004), 81–84. Reprinted with permission. 2. The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976) has attracted great international attention for his invention of mobiles and stabiles. 3. Cf. J. Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, in Gesamtausgabe, vols. 2 and 3 (Schaffhausen, 1978). 4. Der amerikanische Bildhauer Alexander Calder (1898–1976) fand mit seiner Erfindung der Mobiles und Stabiles sehr groГџe internationale Beachtung. Page 340 →5. Vgl. J. Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, in: Gesamtausgabe, Bd. II und III, Schaffhausen 1978.

Select Texts by Earle Brown 1. Pierre Boulez arrived in New York in December 1952 and left shortly after the New Year. 2. The world premiere of Available Forms 2 “for orchestra, four hands” was conducted by Bruno Maderna and Earle Brown at the Venice Biennale on April 19, 1962. 3. For a table of composers represented by country, see D. J. Hoek, “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series,” Notes 61, no. 2 (December 2004): 354. Brown’s estimates are approximations, and don’t quite tally with the albums released by 1966. These numbers may have also reflected composers with recording sessions that

were ultimately unissued. 4. Peter Heyworth, “Taking Leave of Predecessors,” New Yorker (March 24 and 31, 1973), 45–70, 45–75; Karl H. Wörner, Stockhausen; Life and Work (1963), trans. Bill Hopkins (New York: Faber and Faber, 1973). 5. Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967); H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). 6. For Pamela Quist’s 1984 work list, Brown included Patchen Piece for large orchestra and chorus as a work in progress (indicating that he had begun the composition in 1980), but the work did not progress beyond a sketch. 7. Music critic Nat Hentoff (1925–2017) attended Northeastern University at the same time as Earle Brown. They appear in the same yearbook.

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Bibliography Published Writings by Earle Brown “Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic.” Current Musicology 67–68 (2002): 39–57. Rpt. in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by C. Cox and D. Warner, 189–95. New York: Continuum, 2004. “Earle Brown.” In Merce Cunningham, edited by James Klosty, 74–75, 215. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. “On December 1952” (1970). American Music 26, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 1–12. “The Promotion and Performance of American Music Abroad.” National Music Council Bulletin 27, no. 2 (1966–67): 6–9. “Serial Music Today.” Preuves 181 (March 1966): 39–42. Rpt. in Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Critical Anthology of the New Music, edited by Gregory Battcock, 97–101. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. “Form in New Music.” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1965): 57–69. Rpt. as “On Form” in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde 1, no. 1 (January 1967): 49–51. Rpt. in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, edited by Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 24–34. “The Notation and Performance of New Music” (1964). Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 9 (1965): 64–86. Rpt. in Musical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 180–201. “Planned Panichood.” In An Anthology of Chance Operations, edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 7–9. New York: Young and Mac Low, 1963. “Some Notes on Composing” (1963). In The American Composer Speaks, edited by Gilbert Chase, 301–2. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966.

Select Works Cited Alburger, Mark. “Available Brown: A Chance Interview with Earle” (17 January 1996). 20th-Century Music 3, no. 5 (May 1996): 1–7. Alden, Jane. “From Neume to Folio: Mediaeval Influences on Earle Brown’s Page 342 →Graphic Notation.” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (special double issue, “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics”) (June–August 2007): 315–32. Ashton, Dore. “Earle Brown’s Continuum.” Arts Magazine (January 1982), 68–69. Augustine, Daniel S. “Four Theories of Music in the United States, 1900–1950: Cowell, Yasser, Partch, Schillinger.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1979. Bailey, Derek. Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. New York: Da Capo, 1980. Beal, Amy C. “An Interview with Earle Brown.” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (special double issue, “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics”) (June–August 2007): 341–56. Beal, Amy C. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to

Reunification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Berger, John. “Painting and Time.” In The Sense of Sight: Writings. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory (1911). Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Bobbitt, Richard. Harmonic Technique in the Rock Idiom. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1976. Boulez, Pierre. “.В .В .В вЂouvert’, encoreВ .В .В .” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (special double issue, “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics”) (June–August 2007): 339–40. Brecht, George. Chance-Imagery (1957). New York: Something Else Press, 1966. Brooks, William. “In Re: вЂExperimental Music.’” Contemporary Music Review 31, no. 1 (February 2012): 37–62. Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Knopf, 2007. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Cage, John, and Alison Knowles, ed. Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969. Cardew, Cornelius. “Darmstadt 1964: New Music Has Found Its Feet.” In Cornelius Cardew: A Reader, edited by Eddie PrГ©vost and Richard Barrett. Harlow, Essex: Copula, 2006. Cline, David. The Graph Music of Morton Feldman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cowell, Henry. “Current Chronicle.” Musical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1952): 127–34. Davies, Hugh. “International Electronic Music Catalog” [“Repertoire International de Musiques Electroacoustiques”]. Electronic Music Review 2–3 (April–July 1967). De Kooning, Elaine. “Dymaxion Artist.” ARTnews 1952. Rpt. in The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994). Page 343 →Delaigue, Olivier. “Earle Brown et la France.” In Sillages Musicologiques: Hommages Г Yves GГ©rard, edited by Philippe Blay and RaphaГ«lle Legrand, 289–308. Paris: Conservatoire National SupГ©rieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, 1997. Denton, David Bryan. “The Composition as Aesthetic Polemic: December 1952 by Earle Brown.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1992. Dickinson, Peter, ed. “Earle Brown” (Interview, July 1, 1987). In CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage, 136–45. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006. Dubinets, Elena. “Between Mobility and Stability: Earle Brown’s Compositional Process.” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (special double issue, “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics”) (June–August 2007): 409–26. Dufallo, Richard. Trackings: Composers Speak with Richard Dufallo. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work (Opera aperta, 1962). Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1989. Ernst, Max. Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, edited by Robert Motherwell. New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1948. Fearn, Raymond. Bruno Maderna. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990. Feldman, Morton. Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, edited by B. H. Friedman. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000. Fichter, Thomas. “Earle Brown’s Calder Piece and Alexander Calder’s Chef d’orchestre.” In Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume and Ann Coxon, 66–75. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Fichter, Thomas. Editing Report. Rye, NY: The Earle Brown Music Foundation, 2013. Fuller, Buckminster. Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Gann, Kyle. “Square Rhythms.” Village Voice 37, no. 17 (April 28, 1992), 94. Henahan, Donal. “Earle Brown: They Love Him in Baden-Baden.” New York Times (June 21, 1970), 15, 18. Hicks, Michael, and Christian Asplund. Christian Wolff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Hoek, D. J. “Documenting the International Avant Garde: Earle Brown and the Time-Mainstream Contemporary Sound Series.” Notes (December 2004): 350–60. Holzaepfel, John. “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994. Hoover, Elizabeth. “вЂI Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It’: Collaboration, Collage and the Meeting of Indeterminacies in American Avant-Garde Performances of the 1960s.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2012. Iddon, Martin. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kendall, Maurice George, and Bernard Babington Smith. Tables of Random Sampling Numbers. Tracts for Computers, No. XXIV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939. Kim, Rebecca Y. “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008. Page 344 →Kim, Rebecca Y. “A United Front: John Cage and the Foundation’s First Decade.” In Artists for Artists: Fifty Years of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, edited by Eric Banks, 60–81. New York: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2013. Klosty, James. Merce Cunningham. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975. Krauss, Rosalind. Under Blue Cup. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Kutschke, Beate. “Aesthetic Theories and Revolutionary Practice: Nikolaus A. Huber andВ ClytusВ GottwaldВ inВ Dissent.” In Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, edited by Robert Adlington, 78–98. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

La Barbara, Joan. “Earle Brown’s Hommage to Alexander Calder.” Musical America (July 1980), 13. Lee, Pamela M. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91–122. Magnus, David. Aurale Latenz: Wahrnehmbarkeit und OperativitГ¤t in der bildlichen NotationsГ¤sthetik Earle Browns. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016. Mattis, Olivia. “From Bebop to Poo-Wip: Jazz Influences in VarГЁse’s PoГЁme Г©lectronique.” In Edgard VarГЁse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, edited by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann, 309–17. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. Mongini, Claudia. “Sign and Information: On Anestis Logothetis’ Graphical Notations.” In Deleuze and Contemporary Art, edited by Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan, 227–45. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ed. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Translated by Robert Samuels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Nicholls, David. “Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School.” In The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard VarГЁse, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Steven Johnson, 17–56. New York: Routledge, 2002. Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Piekut, Benjamin. Experimental Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Piekut, Benjamin, ed. Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pine, Louis. “Conversation with Earle Brown about Constructivism and Schillinger’s System of Musical Composition.” Contemporary Music Review 30, no. 2 (April 2011): 167–78. Potter, Keith. “Earle Brown in Context.” Musical Times 127, no. 1726 (December 1986): 679–83. Previn, Charles. “Schillinger’s Influence on Film Music.” Music News 39, no. 3 (1947): 39. Pritchett, James. “The Development of Chance Techniques in the Music of John Cage, 1950–1956.” PhD diss., New York University, 1988. Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Page 345 →Quist, Pamela Layman. “Indeterminate Form in the Works of Earle Brown.” PhD diss., Peabody Conservatory, 1984. Robinson, Julia, and Christian Xatrec, ed. В±1961: Founding the Expanded Arts. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2013. Rosenberg, Deena, and Bernard Rosenberg. “Earle Brown.” In The Music Makers, 79–91. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Rothfuss, Joan. Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Ryan, David. “Calculation and Spontaneity: David Ryan Speaks to Earle Brown.” Contemporary Music-

Making for Amateurs (February 23, 2000), n.p. Sandler, Irving. A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003. Schapiro, Meyer. “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957). In Selected Papers, vol. 2, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, 213–26. New York: George Braziller, 1978. Schillinger, Frances. Joseph Schillinger: A Memoir. New York: Greenberg, 1949. Schillinger, Joseph. The Mathematical Basis of the Arts. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Schillinger, Joseph. The Schillinger System of Musical Composition. 2 vols. Edited by Arnold Shaw and Lyle Dowling. New York: Carl Fischer, 1946. Shaw, Arnold. “Joseph Schillinger? The Father of Electronic Music, That’s Who.” Los Angeles Times (June 11, 1972), 58. Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “Echt oder gemacht?” In Texte zur Musik, Vol. 2., edited by Dieter Schnebel, 262–63. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964. Sweeney, James Johnson. Alexander Calder. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943; 1951. Van Alphen, Ernst. “Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Usefulness.” In Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, edited by Steve Garner, 59–70. Chicago: Intellect, 2008. Vaughan, David. Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. New York: Aperture, 1997. Villars, Chris, ed. Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964–1987. London: Hyphen, 2006. Welsh, John P. “Open Form and Earle Brown’s Modules I and II (1967).” Perspectives of New Music 32, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 254–90. Wolpe, Stefan. “On New (and Not-So-New) Music in America.” Translated by Austin Clarkson. Journal of Music Theory 28, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 1–45. Yaffé, John. “An Interview with Composer Earle Brown.” Contemporary Music Review 26, nos. 3–4 (special double issue, “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics”) (June–August 2007): 289–310. Zierolf, Robert. “Indeterminacy in Musical Form.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1983.

