>From the NY Times
Earle Brown, an innovative experimental composer who allowed performers
considerable interpretive freedom, and whose vision of sound as an almost
concrete object is often expressed in a form of graphic notation that conveys
the importance of time and space in his music, died on Tuesday at his home in
Rye, N.Y. He was 75.
Mr. Brown began his musical life as a jazz trumpeter, and in his student
years he studied mathematics and engineering with the idea of a career in
aeronautics. But he was also strongly drawn to contemporary painting,
sculpture, poetry, dance and music, and after service in the Army Air Corps
during World War II he devoted himself to more formal musical studies at the
Schillinger School of Music in Boston.
He moved to Denver in 1950, where he began painting as well as composing and
teaching music. An encounter there with the composer John Cage in 1951 proved
decisive: Cage invited Mr. Brown to New York to contribute to his "Project
for Music for Magnetic Tape." Mr. Brown's contribution to Cage's project was
"Octet I" for eight loudspeakers (1953), a tactile work in which isolated
tones, fragments of speech and singing, snippets or orchestral recordings and
bursts of noise swirl around a listener for nearly three and a half minutes.
Mr. Brown quickly became an influential member of the New York School, in
which the other prominent composers were Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian
Wolff and David Tudor. He adopted some of the philosophical hallmarks of
Cage's approach, including the use of indeterminacy, a technique in which
performers were given parameters within which they could choose what, when or
how to play. One of Mr. Brown's best-known works in this style, "December
1952," invites performers to interpret a visually elegant score that consists
of rectangles of different sizes and thicknesses, some horizontal, some
vertical.
The score for "December 1952" has been likened to a painting by Mondrian, but
Mr. Brown has said that his graphic scores were more directly inspired by the
mobiles of Alexander Calder. The score for his "Available Forms I" (1961),
also inspired by Calder, consists of six unbound pages, each of which
includes four or five distinct musical events. The conductor begins the work
with any event on any page and builds the work by selecting from the
remaining events and manipulating tempo and dynamics at will. In the
collaborative "Calder Piece" (1963-6), a percussion score by Mr. Brown was,
in effect, performed by Calder's "Chef d'Orchestre," a playable mobile.
Earle Appleton Brown was born in Lunenburg, Mass., on Dec. 26, 1926. During
his years as a mathematics and engineering student at Northeastern University
in the early 1940's, he played trumpet in a jazz band on weekends. He
continued to play jazz during his military service, and in 1946 he enrolled
at the Schillinger School, where he studied composition and early music. His
works in these pre-Cage years were largely in the 12-tone style, as were some
of his early New York works. When Mr. Brown moved to New York to join the
Cage circle, his first wife, Carolyn Brown, a dancer, joined Merce
Cunningham's company. Their marriage ended in divorce. In 1972, Mr. Brown
married Susan Sollins, who survives him, as does a sister, Marilyn Krysil, of
Lunenburg, Mass.
In New York, Mr. Brown quickly developed his own approach to Cage's chance
aesthetic. But he was less enamored than Cage of pure chance composition. He
later described "December 1952" as "an activity rather than a piece by me,
because of the content being supplied by the musicians." More typically, he
found ways to combine ambiguous elements, in which musicians were free to
make choices, with specifically notated passages, which he expected to be
played with strict precision.
In "time-notation" works like "Music for Cello and Piano" (1954-5), pitches
and dynamics are provided in traditional notation, but durations are left to
the players. In his later works ā the best-known is "Tracking Pierrot" (1992)
ā he continued to modify the balance between fixed notation and open forms.
He also continued to compose for a variety of forces, calling for huge blocks
of chordal sound in some works and graceful, pointillistic webs in others.
Mr. Brown music was extremely influential in Europe during the 1950's and
60's, when composers like Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, Karlheinz
Stockhausen and Franco Donatoni adopted elements of his style. (Donatoni also
dedicated two orchestral works to Mr. Brown, "To Earle I," in 1970, and "To
Earle II," in 1972.)
As a teacher, Mr. Brown held the W. Alton Jones chair of composition at the
Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from 1968 to 1973. He also taught at SUNY
Buffalo, Yale University and the Tanglewood and Aspen Music Festivals.
As president of the Fromm Music Foundation from 1984 to 1989, he organized
new music concerts at the Aspen Music Festival and commissioned works by many
composers, among them Henry Brant, Ornette Coleman, Todd Machover, Steve
Mackey, Steve Reich, James Tenney and Joan Tower. He was also the repertory
director of an important series of new-music recordings on the
Time-Mainstream label. Between 1960 and 1973, he oversaw the label's
recordings of works by 49 composers from 16 countries, among them Ives, Cage,
Nono, Maderna, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Iannis Xenakis.
