After graduating from Stanford in 1984, I was fortunate to get two big breaks from Earle Brown. I met Earle for the first time at the 1985 BMI Student Composer Awards, where to my surprise he was on the jury that year. I was 24 and had studied his works for many years. If it had not been for Earle, I would not have been invited there.
The piece that got his attention was Pentateuch, a grand divisi orchestral work in quarter-tones, including three choral groups and soprano solo with strong hints of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Pentateuch was used to fulfill the requirements for my masters thesis. Because of its unwieldy and impractical size (back then, only blueprint shops could make copies of oversize paper and reductions were prohibitively expensive) Earle was the only judge who took the time to open it up and give it a look. ‘I had to fight for your score,’ he told me. ‘No one else wanted to look at it.’ Earle did not mind ‘rolling up his sleeves,’ so to speak. It was serendipity that he was a judge that year. My life changed!
Excerpt from Pentateuch (1983-84)
Shortly after meeting Earle, I received my first commission. Earle presided over the Fromm Music Foundation and asked me to write a piece for sinfonietta (one each winds and brass, percussion, piano and string quintet). The piece, called Trailing Vortices, was based on a musical interpretation of photographs of trailing vortices and other flow phenomena in Milton Van Dyke’s An Album of Fluid Motion. I discovered the book while browsing at the Stanford Bookstore. Milton Van Dyke was a Stanford professor in fluid mechanics and even signed the book for me! I spent the good part of 1986 composing the piece. In a sense, Trailing Vortices is a tone poem, however instead of program music with a story line, photographic images of flow phenomena are musically depicted.
Trailing vortices from a rectangular wing (An Album of Fluid Motion, Milton Van Dyke, 1982).
Trailing Vortices was premiered at the Aspen Music Festival in the summer of 1987. A few months later, it was performed at the Gaudeamus Festival by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra with Ernest Bour, conducting. Here is the recording of the live performance at the VARA radio headquarters in Hilversum.
A conductor who was to give the first performance of Trailing Vortices, my Fromm commission from Earle, met with me a few months before the premiere. His first comment was, ‘Your music is nothing like Earle’s’. ‘Uh, huh right should it be?’ I asked. We did not hit it off. ‘Is the selection of a composer for a commission based on if the commissioner feels you cop his style sufficiently, or on a deeper intrinsic value, something one sees or hears below the surface of the notes?’
Trailing Vortices (1986) was premiered at the Aspen Music Festival
Earle could see and hear something that goes to the core structure of sound and the potential of an individual passionate about moving the language of music forward. I have come to realise that it was not mere luck, but instead being at the right place at the right time and with the right score. The stars lined up for Earle and me. I am grateful to have known him.
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
When I went to visit Earle at his home in Rye, we had lunch together with Susan. (This was in 1986 and I presented to Earle my recently completed Fromm commission Trailing Vortices.) She served a delicious homemade soup. Afterward, Earle showed me their art pieces.
It was not so much a collection as a series of masterworks, many of which had been given to him off the floor of the studios of luminaries such as Robert Rauschenberg. He knew many artists early on and they often collaborated. Earle surrounded himself with art.
Earle inspires a constant desire to look outside of music for new ideas, look around, keep your eyes and ears open. Mix it up a bit. Make some soup.
“This elegy is dedicated to the memory of Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and to the memory of his friendship with my late husband, Earle Brown (1926-2002), whose music has been intertwined and juxtaposed here with images of the glorious Combines.” – Susan Sollins-Brown, Executive Director, Art21
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
After receiving the Fromm commission, I was invited to attend Paul Fromm’s 80th birthday celebration. At 25, I was the youngest to receive this commission and one of the last while Mr Fromm was alive. Paul Fromm was a refined gentleman – very old school. He built a successful wine and spirits distribution company in Chicago and supported contemporary music like few have.
A concert and reception was given in honour of his 80th birthday at the University of Chicago. Earle was in Europe. The concert consisted of a few composers from the University of Chicago and elsewhere who had from time to time received Fromm commissions.