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Contributors Carolyn Rice Brown (first wife of Earle Brown) is a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and was a principal dancer and Mr. Cunningham’s partner for twenty years. In addition to performing with MCDC, Miss Brown created her part in the first performance of John Cage’s Theatre Piece, and danced on point in Robert Rauschenberg’s first dance piece, Pelican. After leaving the Cunningham Company she worked as a freelance choreographer, filmmaker, writer, lecturer, and teacher, returning to MCDC as Artistic Advisor to coach early Cunningham works for it and other companies. In 2007 Knopf published her book Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (a 2007 National Award for Arts Writing Finalist). In 2009 the book was published in paperback by Northwestern University Press; and in 2010 as an e-book. George Brunner is the Founder and Director of the International Electroacoustic Music Festival at Brooklyn College. He is also Director of Music Technology and a member of the Composition Faculty. Jason Cady composes small-scale operas and instrumental and electronic music, and performs on pedal steel and modular synthesizer. His latest opera—I Screwed Up the Future—was described by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times as a “charming fantasyВ .В .В . drably comic and spacey.” He cofounded and is Artistic Director of Experiments in Opera and is Senior Researcher at The Earle Brown Music Foundation. He lives in New York City. Page 348 →Stephen Drury is Professor of Piano at New England Conservatory of Music and Artistic Director of the Callithumpian Consort and Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. He has appeared as soloist and conductor throughout the world, performing works from the standard repertoire as well as music from the last one hundred years, gaining particular acclaim for his performances of the music of Charles Ives, John Cage, and Frederic Rzewski. Kyle Gann, a composer, is Hawver Professor of Music at Bard College, and from 1986 to 2005 was new-music critic for the Village Voice. He is the author of six books on American music, including monographs on Conlon Nancarrow, Robert Ashley, John Cage’s 4′33″, and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. His commissioned works include the piano concerto Sunken City for the Orkest de Volharding and Transcendental Sonnets for the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and Orchestra, and much of his music is microtonal. Fredrick Gifford explores openness to create pieces that are never the same twice. His music has been performed and recorded by contemporary ensembles and soloists, and heard at festivals around the world. He has taught on the faculties of the schools of music at DePaul and Northwestern Universities in the United States and the Escola Superior de MГєsica, Artes e EspectГЎculo, Portugal. www.fredrickgifford.info. Elizabeth Hoover is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at Miami University in Ohio and specializes in twentiethcentury music and American experimentalism. As a 2016–2017 Alumni Teaching Scholar at Miami, her current research explores music history pedagogy. Elizabeth holds a master’s degree and PhD in musicology from the University of Pittsburgh. Rebecca Y. Kim specializes in music of the twentieth century. Her publications appear in MusikTexte, Contemporary Music Review (centennial issue on John Cage), American Music, Current Musicology, October, New York Arts, and Artists for Artists: Fifty Years of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has taught at Williams College, the Museum of Modern Art, Northeastern University as a postdoctoral fellow, and at Columbia University, where she received her PhD in musicology. Felix Koch studied philosophy, history, and economics in Oxford, Freiburg, and Berlin. He completed his PhD in philosophy at Columbia University Page 349 →and has been teaching in the philosophy department at the Free University Berlin since then. His research interests are in metaethics, legal philosophy, aesthetics, and eighteenth-

and nineteenth-century philosophy. Louis Pine received his bachelor of music and master of arts degrees from the University of Iowa. He has taught courses at Kirkwood Community College and Coe College, both in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and since 1980 has been a private music instructor in instrumental music and voice. His interest in Joseph Schillinger’s life and work began in 1983, when he discovered that George Gershwin had studied with Schillinger. After receiving his MA degree, he began serious research on the system, which has resulted in papers presented at conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom; an online bibliography on the Joseph Schillinger Home Page hosted by the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University; three chapters in Two Lives of Joseph Schillinger, Russia-America (in Russian); and an interview with Earle Brown in Contemporary Music Review. David Ryan is a visual artist, musician, and writer who is actively involved in contemporary music. Other publications include “We Have Eyes as Well as Ears: Experimental Music and the Visual Arts” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Ashgate, 2009); “Changing the System: Indeterminacy and Politics in the 1970s,” in Christian Wolff: Changing the System (Ashgate, 2010), and forthcoming, “Drawing towards Sound: Notations, Diagrams, Drawings,” in A Companion to Contemporary Drawing (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017). He has also exhibited widely with exhibitions and screenings at the Konzerthaus, Berlin; Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire; Issue Project Space, New York; Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, Rome; Darmstadt Ferienkurse fГјr Neue Musik; V22 Space, London; Logos, Ghent; Qo2 in Brussels, Belgium; and the British School at Rome. He is currently Reader in Fine Art at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. Richard Toop, musicologist, was born 1945 in Chichester, England, and studied at Hull University. He was a teaching assistant in 1973–74 to Karlheinz Stockhausen at Cologne Musikhochschule. In 1975, he emigrated to Sydney, Australia, and from that time until 2010 taught at the Sydney Conservatorium (University of Sydney) where he is now Honorary Reader in Musicology. His publications include a Ligeti monograph, a book of Stockhausen analyses, numerous articles in Perspectives of New Music, and Page 350 →multiple entries in New Grove Dictionary (including those on Brian Ferneyhough and Karlheinz Stockhausen). Hans Zender is Professor Emeritus of Composition at the Hochschule fГјr Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and former Resident Conductor of the SГјdwestrundfunk Baden-Baden and Freiburg Symphony Orchestra.

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure or illustration. abstract expressionism, xxxv, 81, 82, 96, 107, 167, 255, 257–58, 293 abstraction, 86, 259–60, 268 of time, 258–59 abstract notation, 6, 7 Achorripsis (Xenakis), 143 action music, 293 action notation, xxviii, 306n4 action painting, xxviii, 293 Adamowicz, Elza, 167–68 Adams, John, 251 Adorno, Theodor, 126, 297 Albertson, Dan, xxxiii, xxxiv Alburger, Mark, 41 Alden, Jane, 97, 107 aleatoric music, 250, 259 See also chance American music, 42, 157, 256–58 avant-garde, xxxi, xxxiii, 163, 176, 259, 260, 291 European reception of, 259–60, 289–90 promotion of, 280–88 Amirkhanian, Charles, 251 Amy, Gilbert, 146 Andriessen, Louis, 251 Antenna Repairmen ensemble, 161, 177 archival material, links to, 315n85, 332n42, 334n12, 335n19, 336n36, 336n41 Arnold, Bob, 113

Arp, Hans, 82–83 art history, xxxiii Ashley, Robert, 143, 251 Ashton, Dore, 176, 329n3 Associated Music Publishers (AMP/Schirmer), xxxii–xxxiii, 1, 2, 7, 12, 166–67, 279, 309n1 Atlas Eclipticalis (Cage), 154 atonality, xviii, xxii, xxiii, 43, 129, 249, 251 automata, 123 automatic drawing, xxviii automatic writing, 107 avant-garde American, xxxiii, 163, 176, 259, 260, 291 in art, 89, 95 European, xxxi, xxxiii, 126, 136, 140, 153, 176, 256, 259, 260, 288, 291 jazz, xxxi musical, xviii, 106, 295, 301 New York, xxxi Babbitt, Milton, 194, 251, 294, 295, 301 Bailey, Derek, xxx, 177 Baker, Chet, 123 BarraquГ©, Jean, 194 BartГіk, BГ©la, 50, 236, 269, 299–300 Basie, Count, xviii, 3, 296 Baudelaire, Charles, 81, 95 Beal, Amy, xxxiii, 144 Page 352 →Beaten Track Ensemble, 185, 186 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 32, 50, 116, 256, 267, 269, 332n45 Behrman, David, 143 Beiderbecke, Bix, 23

