Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form,"[1] a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s (see John Zorn) and generations of younger composers.
For the Virginia lawyer and member of the Virginia House of Delegates, see Earle M. Brown.Among his most famous works are December 1952, an entirely graphic score, and the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, and Cross Sections and Color Fields. He was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1998).[2]
Notation[edit]
Although Brown precisely notated compositions throughout his career using traditional notation, he also was an inventor and early practitioner of various innovative notations.
In Twenty-Five Pages, and in other works, Brown used what he called "time notation" or "proportional notation" where rhythms were indicated by their horizontal length and placement in relation to each other and were to be interpreted flexibly. However, by Modules I and II (1966), Brown more often used stemless note heads which could be interpreted with even greater flexibility.
In 1959, with Hodograph I, Brown sketched the contour and character abstractly in what he called "implicit areas" of the piece. This graphic style was more gestural and calligraphic than the geometric abstraction of December 1952. Beginning with Available Forms I, Brown used this graphic notation on the staff in some sections of the score.
December 1952 and FOLIO[edit]
December 1952 is perhaps Brown's most famous score. It is part of a larger set of unconventionally-notated music called FOLIO. Although this collection is misconstrued as, historically, "coming out of nowhere", musical notation has existed in many forms—both as a mechanism for creation and for analysis. Brown studied what is now called Early Music, which had its own systems of notation; he was a student of the Schillinger System, which almost exclusively used graph methods} for describing music. From this perspective, FOLIO was an inspired, yet logical, connection to be made—especially for a Northeasterner who grew up playing and improvising jazz.
December 1952 consists purely of horizontal and vertical lines varying in width, spread out over the page; it is a landmark piece in the history of graphic notation of music. The role of the performer is to interpret the score visually and translate the graphical information into music. In Brown's notes on the work, he even suggests that one consider this 2D space as 3D and imagine moving through it. The other pieces in the collection are not as abstract. According to dates on the scores, Brown wrote December 1952 and then moved back towards forms of notation that contain more specific musical information.