Brown, Earle

▪ 2003

      American composer (b. Dec. 26, 1926, Lunenburg, Mass.—d. July 2, 2002, Rye, N.Y.), used graphic notation to convey the sense of the passage of sounds through time and open form to give musicians latitude in the performance of a work. His music was particularly influential among European composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki. Brown briefly studied mathematics and engineering in the mid-1940s, but he was also interested in the contemporary arts, including painting and sculpture, and played jazz trumpet. From 1946 to 1950 he studied at the Schillinger House (now Berklee College) of Music in Boston. He then became associated with the so-called New York school, which included John Cage and other avant-garde composers, and in 1953 he contributed Octet I, a work for eight loudspeakers reproducing musical sounds and noise, to Cage's “Project for Music for Magnetic Tape.” The score for Brown's December 1952 showed the influence of Cage's ideas on indeterminacy. In Twenty-five Pages (1953), the performers arranged the pages of the score in any order, and in the two orchestral works Available Forms I (1961) and Available Forms II (1961–62), the conductor ordered the sections at his own discretion. Calder Piece (1963–66), for percussion, was written to be performed on a sculpture especially created by Alexander Calder. Brown's music eventually came to incorporate a balance between open form and fixed notation, as in Tracking Pierrot (1992), one of his better-known later works. Throughout his career he held a number of teaching appointments, among them a chair in composition in 1968–73 at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Md. From 1960 to 1973 he chose repertory for recording on the Time-Mainstream label, and from 1984 to 1989 he was president of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Among his many honours was a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965–66.

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▪ American composer

in full  Earle Appleton Brown 

born December 26, 1926, Lunenburg, Massachusetts, U.S.

died July 2, 2002, Rye, New York

      one of the leading American composers of avant-garde music, best known for his development of graphic notation and the open-form system of composition.

      Brown had been trained in engineering and mathematics before he began to study music theory and composition. In the early 1950s he met the experimental composer John Cage (Cage, John), who strongly influenced Brown's music. In 1952 Brown developed a system of graphic notation, the use of nontraditional notational syllables across a writing surface in such a way that they are analogous to the passage of music through time. In 1953 he further put forth an open-form technique of composition, such that the conductor or performer determines the sequence of a group of musical units. Brown's first open-form composition, Twenty-five Pages (1953) for 1–25 pianists, has a score of 25 pages that are to be arranged in a sequence chosen by the performer(s). Most of Brown's later work further developed graphic notation and open form.

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