Bendian, Gregg, xvii Berg, Alban, xvii, 43, 268, 292, 297 Bergamo, John, 177, 332n53 Berger, John, 92 Bergonzi, Rosie, 185, 186 Bergson, Henri, 183–84, 186 Creative Mind, 161, 176 Matter and Memory, 162, 182 Time and Free Will, 332n45 Berigan, Bunny, 292 Berio, Luciano, 114, 125, 130, 142, 143, 150, 173, 281, 282, 297, 299, 332n45 Incontri Musicali, 126 Sinfonia, xxii Berk, Lawrence (Larry), 31, 33–34, 35, 79 Berk, Lee, 34 Berklee College of Music, xviii, 2, 31, 292. See also Schillinger House Bernstein, Leonard, 277–78, 301 Brown’s letter to, 278–80 Bert, Eddy, 128 bias, 13, 114, 116, 119, 122, 123, 124, 131, 301 Blum, Eberhard, 101, 106 Blume, Friedrich, 144 Bodin, Lars-Gunnar, 251 Bois, Yves-Alain, xxxiii Boulez, Pierre, 249, 251, 273, 289, 300 Brown’s defense of, xvii, xxvi Brown’s friendship with, xxx, xxxi, 125, 144, 272, 281, 282, 296, 298, 299 Brown’s gift piece to, 101, 103, 104 Brown’s letters to, 153–54, 235

conducting Brown’s works, 114, 126, 130, 132, 145, 235, 237, 244, 272, 281 Constellation-Miroir, 144–45 Deuxième Sonate, 83, 319n3 Éclat, 156 on Folio, 85 influence on Brown, xxii, 83 Livre pour quatuor, 143 Le Marteau sans Maître, 118, 273 and the New York School, 114–15 open form, 150, 151 opinion of Brown’s music, 85, 156, 296–97 performances of, 176, 332n45 and the programming of modern music, 127, 143–44, 274, 301 Rituel in Memorian Bruno Maderna, xxii, xxiii serialism, 3, 194 Third Piano Sonata, 83, 144, 290 Trope, 144–45 Breakall, Ray, 332n53 Brecht, George, 123, 310n21, 322n25 Breton, André, 167 Brooks, William, xxx Brown, Carl (“Unc”), Jr., 22, 25, 305n1 Brown, Carolyn (Rice), xxxiii, xxxvii, 3, 21, 26, 117, 132, 133, 135, 242, 267, 272, 305n1, 324n53, 325nn69–70, 329n6 Brown, Earle access to primary sources, xxx–xxxii at CalArts, 5, 161, 249–54, 300, 339n2 (chapter 10) at Camp Lawrence, 21 collaboration with Calder, 5, 160–61, 329n6, 339n2 (chapter 11) as conductor, xi, xvi, xxviii, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 1, 2, 4, 109, 110, 149, 177–78, 235, 236, 253, 255, 279, 282,

283, 284, 285, 286, 299, 319nn61–62, 340n2 correspondence with Schoenberg, 320n7 Denver years, xxviii, xxxv, 3, 41, 82–83, 90, 115–17, 128, 267, 294, 320n7 paintings during that time, 90–92, plates 1–5 in Europe, xxxi–xxxii, 113, 125–29, 131–36, 140–41, 144, 146, 166–67, 272–73, 280, 281, 283, 285–87, 296–97, 298–99 European reception of, xxxi, 42, 130, 133, 136–39, 145–47, 149–53, 255–56, 258–59, 260, 281, 297, 298–99 European sound of, xxii, 156–58 exposure to big band music, 2, 4, 23–24, 25, 292 friendship with Boulez, xvii, xxx, xxxi, 101, 125, 144, 153, 235, 272, 281, 296–97, 298, 299 friendship with Maderna, 19, 143, 146, 153, 158, 235, 255, 328n6 Page 353 →improvisations of, xv, 4, 107, 111, 190 influence of the Schillinger system, 9, 25, 27–28, 35, 39–43, 77–79, 90, 124, 127, 194, 211, 283, 284, 292 influence on European composers, 144–45, 152, 156, 255, 258–59, 284–85, 289–90 and jazz, xvii–xviii, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxix, 2, 3, 8, 9, 23, 27–28, 63–64, 96–97, 117, 123, 127–28, 274, 291–92, 293, 296, 298, 337n59 at “June in Buffalo” symposium (1975), xvi–xvii mentioned in Nono’s lecture, 98, 136–39, 145, 317n42 and the New York School, xv–xviii, xxii, xxvi, xxviii–xxix, xxx, xxxi–xxxii, xxxvii, 113, 114, 115–16, 132, 142, 146, 149, 162, 250, 255–56 as performer, xv, xvi, 4, 23, 26, 190, 291–92, 296 photographs, 114, 150 as record producer, xviii, xxxii, xxxiii, 113, 142–43, 250, 271, 272, 286 relationship with the Rice family, 21–26 research on, xxx–xxxi as respected composer, 299 at Schillinger House, xviii, xxviii, 2, 35–38, 292. See also Schillinger House on the Schillinger System, 38–41 as trumpet player, xviii, xxvii, 4, 23, 24, 26, 27, 249, 291–92, 296

during World War II, 23–24, 292, 305–6n2 Brown’s compositions 4 Systems Cage’s critique of, 131–32 compositional process, 190 graphic notation, xv, 6, 106, 129 notational indeterminacy, 136 performances of, 125, 152, 324n51, 324-25n64 as time notation, 10 See also Folio and 4 Systems 25 Pages, xxxii, xxxv, 10 compositional process, 190 European reception of, 150, 152 graphic notation, xv harmonic combinations, 83 influence on European new music, 144, 290 mobility, 14, 151, 152, 164 open form, 14, 116, 150, 151, 164, 165, 208, 242, 290, 294, 306n5, 322n25, 330n17 performance of, 324n51 random sampling numbers, 12, 119, 321–22n23 relationship to other works by Brown, 165, 190, 242, 306n5, 330n17 time notation in, 9, 151, 157, 190 1953 (from Folio), 9–10, 14 Actomy, 82, 83–84 Available Forms 1 approach to form, 125 commission for, 145, 299 composition of, 320–21n15 conducted by Brown, 253

conducted by Maderna, 153, 154, 156, 235, 242, 301 conducted by Mosko, 253 first rehearsals of, 242 influence of Pollock on, 109 relationship to other works by Brown, 48, 110, 125, 133, 135–36, 147, 154, 165, 191 influence on other composers, xxx, 158, 307n11 mobile form, 14–15 modular thinking, 307n11 as new direction for Brown, xxxv notation, xxviii, 8, 99, 129 open form, 14–15, 99, 165, 191, 208, 232, 234, 242, 299, 330n17 positive reception of, 140–41, 144, 156, 157 preface and score, 8, 133, 141, 152 in print, xxxiii process of composing, 133, 135–36 rehearsal for, 242 role of conductor, 153, 157, 235–36, 246, 248, 253 score, 155 scoring of, 246 as source material for Wikiup, 5 stemless noteheads, 10 use as collage material, 169, 332n39 Available Forms 2 approach to form, 125 Page 354 →commission for, 145, 281 composition of, 320–21n15 conducted by Brown, 278, 299 conducted by Maderna, 278 conducted with Bernstein, 278, 301

relationship to other works by Brown, 110, 125, 147, 154, 157, 165, 191, 202, 204 influence on other composers, xxx, 156, 157, 158 list of instrumental techniques, 8 as new direction for Brown, xxxv notation, xxviii, 8, 9, 99 open fifth chord, xxiii, xxv open form, 15, 99, 165, 191, 208, 330n17 performances of, 301 preface to, 133, 152 premiere of, 282–83, 340n2 in print, xxxiii quoting from La Monte Young, 19 rehearsal requirements for, 278–80 role of conductor, 154, 246, 248 score, 9 scoring of, 246, 320n11 sketches for, 193, 202, 204 as source material for Wikiup, 5 stemless noteheads, 10 study of, xxxii sustained harmonic blocks, 157 timbral transformation in, 202, 204 time notation, 331n19 use as collage material, 169, 332n39 Available Forms 3. See Novara Calder Piece Chef d’orchestre by Calder, xxxiii–xxxiv, 14, 160, 178, 185, 186, 309n27, plate 8 as closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 164, 165, 166, 176–77, 178 collaged from String Quartet, 161, 169–70, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175–76

as collage, 16, 161, 166, 168–76, 169, 181–82 “collage-sketch,” 170, 171, 173, 174, 175 combining mechanical and conceptual, 90 compositional process, 191, 280 composition of the performance, 176–81 composition of the score, 168–76 directions for performance, 14, 90, 103, 161–62, 168, 170, 178–79 dynamics, 175 premiere of, 159–160 feedback conditions, 161–62, 165–66, 169, 175–78, 181, 182, 184–87, 316n22 graphic notation, 173, 178 history of, 160–61, 309n27 ideas of Bergson, 161, 162, 176, 182–85, 186 instrument assignments, 169 and open form, 14, 160, 162–64, 165, 166, 178, 179 performance at CalArts, 161, 177–79, 181, 332n53 performer’s scores, 179, 180, 181 playing on the mobile, 14, 159, 175, 186 recent performances of, xxxiii–xxxiv, 185, 333n77 role of the mobile as conductor, 14, 90, 160, 166, 178–79 role of the percussionists, 177–81, 181–82 scoring for, 14, 329n7 sketch, 15 Centering analysis of, xxxii European sound of, 157 quoting from Maderna, 19, 158, 158 stemless noteheads, 10 commissions for, xxii, xxxii, 3, 140, 145, 146, 147, 160, 281–82, 283, 284, 286, 293, 298–99, 306n6, 334n3

Corroboree approach to form, 125, 164, 165, 166 clock as conductor, 339n13 as closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 164 collage, 44, 166, 170 commission for, 145, 281 composition of, 144, 170 notation, 8 performance note, 165 precompositional material, 170 Page 355 →prefatory text, 164 as source material for Wikiup, 5 Cross Sections and Color Fields as closed form with open (mobile) interior sections, 16 commission for, 334n3 communication, 189, 200, 204, 216, 222 compositional process, 189–93, 192, 336n33 considered for two conductors, 334n12 defining the identity, 198, 204, 208–13, 214, 219–20 Denver Symphony Orchestra performance of, 334n3 distribution of sketches by compositional phase, 229 entity, 188, 189–90, 197, 198–99, 201, 202, 204, 208, 214, 218, 219, 221, 222 “Fibonacci Chord,” 204–5, 209, 211, 212, 219–20, 337n47 final disposition of materials, type of notation, related sketches, 230 “First Chord,” 211, 219–20, 337n51, 337n63 harmonic blocks, xix–xx, 157 influence of jazz on, xxxiv inversionally symmetrical chords, xx, xxi liberation of the content, 216, 218–21

“Major Sectional Aggregates,” 212–13, 219–20 “Maximum Divisi,” 211–12, 219–20, 221 “Maximum Spreads,” 212, 219–20 notation of, 192, 193, 196, 199, 213, 214–16, 218, 230 and open form, 16, 190, 191, 196, 201, 205, 208, 211, 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 337n61 opening chord, xix, xxi, xxii parallel diatonic pitch collections, xxii parallel melodic figures, xxii, xxiii performance by Michael Tilson Thomas, 335n21 programming phase, 200–8 sketch categories, 193 sketch contents coded summary, 223–28 coding categories, 195–98 sketches, xxxvi, 193–94, 195, 196–98, 197, 199, 203, 204, 205, 206–7, 210, 213, 217, 334n12, 335n19, 335n24, 337n46, 337n51 stemless noteheads, 10 time units of, 196, 337n62 timbral transformation, 202, 218 December 1952 coordinate system, 118–19, 163 European reception of, 85 focus on, xix, 1, 85, 330n15 graphic notation in, xv, xxxiii, 1, 5, 6, 84–85, 85, 137, 163 improvisation, 84, 93, 163, 306n5 influence of Fuller on, 87, 94–95, 96 influence of Calder on, 87 influence of Mondrian on, 85–88 influence of Patchen on, 84–85, 86, 87 open form, 13, 14, 84–85, 163, 330n17

performance of, 109–10, 138, 319n61, 327n86, 330n17 prefatory note, 85 random sampling numbers, 12, 86–87, 321–22n23 reformulation of, 94 relationship to other works by Brown, 110, 137, 306n5 as rotational work, 9–10 score of, 5, 6, 85, 96, 319n61 as source material for Wikiup, 5 See also Folio and 4 Systems Event: Synergy II commission for, 146 experimental scoring and techniques, 154 in Folio II, 101 open form, 15, 306n5 preparation for performance, 149 role of the conductor, 244 scoring for, 320n11 use as collage material, 17–18, 19 Folio and 4 Systems 1953, 9–10, 14 chamber orchestrations of, 319n63 composition of, 87, 188 compositional process, 190 European knowledge of, 85, 138, 150, 151–52 Page 356 →experimental vs. conventional notation in, xxviii, xxix graphic notation, 19, 84, 96, 97, 116, 151, 190, 296 influence of Calder, 89, 163 influence of Pollock, 93, 109 influence on other composers, 152, 252, 290

and jazz, 96–97, 298 as loose-leaf collection, 82 “MM” pieces, 83, 93 open form, 13, 93, 151, 163, 290, 306n5, 330n17 prefatory note to, 5 publication of, xxxii–xxxiii recordings of, 149, 297 relationship to Folio II, xxix, 81–82, 100–1, 110–11, 306n5 relationship to other works by Brown, 82, 84, 93–94, 137, 138, 152, 165, 190, 191, 306n5, 331n19 sketches for, 87–88, 97–98 time notation in, 8, 151 and the visual arts, xxxiii See also 4 Systems; December 1952; November 1952; October 1952 Folio II experimental vs. conventional notation in, xxix gift sketches, 81–82, 101, 111 graphic sketches, 80, 99–100, 103, 111–12, plate 7 influence of Pollock on, 109, 110 interpretation of, 109–10 naming of, 101, 318n48 notation, xxix, 6, 8, 98–99, 100, 101, 106–7, 111 orchestration in, 103, 106 Performable Imaginary Piece for Pierre, 103, 104 publication and performance of, 80, 101, 310n16, 315nn1–2, 318n47 relationship to Folio and 4 Systems, xxix, 81–82, 100–1, 110–11, 306n5 sketches as direct route to performance, 100–1 Sketch for New Orchestral Piece, 103, 106, 108, plate 7 text-based improvisation, 8 To the Memory of Helga, 103, 105

“Untitled” (1990), 99, 103 “Untitled” (ca. 1980), 102, 103 See also One to Five Forgotten Piece time notation, 9, 10 Four More notation, 126, 129 performance of, 125 publication of, 273 From Here commission for, 145 notation, 99 open form, 15, 99 performance instructions, 152 use of guitar, 320n11 Hodograph I commission for, 145, 317n42 and the European avant-garde, 135–41, 145, 152–53, 156–57, 317n42 experimental vs. conventional notation in, xxviii, 7, 98, 137, 157 graphic notation, xxviii, 2, 6–8, 7, 98, 106, 132, 137 and improvisation, 317n42 in Nono’s lecture, 98, 136–39, 145, 317n42 performance notes, 7–8, 139 prefatory text, 133, 164 scoring for, 137 structural diagram, 156 time notation, 132, 157 Home Burial, 26 Indices

in 1958, 129–36 ballet score for Springweather and People, 117, 129, 132 Brown’s “programme” for, 120, 121, 122, 123–24 Cage’s criticism of, 13, 114, 131–32, 141 cancellation of, 325n69 composition of, 113–14, 116, 118–23, 125, 270–71 concert version of, 125–29, 132, 321n16, 323n39 coordinate system, 118–19 European reception of, 114, 118, 126–27, 129–31, 133, 135, 140, 272, 273 Page 357 →function of the conductor in, 131, 141 notation of, 140 Maderna’s interest in, 126, 130, 132, 133, 137, 322–23n38 original manuscript, 121 performance of, 129, 141, 327n99 piano reduction, 117, 126–27, 133, 137, 140, 271, 326n82 premiere of, 113, 129 random sampling numbers, 12, 13, 113, 119, 124, 321–22n23 scoring for, 117–18, 270–71, 320n9 Schillinger density principles, 12, 124–25 sketches for, 320n10 Steineke’s interest in, 129, 137, 323n45 The Kind of Bird I Am, 305n1 “MM” pieces, 83, 93. See also Folio and 4 Systems Module I chords and composite pitches, xx chords as triads and major sevenths, xix, xx commission for, 146, 281–82 composition of, 280 conducted by Brown and De Carvalho, 16

conducted by Zender, 255 conducting guidelines for, xxix open form, xix–xx, 16 score, xx simplification in, 191 stemless noteheads, 10 Module II commission for, 146, 281–82 composition of, 280 conducted by Brown and De Carvalho, 16 conducted by Zender, 255 conducting guidelines for, xxix open form, 16 simplification in, 191 stemless noteheads, 10 Module III commission for, 146 conducted by Zender, 255 open form, 15, 16 simplification in, 191 stemless noteheads, 10 Music for Cello and Piano performances of, 127, 273, 323n42 premiere of, 322–23n38 publication of, xxxiii, 273 time notation, 156, 271 Music for Galerie Stadler, xxxiv, 4, 5, 309n8 Music for Trumpet, Horn, Double Bass, Guitar, Piano and Percussion (unrealized), 117–18 Music for Violin, Cello and Piano

publication of, 273 influence of the Schillinger System on, 3 New Piece open form, 15 simplification, 191 stemless noteheads, 10 New Piece Loops commission for, 146 time notation, 10 Nine Rarebits commission for, 145, 281–82 composition of, 280 indeterminate and determinate notations, xxix open form, 242 Novara as Available Forms 3, 145 commission for, 145 directions for performance, 2, 133 notation, 8 open form, 2, 13–14, 232–34, 242–43, 244, 252 page 2 of score, 232, 233 page 3, event 5 of score, 234, 235 page 4, event 2 of score, 243 performance of, xxxvi, 232, 239 preface to, 8, 339n12 publication of, 1 role of conductor, 234, 242–43, 244 sequence of events, 232–34 November 1952 (“Synergy”)

composition of, 87, 93, 163 graphic score, xxxiii, 6, 306n5 influence of Fuller on, 94–96 performance notes, 97, 103 random sampling numbers, 12, 119, 321n23 reformulation of, 94 sketches for, 97–98 See also Folio and 4 Systems Page 358 →Octet I closed form, 5 compositional process, 13, 116, 190, 321n21 coordinate system, 118 Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, 3, 144 random sampling numbers, 12, 13, 119, 321n23 Octet II closed form, 5 compositional process, 116, 190, 309n3 coordinate system, 118 Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, 3, 271 random sampling numbers, 12, 119, 321n23 October 1952 as Folio piece, 83 notation, 163 random sampling numbers, 12 See also Folio and 4 Systems Oh, K open form, 15 stemless noteheads, 10 One to Five

open form, 108–9 role of the conductor, 108–9, 110 score, 108 as sonic events, 101 as sonic activity, 110 See also Folio II Patchen Piece, sketch for, 340n6 Pentathis as change from previous works, 125, 136 commission for, 145, 281 European reception of, 152 notation, 132, 137 premiere of, 132, 133 publication of, 325n74 score, 134 addition of “stops” in score, 133, 325n68 performances of, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 4, 16, 26, 80, 101, 132–33, 135, 136, 144, 159, 176, 177, 179, 185, 253, 273, 278–79, 280, 281, 282, 287–88, 295, 298–99, 315nn1–2, 317n42, 319nn61–62, 319n3, 325n70, 326n82, 327n86, 327n99, 328n1, 333n77, 335n21, 338n1, 340n2 as performative art, xvi Performable Imaginary Piece for Pierre, 103, 104 Perspectives Boulez’s reaction to, 272, 296 publication of, xxxii–xxxiii, 1–2, 273 response to Arp sculpture, 82–83, 84 Schillinger influence on, 3 twelve-tone technique, 3, 116 Quartet for Flute, Violin, Cello and Guitar (unrealized), 117 recordings of, xxxiii, 4, 143, 144, 153, 154, 156, 278, 297, 328n1 (chapter 7), 329n4 Sign Sounds

aleatory textures, 157 open form, 248 percussion part, 247 role of conductor, 248 as source material for Wikiup, 5 Sketch for New Orchestral Piece, 103, 106, 108, plate 7 Sounder Rounds collage, 18, 19 stemless noteheads, 10 twelve-tone pitch rows, 3 Special Events notation, xxix, 8 stemless noteheads, 10 twelve-tone pitch rows, 3 String Quartet (unpublished, 1951) Pollock’s influence on, xxviii, 99 sketch of, 269, 306n4, 318n43 String Quartet (1965) action notation in, xxviii approach to form, 125, 190–91 as closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 164, 165, 190–91 collage, 16, 166 collaged in Calder Piece, 16, 161, 169–71, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175–76 commission for, 145–46, 281 composition of, 280 graphic notation, 170–71 page 1 of score, 172 precompositional material, 171, 172 Page 359 →preface to, 164–65, 240–41, 306n4, 338–39n9

role of the conductor, 240–42, 244 time notation, 240–41 vertical alignments in, 233, 240 Summer Suite вЂ95, 2 Syntagm III collaboration between performer and composer, 306n6, 339n7 collage, 18, 19 commission for, 146 notation, 8, 306n5 pages interspersed with Folio pieces, 101 relationship to other works by Brown, 306n5 Three Pieces for Piano notation, 83 performance of, 295, 320n8 publication of, xxxiii, 273 Schillinger influence in, 3 twelve-tone technique, 3, 116, 269 Times Five as closed form with mobile open (mobile) interior structures, 5, 16, 164, 239–40 commission for, 3, 145, 147, 160, 281–82, 286 ensemble with tape, 4, 5 prefatory text, 338n8 role of the conductor, 239–42, 244 score, 241 Time Spans commission for, 146–47, 148, 255, 299 harmonic blocks, 157 open form, 15 premiere of, xxx

stemless noteheads, 10, 11 time notation, 10 written for Zender, 146, 255 To the Memory of Helga, 103, 105 See also Folio II Tracer collage, 16, 19 open form, 5, 15 preface to, xxix stemless noteheads, 10 unsynchronized loops, 5 use of prerecorded sound, 5, 240 Tracking Pierrot as closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 244–46 Fibonacci chord, 204 influence of the Schillinger system, 28 page 1 of score, 245 page 3 of score, 246 dominant seventh chords, xxii–xxiii, xxiv, xxix role of the conductor, 244–46 stemless noteheads, 10 twelve-tone pitch rows, 3 See also Schillinger System in Tracking Pierrot Trio for Clarinet, Bassoon, and Piano (unrealized), 269 “Untitled” (1990), 99, 103 See also Folio II “Untitled” (ca. 1980), 102, 103 See also Folio II Wikiup

collage, 19 and open form, 4–5 stemless noteheads, 10 tapes for, 4–5 Windsor Jambs earlier version (“Transients”), 304 and open form, 252 role of the conductor, 339n14 stemless noteheads, 10 use of Novara text, 2 Brown’s composition technique abstract notation, 6, 7 action notation, xxviii, 306n4 closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 5, 16, 164, 165, 166, 167, 176–77, 178, 190–91, 244 collage, 16–19, 20, 44, 161, 166–68, 332n39 as constructive, xxiv, 98, 251, 254, 318n43 coordinate system, 118–19, 163 gestural notation, xxviii, 7, 8, 81, 98, 99, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111 graphic concept, 86–88 graphic sketches, 80, 99, 198, 199, 318n43 indeterminate and determinate notations, xxix. See also indeterminacy linear open form, 16, 19 rotational works, 9–10, 14 stemless noteheads, 10 summary chart, 20 Page 360 →tape music, 3–5, 19, 147, 160, 271, 282, 295, 296, 309n8, 338n8 time notation, 8–11, 129, 156–57, 331n19 twelve-tone composition, 2–3, 19, 42–43, 53, 57, 83, 116, 194, 267–70, 292, 294, 298, 299, 306n4, 314n80 See also graphic notation; improvisation, open form; random sampling methods; Schillinger System in Tracking

Pierrot Brown’s lectures and writings autobiographical, xxxi–xxxii, 291–301 at Darmstadt, 42, 90, 96, 135–36, 140, 164, 165, 231, 330n17, 334n1 essay on Varèse, 275–77 “Form in New Music,” 165, 176, 251–52, 316n22, 330n17 “Lecture Demonstration in New Music: Techniques, Sounds and Processes,” 194 “The Notation and Performance of New Music,” 42, 164, 188, 231, 239, 330n17 “Open Letter” to critics and friends, 289–90 remarks to the National Music Council, 280–88 “Why I Am a 12-Tone Composer,” 116–17, 267–70 Brown’s paintings “Denver (1),” 90–91, plate 2 “Denver (2),” 91, plate 3 “Denver (3),” 91, plate 4 “Denver (4),” 91–92, plate 5 Pierrot, 90, 92, plate 1 Budd, David, xxxiv, 4 Burroughs, William S., xxxiv, 4 Bussotti, Sylvano, 252 Cage, John Atlas Eclipticalis, 154 Brown’s letter to, 161, 166, 193 Brown’s relationship with, xvii, xxx, 13, 83, 87, 113–14, 116–17, 267, 268, 273, 294–95 at CalArts, 251 Cartridge Music, 143 and chance, xvii, 13, 114, 115, 116, 124–25, 284, 334n4 “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” 131 Concert for Piano and Orchestra, 154

conducting Indices, 113, 129, 131 criticism of Indices, 13, 114, 131–32, 141 critique of Brown’s compositions, xxx, 131–32, 136 disagreements with Brown, xvii, 123–24, 141, 284, 298 and Europe, xxii, 131–33, 136, 142, 144, 146, 149, 152, 259, 284, 287, 317n42 graphic notation, 106, 252 Indeterminacy (stories), 154 and indeterminacy, xxxiii, 132–33, 136, 138 Music of Changes, 124, 131 negative aesthetics of, xxiv–xxv and the New York School, xv–xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, xviii, xxx xxxi, 1, 113, 114, 114–15, 116, 132, 142, 146, 250, 255, 257–58 Nono’s critique of, 136–37, 139 Notations, xxx, 147, 166 performances of, 154, 176, 259, 287, 301, 319n3 and performers, 131, 238 as philosopher, 295 and the Project for Magnetic Tape, 3, 113, 119, 124, 144, 319n5 publishing house of, xxxii reaction to jazz, xvii–xviii, 128, 274 recordings of, xxxii, 143 Roaratorio, 240 Sonatas and Interludes, 294 on sound and silence, 115, 124, 268 and sound composition, 194 and tonality, xxiii–xxiv “The Ten Thousand Things” project, 119, 321n19 use of I Ching, 13, 115, 124, 251 Variations I, 136 and the visual arts, 80, 258

Williams Mix, 3, 144 Cajori, Charles, 93 CalArts Brown at, 5, 161, 249–54, 300, 339n2 (chapter 10) Calder Piece performed at, 177–79, 181, 332–33n53, 333n55 Page 361 →composition program at, 249, 250–51, 253 electronic music at, 5, 250–51 world music at, 251 Calder, Alexander Brown’s collaboration with, xxxiii–xxxiv, 14, 160–61, 163, 329nn5–6 influence on Brown, xxvi, 13, 25, 81, 87, 88–89, 162–63, 258, 293, 329n3, 329n9 Sweeney’s essay on, 88 Calder mobiles, xx, xxxiii, 4, 13, 14, 96, 159–62, 164, 176, 293, 329n3, plate 8 mechanized pieces, 88, 90 Pantograf, 88, 89 Two Spheres, 88 See also Chef d’orchestre California Institute of the Arts. See CalArts calligraphic drawings/calligraphy, xxviii, 80, 91–92, 100, 100, 101, 103, 107, 111, 137, plates 6–7 Capitol Records, xxix, 3, 96, 117, 125, 135, 140, 143, 271, 272, 274, 296, 320n12, 326n84 Cardew, Cornelius, xvi, 110, 138, 139, 140, 153, 252 Carter, Elliott, 251 Cartridge Music (Cage), 143 Caskel, Christoph, 137, 153, 317n42 Castiglioni, NiccolГІ, 143, 281 chance, xvi, xvii, 12, 13, 36, 106, 114, 116, 118, 123, 124–25, 131, 136, 192, 208, 231–32, 249, 251, 279, 284, 322n25 use by Cage, xvii, 13, 114, 115, 116, 124–25, 284, 334n4 Chance-Imagery (Brecht), 123, 310n21, 322n25 Charles, Daniel, 149

Charles, Ray, 3 Charles, Teddy, 128, 274 Chef d’orchestre (Calder), xxxiii–xiv, 14, 160, 178, 185, 186, plate 8 choice, xvi, xxxi, 30, 96, 123, 124, 131, 178, 214, 218, 219, 220, 222, 242, 253, 334n4 City of Glass (Graettinger), xviii Clementi, Aldo, 143 closed form with open (mobile) interior structures, 16, 19–20, 20, 164 Calder Piece, 164, 165, 166, 176–77, 178 Corroboree, 164 Cross Sections and Color Fields, 16 String Quartet, 164, 165, 190–91 Times Five, 5, 16, 164, 239–40 Tracking Pierrot, 244–46\ See also linear open form Cobra (Zorn), 236–37, 238–39, 240, 242, 246, 248, 339n14 Coleman, Ornette, 123, 315n1 collage, 16–19, 20, 166–68, 332n39 in Corroboree, 44, 166, 170 in Sounder Rounds, 18, 19 in String Quartet, 16, 166 in Syntagm III, 18, 19 in Tracer, 16, 19 in Wikiup, 19 See also Calder Piece Complete Webern, 142 Complete Works (Varèse), 128 Composition 1960 Number 7 (Young), 19 Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Cage), 154 Concerto per Oboe e orchestra No. 1 (Maderna), 19, 156, 158

Concord Sonata (Ives), 143, 291 conducting placard (slider), 14–15, 234, 324n53, 339n12 conductor Brown’s instructions for, xxix, 2, 41, 14–15, 69, 108–9, 234, 239, 253, 338n8, 339n12 function of, 109, 131, 141, 339n13 role of, 108–9, 153, 154, 157, 160, 191, 192, 215, 220, 234–37, 239, 242–46, 248, 253, 259, 278–79, 299, 339n14 as unnecessary, 165, 239–40, 279 Constellation-Miroir (Boulez), 144–45 Contemporary Sound Series, 142–43, 286, 320n9, 340n3 See also Time-Mainstream Records coordinate system, 118–19, 163 Copland, Aaron, 295, 299 coupling, 62, 62–63, 65, 65, 75, 75, 78 Cowell, Henry, xxxi, 30, 115, 122, 123–24, 136, 194, 284, 298, 320n9, 326n76 Craft, Robert, 142 Creative Mind (Bergson), 161, 176 cubism, 316n26 Cunningham, Merce, 3, 117, 118, 120, 127, 133, 135, 320n13, 325nn69–70 cybernetics, 90, 321n20 Page 362 →Debussy, Claude, 287, 301 de Carvalho, Eleazar, 16 de Kooning, Elaine, 94 de Kooning, Willem, 80, 167, 268, 295 Deleuze, Gilles, 198 Dello Joio, Norman, 287 density, xxii, 12, 83, 91, 103, 109, 124, 162, 192, 196, 205, 211, 250 DeuxiГЁme Sonate (Boulez), 83, 319n3 de Waart, Edo, 299 Dodge, Charles, 251

Donatoni, Franco, xxx Dorsey, Tommy, 23, 30 Dowling, Lyle, 32, 50, 79 “drip” paintings, 90–91, 93, 96 Druckman, Jacob, xxiv, 251 Duel (Xenakis), 153 Dufallo, Cornelius, xvii Durations (Feldman), 143 The Earle Brown Music Foundation (EBMF), xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii, 2, 4, 7, 168, 193, 280, 306n4, 315n85, 318n43, 334n12 Ear Shot (Brunner), 252 Éclat (Boulez), 156 Eco, Umberto, 150 El-Dabh, Halim, 3 electroacoustic music, 3–5, 19, 251 electronic music, 4, 29, 33, 144, 147, 240, 249, 271, 273, 277, 285–86, 295, 309n8, 324n50, 325n69 Ellington, Duke, 23 Ensemble Musica Negativa, xxiv, 149 Ensemble Musique Vivante, 185 Ernst, Max, xxvii–xxviii, xxxix, 22, 81, 167, 276, 305n1, 306n6 European music avant-garde, xxxi, xxxiii, 126, 136, 140, 153, 176, 256, 259, 260, 288, 291 tradition, 256–58, 259 Evans, Gil, 274 event, xxix, 88, 91, 100, 111, 115, 154, 238, 239, 253 in the Available Forms, 44, 48, 109, 156, 157, 278, 279 in Calder Piece, 161, 175–76 in Cross Sections and Color Fields, 191–92, 202, 204, 208, 211, 220 indicated in Brown’s music, xxix, 14, 98 in Folio and Folio II, 85, 97, 101, 109

in Novara, 232–33, 234, 242–43, Schillinger-derived in Tracking Pierrot, 66, 66–67, 68 See also sound events experimentalism, xxx, xxxi, 113, 114, 126, 138, 232, 294, 295, 306n8, 326n76 experimental music, 97, 123, 234, 298 explicit notation, 137, 139, 157 eye music, 107 Farmer, Art, 128, 274 feedback, 161–62, 165–66, 169, 175–78, 181, 182, 184, 187, 316n22 Feldman, Morton Brown’s association with, 87, 131 Durations, 143 European reception of, xxii, xxxi, 146, 149, 259, 284, 287 Intermission 4, 97 Intermission 6, 145 Intersection, 3 mobile technique, xx, xxii and the New York School, xv–xviii, xxvi, xxviii, xxxi, 113, 114, 115, 149, 250, 255, 295 and negation, xxiv, xxv performances of, 152, 176, 252–53, 287, 301, 319n3, 324–25n64 recordings of, xxxii, 143, 152 publisher of, xxxii relationship with Brown, xxxi relationship with Stockhausen, 145 as respected composer, 239 Rothko Chapel, xxiii–xxiv and sound composition, 194 and tonality, xxiii–xxiv and Tudor, 145, 152, 176

views of Brown by, xvii–xviii, xxii, xxvi, xxx, 145 and the visual arts, 80 Fernandez, Robert, 161, 177–78, 179, 181, 182–83, 332–33n53 Filliou, Robert, xxx First Oboe Concerto (Maderna), 19, 156, 158 First Percussion Quartet of Paris, 159–60, 328n1, 329n2, 332n53 For Magnetic Tape (Wolff), 3 Foss, Lukas, 145, 306n6 Page 363 →Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, 145, 308n24 Fourth String Quartet (Scelsi), 143 frottage technique, xxvii Fuller, Buckminster, 81, 87, 94–95, 96, 252, 339n2 (chapter 10) FГјr Augen und Ohren festival (Berlin), 5 Galbraith, Barry, 128, 274 Gann, Kyle, 42 Gazzelloni, Severino, 137, 138, 143, 153, 317n42 Gebser, Jean, 260 GГ©meaux (Takemitsu), 146 Gershwin, George, xviii, 30 gestural notation, xxviii, 7, 8, 81, 98, 99, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, plate 7 Giuffre, Jimmy, 273, 274, 326n84 Glazunov, A. K., 32 Globokar, Vinko, 146 Glock, William, 126, 275, 281, 297 Goodman, Benny, 30 Gordy, M. B., 177, 332n53 GГіrecki, Henryk, 156 Gottwald, Clytus, 147 Graettinger, Bob, xviii

graphic notation, xv, xxviii, xxxiv, 5–8, 80, 157, 178, 234, 252 in 4 Systems, xv, 6, 106, 129 in Calder Piece, 173, 178 in December 1952, xv, xxxiii, 1, 5, 6, 84–85, 85, 137, 163 in Folio II, 8, 106 in Folio and 4 Systems, 19, 84, 96, 97, 116, 151, 190, 296 in Hodograph I, xxviii, 2, 6–8, 7, 98, 106, 132, 137 in String Quartet, 170–71 graphic sketches, 80, 99, 198, 199, 318n43 Greenberg, Clement, 95 Greenwich House Music School, 128 Grismer, Ray, 116, 117, 127, 128–29, 139 Brown’s letter to, 267–70, 270–74 guitar, 4, 117–18, 122, 128, 130, 140, 249, 270, 320n9, 320nn11–12 Guston, Philip, 80, 167 Handy, George, 274 Harakiri (Huber), 147 Harrison, Lou, 117, 320n9 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 281, 283, 297 Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman, 144 Henning, Roslyn Brogue, 2, 25, 42, 43, 292 Hentoff, Nat, 296, 340n7 Herman, Woody, 23 Hespos, Hans-Joachim, 156 Higham-Edwards, Beth, 185, 186, plate 8 Hindemith, Paul, 283–84, 292, 300 Hinton, Milt, 128, 274, 323n48 Hodeir, André, 151 Hoek, D. J., xxxiii,142

Hoffman, Hans, 91 Holliger, Heinz, 146 Holtzman, Harry, 319n2 Hoover, Elizabeth, xxxiii Horkheimer, Max, 297 Huber, Nicolaus A., 147 Hübner, Herbert, 281 Hussain, Zakir, 251 Hyperprism (Varèse), 294 I Ching, 13, 115, 124, 251 Iddon, Martin, xxxiii, 137, 317n42 immediacy, 109, 138, 140, 250, 293 implicit notation, 7, 7–8, 137, 139, 157 improvisation, xv, xxix, 4, 6, 8, 28, 36, 84, 93, 96–97, 98, 106, 107, 128, 139, 151, 163, 165, 178, 190, 192, 236, 245, 246, 249, 253, 270, 274, 279, 293, 294, 295, 296, 306n5, 317n42, 337n59 Improvisation (Bailey), xxx, 177, 307n11 In C (Riley), 237–38, 240 Incontri Musicali (Berio), 126, 130 indeterminacy, xvi, xxviii–xxix, xxxii, xxxiii, 98, 106, 131, 132–33, 136, 138, 144, 145, 156, 160, 163, 237, 249, 293, 317n42, 334n4 Intégrales (Varèse), 294 Intermission 4 (Feldman), 97 Intermission 6 (Feldman), 145 Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (IMD), 137 Intersection (Feldman), 3 Ionisation (Varèse), 294 Ives, Charles, 19, 257, 284, 287, 294, 326n76 Concord Sonata, 143, 291 as sound composer, 294 Three Places in New England, 301

Page 364 →James, Harry, 23 James, Martin, 319n2 James, William, 107 Jarvinen, Arthur, 177, 332–33n53 jazz, xvii–xviii, xxiv, xxix, 2, 3, 8, 9, 16, 23, 24, 25, 27–28, 29, 34, 96–97, 117, 123, 127–28, 249, 274, 291, 292, 293, 296, 298, 323nn46–48, 326n84, 337n59 atonal, xviii avant-garde, xxxi Lydian dominant, xxii–xxiii, 63, 63–64 Jeux (Debussy), 301 Johns, Jasper, 81, 167 Johnson, Roger, 101 Joyce, James, 81 Kagel, Mauricio, 142 150 Kandinsky, Vassily, 106 Kellerer, Christian, 261 Kendall, Maurice George, 119, 124 Kenton, Stan, xviii, xxvi, xxxiv, 23, 117, 320n9 Khan, Ali Akbar, 251 Khan, Sabri, 251 Kim, Duk Soo, 251 kinetic art, 33, 89–90 Kinzie, John, 332n53 KlavierstГјck XI (Stockhausen), 97, 136, 144, 145, 238–39, 285, 290 Klee, Paul, 90 Kline, Franz, 80, 167, 255 Kontarsky, Alfons,127, 145 Kontarsky, Aloys, 143, 145 Kontarsky, Bernhard, 145 Kontrapunkte (Stockhausen), 144

Kotoński, Włodzimierz, 143 Kraft, William, 141 Krauss, Rosalind, 316n26 Křenek, Ernst, xvii, xviii Kutschke, Beate, 147 Labyrinthos (Logothetis), 106 Lachenmann, Helmut, 156 Lee, Pamela M., 89 Le Livre (Mallarmé), 143 Ligeti, György, 300 Light Music (unrealized), xxxiv linear open form, 16, 19 See also closed form with open (mobile) interior structures; open form Livre (Boulez), 143 Logothetis, Anestis, 106–7, 110, 319n61 loops, 4, 5, 69, 154, 165, 187, 240, 242, 244, 248 Lopresti, Molly, 185 Lucier, Alvin, 143, 239 Lydian dominant, xxii–xxiii, 63, 63–64 Macero, Teo, 128, 274, 323n46 MacKillop, Kenneth, 25, 35, 37 Maderna, Bruno Brown’s friendship with, xxx, 125, 146, 281, 282, 299, 328n6 Brown’s influence on, 255 Brown’s letters to, 157, 191–92, 211, 220 Brown’s Centering and tribute to, 157–58 Concerto per Oboe e orchestra No. 1, 19, 156 conducting the Available Forms, 145, 153–54, 156, 235, 278, 299, 301 conducting Brown’s works, 109, 132, 133, 135, 325n74, 340n2

interest in Indices, 114, 126, 130, 132, 133, 137, 322–23n38 performances of, 273, 332n45 on programming modern music, 301 recordings of, 142, 143–44 Magnus, David, xxxiii magnetic tape, xxxii, 1, 116, 124, 271 See also Project for Music for Magnetic Tape; tape music Mahler, Gustav, xxiii MallarmГ©, StГ©phane, 14 Manne, Shelly, xviii marimbula, 117, 122, 127, 130, 270 Le Marteau sans MaГ®tre (Boulez), 118, 273 Masson, Diego, 159–60, 185, 329n6, 332n53 Mathematical Basis of the Arts (Schillinger), 25, 32, 33 mathematics, xviii, 2, 27, 28, 29–30, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 50, 68, 79, 153, 292 Matsudaira, Yoritsune, 143 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 162, 182 Mayuzumi, Toshiro, 143 McInerney, James, 79 McKusick, Hal, 128, 274 McLean, Jane, 117 Measured-Up Music (Filliou), xxx memory, 162, 182–85, 186, 187 memory-images, 183, 184, 186 Messiaen, Olivier, 3, 42, 143, 284 Page 365 →Metastasis (Xenakis), 126 Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 125, 138, 149, 297, 329n9 Microexercises (Wolff), 237 Milhaud, Darius, 283, 287

Miller, Glenn, 23, 30 Milstein, Nathan, 296 minimalism, 251, 259–60 Mitchell, Joan, 81 mobility, xxxiii, 87–89, 92, 115, 151–52, 160, 162–65, 176, 181, 218 of Calder’s sculptures, 89, 258 conceptual, 14, 94, 97, 112, 163 physical, 14, 97, 112, 163 Mondrian, Piet, 85–88, 268, 316n18, 319n2 Mongini, Claudia, 106 Montgomery, Merle, 31 Moore, Henry, 293 Mosko, Stephen “Lucky,” 251, 252, 253 Mulligan, Gerry, 123 Mumma, Gordon, 143 music electroacoustic, 3–5, 19, 251 electronic, 4, 29, 33, 144, 147, 240, 249, 271, 273, 277, 285–86, 295, 309n8, 324n50, 325n69 experimental, 97, 123, 234, 298 and mathematics, 29–30. See also mathematics negative, xxiv–xxv neoclassical, 283 positive, xxiv–xxv science of, 29–30 tape, 3–5, 19, 147, 160, 240, 282, 295, 296, 309n8, 338n8. See also magnetic tape; Project for Music for Magnetic Tape See also American music; European music; jazz music Music Before Revolution (LP album), 149, 297 Music of Changes (Cage), 124, 131 Nancarrow, Conlon, xvi

National Music Council of New York, 42, 280 negative music, xxiv–xxv neoclassical music, 283 neumatic notation, 107 New England Drift (Weisert), 237, 339n14 Newman, Barnett, 255 New Romanticism, xxiv New York School, xv, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxiv, xxvi, xxviii, xxix, xxx–xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvii, 1, 101, 132, 142, 146, 149, 156, 162, 250, 255, 256–57, 258, 261 collaboration of, 113–14 prior to Brown, 115–17 Nicholls, David, 116 Nilsson, Bo, 143, 324–25n64 Nirvana Symphony (Mayuzumi), 143 “noise” factors, 156 Nono, Luigi, 98, 114, 135–36, 142, 282, 299, 301 critical lecture at Darmstadt by, 136–39, 145, 317n42 notation abstract, 6, 7 action, xxviii, 306n4 explicit, 137, 139, 158 implicit, 7, 7–8, 137, 139, 157 indeterminate and determinate, xxix neumatic, 107 stemless noteheads, 10 See also gestural notation; graphic notation; time notation Notations (Cage), xxx, 147, 166 Nyman, Michael, xxxi Objects on a Table (Arp), 82–83 Oldenburg, Claes, 167

open content, 84, 163 open form, xx, xxvi, xxvii, xxix, xxxv–xxxvi, 1, 2, 3, 13, 19–20, 81, 111, 113, 150, 163–65, 176, 213–14, 231, 237, 248, 252, 253, 284, 296, 298, 329n3, 329–30n9, 336n33 in 25 Pages, 14, 116, 150, 151, 152, 164, 165, 208, 242, 290, 294, 306n5, 330n17 in Available Forms, 14, 15, 99, 165, 191–92, 208, 232, 234, 242, 299, 330n17 use by Boulez, 150, 151 and Calder Piece, 14, 160, 162–64, 165, 166, 178, 179 in Cobra (Zorn), 236–37, 238–39, 240, 242, 246, 248 and Cross Sections and Color Fields, 16, 190, 191, 196, 201, 205, 208, 211, 214, 215, 218, 220, 221, 337n61 in December 1952, 13, 14, 84–85, 163, 330n17 Page 366 →in Event: Synergy II, 15, 306n5 in Folio and 4 Systems, 13, 93, 151, 152, 163, 290, 306n5, 330n17 in From Here, 15, 99 linear open form, 16, 19 in Modules, xix–xx, 15, 16 in New Piece, 15 in Nine Rarebits, 242 in Novara, 2, 13–14, 232–34, 242–43, 244, 252 in Oh, K, 15 in One to Five, 108–9 performance practice, 179–81, 183, 231–32, 242 and the role of the conductor, 108–9, 244–46, 248, 319n62 in Sign Sounds, 248 and Stockhausen, 150, 285, 290 in Time Spans, 15 in Tracer, 5, 15 and Tracking Pierrot, 244–46 and Wikiup, 4–5 and Windsor Jambs, 252 See also closed form with open (mobile) interior structures

openness, 189, 190, 191, 200, 201, 215, 218, 219, 259, 260, 334n4 Opera Aperta (Eco), 150 orchestration (scoring), 69, 74, 117, 119, 122, 133, 135, 147, 153, 154, 194, 232–33, 253, 258 in Available Forms 2, 191 in Calder Piece, 14, 159–60, 168, 169, 170–73, 178, 183 of Folio, 319n63 and Schillinger, 32, 311–12n18, 315n86, in Tracking Pierrot, 64, 65, 73, 79 overdubbing, 4 Overton, Hall, 128, 274 Ozawa, Seiji, 300 Paik, Nam June, 250 Pantograf (Calder), 88, 89 Parker, Charlie, xxxi Patchen, Kenneth, 25, 81, 84–85, 86, 87, 292–93 Patchen Piece, sketch for (Brown), 340n6 Peabody Conservatory, 300 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 143–44, 156 performance ambiguity, 231–32 performer involvement, 138, 163, 165, 177, 239, 296, 331n19 performers, 101, 138, 139, 140–41, 146, 165, 232, 317n42 of new music, 238–39, 248 relationship with composer, xxix, 177, 231, 242, 296, 297, 306n6 time-sense perception of, 310n17, 324n52, 331n19 Perlis, Vivian, 101 permutations, 68–69, 73, 74, 78–79, 315n86 Peters Edition, xxxii, 309n1, 2, 7 Piano Piece No. XI (Stockhausen). See Klavierstück XI (Stockhausen) Picht, Georg, 259

Pier and Ocean (Mondrian), 86 Pierrot (Brown), 90, 92, plate 1 Pierrot lunaire (Schoenberg), 44, 273, 292 Pierson, Alan, 256 Piston, Walter, 42–43, 287 Plunkett, Don, 271 Poetics of Music (Stravinsky), 297–98 pointillism, 129, 152, 248 Pollock, Jackson, xxvi, xxviii, 25, 81, 90, 91, 92–93, 98, 99, 109, 110, 162, 167, 219, 250, 253, 268, 278, 293, 294, 295 Pop art, 259 positive music, xxiv–xxv postmodernism, xxiv, 260 postserialism, xxiv Pousseur, Henri, 114, 130, 144, 150, 194 Powell, Mel, 251, 254 prerecorded sound, 5, 147, 239–40, 244, 309n8 Pritchett, James, 119 Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, 3, 113, 119, 124, 144, 319n5 Puma, Joe, 320n12 quadrant rotation, 56–57, 77–78, 314n80 Quist, Pamela Layman, xxxii Ran, Shulamit, 299 random sampling numbers, 12–13, 19–20, 98, 124, 317n42, 321n18, 321n22 in 25 Pages, 12, 310n21, 321–22n23 in December 1952, 12, 86, 310n21 Page 367 →in Indices, 12, 13, 113, 118–20, 131, 163, 321–22n23 in November 1952, 12, 310n21, 321–22n23 in October 1952, 12, 310n21 in Octets I–II, 12, 13, 321–22n23

Raphael, Dori, 185 Rauschenberg, Robert, 19, 81, 129, 167, 295, 309n26 Ray, Man, 91–92 Refrain (Stockhausen), 153 Reich, Steve, 238, 239, 251 Rice, Carolyn. See Brown, Carolyn (Rice) Rice, Marion, xxxv, 21 Rice, Parker, 21–24, 25, 26 Richards, Mary Caroline, 158 Riehn, Rainer, 149 Riley, Terry, 237–38 Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna für Orchester in 8 Gruppen (Boulez), xxii, xxiii Roaratorio (Cage), 240 Robinson, Julia, xxxiii Romanticism, xvi, xxiv Rosbaud, Hans, 114, 125, 126, 127, 129–30, 281, 297, 322n38, 323n42 Rosenberg, Harold, 293 rotational works, 9–10, 14 Rothko, Mark, 167, 250, 255, 295 Rothko Chapel (Feldman), xxiii–xxiv Russell, George, 274 Ryan, David, xxix, 27 Rzewski, Frederic, xvi, 144 Salabert, 1, 2 Salzman, Eric, 33, 151, 290 Sandler, Irving, 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 162 Scelsi, Giacinto, 143 Schaeffer, Pierre, 3

Schapiro, Meyer, 95–96, 98 Schillinger, Frances (Mrs. Joseph), 31–33, 311n18 Schillinger, Joseph, 2, 25, 28–29, 34, 136–37, 139, 311n18 Schillinger House, xviii, xxviii, 2, 25, 28, 31, 313n49 Brown’s time at, 34, 35–38, 292 degree program, 36–38 history of, 34–35 Schillinger House School of Music Supervised Self-Study Course in Arranging and Composition, 79 Schillinger System, xviii–xix, 1, 30, 36, 43,136, 194, 253, 284, 294, 310n1, 314n80 Brown and authorization as a teacher of, 28, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 79, 294, 313n48, 326n76 Brown’s explanation of, 38–41 Brown’s interest in writing a book on, 33 Brown’s variation of, 55–56 cadences, 53 cycles of root movement, 53, 54, 55, 77 density principles, 12, 124, 322n29, 322n31 harmony defined, 53 history of, 28–31 influence on Brown, xxiv, 9, 25, 27–28, 41–43, 90, 124, 127, 322n29 permutation, 68–69 publication of, 31–32 similarities to serialism, 2–3, 50 Schillinger System in Tracking Pierrot, 314n76, 314n84 Brown’s variation of Schillinger cycles of root movement, 53, 55–56 chord progressions, 48, 48, 59–60, 61, 62, 62–63, 63–64, 63, 64, 68–69, 72 coupling, 62, 62–63, 65, 65, 75, 75, 78 Lydian dominant, xxii–xxiii, 63, 63–64 permutation, 68–69, 73, 74, 78–79 pitch/tone rows, 45, 46–48, 53, 55–56, 58–59

pre-compositional planning, 43–44, 77 quadrant rotation, 56–57, 77–78, 314n80 rhythmic structures, 45, 45, 48, 77 sigmas, 63–64, 78 symmetrical application of, 57, 58–60, 64, 68, 78 tone clusters, 60, 63 tonic systems, 57, 57–59, 60, 62–63, 64, 65, 78 transposition errors and discrepancies, 70–71, 74, 75, 77 The Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 30, 31–32, 33, 35, 37, 53, 68, 124, 310n1, 311n18, 322n29, 326n76 definition of harmony, 53 Page 368 →Schirmer (Associated Music Publishers), xxxii–xxxiii, 1, 2, 7, 12, 166–67, 279, 309n1 Schleiermacher, Steffen, 149 Schoenberg, Arnold, xvii, xviii, 57, 116–17, 129, 249, 256, 267, 269, 270, 292, 297 Brown’s correspondence with, 320n7 Pierrot lunaire, 44, 273, 292 Schott, xxxiii, 1, 2, 309n1, 325n74 Schrader, Barry, 251 Schwitters, Kurt, 19 Scratch Orchestra, xvi Second Viennese School, xvii serial composition, xxiv, 2–3, 33, 42, 50, 154, 157, 194, 284, 294, 322n31 See also twelve-tone composition Sessions, Roger, 295 Shanghai Film Orchestra, 238 Shankar, Ravi, 238, 251 Shaughnessy, Ed, 128, 274 Shaw, Arnold, 30, 32, 50 Shaw, Artie, 23 sigmas, 63–64, 78, 211–12

silence(s), 6, 103, 110, 115, 124, 159, 238, 240, 245, 268, 331 Sims, Zoot, 24, 123, 128 Sinfonia (Berio), xxii Six Pieces for Orchestra (Webern), 301 Sleepers Awake (Patchen), 84, 86 Smith, Bernard Babington, 119 Sollins-Brown, Susan, 101 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (Bartók), 236 Sonatas and Interludes (Cage), 294 sonic structure, 112, 337n44 sonic wallpaper, 12, 124 Soto, Jesús Raphael, 90 sound composition, 192 193, 194 sound events, 107, 109, 113, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122–23, 140, 192, 194, 209, 300, 321n22 See also event Soundings (concert), 315n1 sound organization, 194, 208 Sounds of Void (sound installation), xxxiv Springweather and People (Cunningham) ballet version, 118 duet version, 135 press release, 324n54 Stein, Gertrude, xxviii, 25, 81, 107, 198, 201, 275, 276, 301, 335n26 Steinecke, Wolfgang, 114, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 135, 137, 323n45 Stella, Frank, 167 stemless noteheads, 10 Still, Clyfford, 255 Stockhausen, Karlheinz Brown’s disagreement with, 151–52, 285, 289–90

Brown’s influence on, 144, 153, 157, 285 Brown’s interaction with, 2–3, 125, 126, 139, 144–45, 282, 299 Cage’s analysis of, 131 exchange of letters with Brown, 150–52 Gesang der Jünglinge, 273 Klavierstück XI, 97, 136, 144, 145, 238–39, 285, 290 Kontrapunkte, 144 Nono’s critique of, 137 use of open form, 150, 285, 290 performances of, 136, 144, 152–53, 176, 238–39, 315n1, 332n45 photograph, 150 recordings of, 142, 143 Refrain, 153 relationship with Feldman, 145 and serial composition, 3, 194 scores by, 249, 252 Zyklus, 153 Stokowski, Leopold, 101 Straebel, Volker, 13, 309n3 Stravinsky, Igor, 257, 272, 283–84, 287, 297–98 Strobel, Heinrich, 125, 127, 281, 322n38 structuralism, 28, 294 Subotnick, Morton, 251, 254 Surrealism, xxxvi, 83, 90, 107, 123, 124, 166–68, 175, 176, 259, 264 Suzuki, Daisetz T., xvii Sweeney, James Johnson, 88 Synergetics (Fuller), 94–95 synergy, xxix, 94–98, 252, 253, 338n7 synthesizer, 5

Takemitsu, Toru, 16, 146 Talujon ensemble, xxxiv tape music, 3–5, 19, 147, 160, 240, 282, 295, 296, 309n8, 338n8 See also magnetic tape; Project for Music for Magnetic Tape Page 369 →tape splicing, 3–5, 15, 319n5 Taube, Werner, 127, 323n43 Theremin, Leon, 29 theremin (instrument), xvi, 29 “The Ten Thousand Things” project (Cage), 119, 321n19 Third Piano Sonata (Boulez), 83, 144, 290 Constellation-Miroir, 144–45 Trope, 144–45 Thome, Joel, 249 Thomson, Virgil, 133 Three Places in New England (Ives), 301 Tilson Thomas, Michael, 335n21 timbral transformation, 202, 204, 218 time, abstraction of, 258–59 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 332n45 Time-Mainstream Records, xxxii, xxxiii, 113, 142–43, 286, 320n9, 327n97, 340n3 time notation, 8–11, 164, 310n17 in 25 Pages, 9, 151, 157, 190 in Available Forms 2, 331n19 in Cross Sections and Color Fields, 196, 218 in Forgotten Piece, 9, 10 in Four More, 126, 129 in Hodograph I, 132, 157 in Music for Cello and Piano, 156, 271 in String Quartet, 240

in Time Spans, 10 time-sense perception, 310n17, 324n52, 331n19 To Earle (Donatoni), xxx To Earle Two (Donatoni), xxx Tomek, Otto, 114, 125, 127, 135, 140, 281, 283, 296–97, 325n74 tonality, xxiii, xxiv, 91 tonic systems, 56, 57, 57–59, 60, 62–63, 64, 65, 78 Trans/formation (journal), 115, 319n2 Trope (Boulez), 144–45 Tropi (Castiglioni), 143 Tudor, David on Brown’s notation, 129 and Brown’s open form, 290 influence on Brown, 324n52 and jazz, xvii and the New York School, xxviii, xxxi, 113, 114, 115, 250 performances by, 83, 94, 117, 125, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 152, 153, 176, 273, 295, 317n42, 319n3, 320n8, 324n51, 324n64, 327n86, 332n45 playing Indices, 126–27, 133, 273 on Stockhausen and Feldman, 145 twelve-tone composition, 2–3, 19, 42–43, 53–57, 83, 116, 194, 267–70, 292, 294, 298, 299, 306n4, 314n80 See also serial composition Two Spheres (Calder), 88 Tyulin, Yuri, 31 Tzara, Tristan, 167 Universal Edition, xxxii, 1, 125, 126, 127, 152, 273, 281, 297 van Alphen, Ernst, 107 Varèse, Edgard Brown’s essay on, 126, 275–77

collective improvisation, 128 Complete Works, 128 gestural notation, 8 Hyperprism, 294 influence of, 42, 139, 249, 284, 292, 294, 337n44 Intégrales, 294 Ionisation, 294 and the New York School, xxxi performances of, 287 recordings of, 294 as sound composer, 194 sound organization, 194 Variations I (Cage), 136 Vassilakis, Pangiotis “Takis,” xxxiv Violin Concerto (Berg), 292 Vischer, Antoinette, 145, 146 visual art abstract expressionism, xxxv, 81, 82, 96, 107, 167, 255, 257–58, 293

Plates Page 371 → Plate 1. Earle Brown, Pierrot, 1951. Enamel on cardboard. 29.6 Г— 27.4 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 372 → Plate 2. Earle Brown, Denver (1), 1951. Oil and enamel on cardboard. 47 Г— 46.5 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Plate 3. Earle Brown, Denver (2), 1950–51. Oil on cardboard. 76.6 Г— 34 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Plate 4. Earle Brown, Denver (3), 1951–52. Oil and enamel on cardboard. 77 Г— 34 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 375 → Page 373 →Page 374 →Plate 5. Earle Brown, Denver (4), 1951. Enamel on card. 50.8 Г— 37.9 cm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 376 → Plate 6. Earle Brown, notebook sketches, ca. 1972. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 377 → Plate 7. Earle Brown, Sketch for New Orchestral Piece (1978) from Folio II, 338 Г— 700 mm. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation. Page 378 → Plate 8. Alexander Calder, Chef d’orchestre in Earle Brown’s Calder Piece (with Beth Higham-Edwards, percussion). Tate Modern, London, November 2015. Photo by Thomas Fichter. Courtesy of The Earle Brown Music Foundation.