After the concert, Mr Fromm was “fêted” in a room next to the concert hall with a blend of peanuts, M&Ms, swill champagne (why not pour one of Fromm’s?), and spongy cake. Mr Fromm was gracious, while Maestro Sir Georg Solti was unable to attend. (I was told he had been invited) I marvelled at the absurdity of it all. (It was bewildering why the Universitiy’s composers and Music Department did not pay tribute to Mr. Fromm with an after-concert birthday reception befitting his lifelong generosity towards their music) From time to time, Earle was invited to teach at various forward-thinking institutions. The University of Chicago was not one of them.
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Bruno Maderna’s legendary recording of Earle Brown’s “Available Forms I (1961)” recorded in 1967
What happens when Available Forms I or II is recorded? A result somewhat like the Calder sculpture that does not move at the Hirshhorn: it takes on a fixed shape in space and time. Listening to a recording of Available Forms I or II, or to any of Earle’s open-form works, many times will elicit an unintended through-line. So, optimally the work should be performed a few times during a concert.
Here is an alternative approach to experiencing this work: with today’s computer technology, a website similar to Earle’s homepage, http://www.earle-brown.org/, could show the score and the listener could click on different sections (that had been recorded by a real orchestra or spliced from existing recordings) and thus act somewhat like a conductor telling the musicians which section to play and when.
(As of this posting on WordPress, Earle Brown’s Novara was recorded by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound. However, it was not recorded for a one-time linear experience. The various sound constellations in the score were recorded separately. These “sound objects” will ultimately be manipulated via a program allowing anyone – and not only a conductor – to “collaborate” with the musicians and composer. An accessible graphic user interface will allow even a novice an interactive experience to shape the ordering of the piece and sculpt the sound in much the same manner one can move a Calder mobile and alter its shape.)
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Score excerpt from Earle Brown’s masterpiece “Available Forms II”
Compose several constellations of sound and then allow the conductor to change the order of the constellations at each performance – a brilliant idea that is at the heart of Available Forms I and II. There is no fixed ‘through-line’; it is different at each performance.
I have been deeply influenced by this approach when I compose. I create small chunks of music or phrases that can be a few measures or many in length. After composing a certain amount of these chunks, I order them in a way that I think works. This approach is not much different from the Available Forms, other than the fact that the material is fixed: I do not have a preconceived notion of an overall arc or through-line.
I would like to try writing a piece someday where the conductor can choose an order of preference, but that would necessitate many performances to assume the desired effect of variation, as in the Available Forms. At the moment, I am not that optimistic.
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Nowadays, many composers write music using sequencers. One of the paradigms of the sequencer is the ‘piano roll’ view, where one can ‘see’ the music in space and time. Lines represent notes and their durations, and pitch is based on a high or low placement. Other parameters, such as loudness, are viewed numerically or with a separate graphic. Earle’s scores in graphic notation from the 1950s saw the future and at the same time built off the past. They also went one step further than the ‘piano roll’ window of modern sequencers, as the thickness of a line could be interpreted to mean loudness, relative to lines that were thinner. His graphic scores allow the musician to interpret a soundworld with freedom and discipline simultaneously.
When I compose, I often view and edit my music in the ‘piano roll’ window (using either LOGIC or Digital Performer) because of its ease in interpreting and editing patterns. (Many years ago, I first discovered this “piano roll” view in the book Sonic Design (1981) by Cogan and Escot and found it to be a revelation. In 1982, I analyzed and graphed in color a movement from Boulez’ Le Marteau sans Maître.)
In the same spirit, Xenakis’ UPIC system, a graphic computer music program from the late 1970s, allows the musician to draw patterns on a tablet that are then interpreted by the computer and converted into sound. In the 1950s, when Earle had these scores performed, there was David Tudor.
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
National Gallery Hirshhorn Museum with giant Alexander Calder Mobile
Earle’s seminal masterpieces Available Forms I and II are based on the mobile form of Alexander Calder’s constantly changing sculptures. So many composers, including many contributing to this journal, were influenced by Earle’s work (Pierre Boulez’ Rituel (in memoriam Bruno Maderna) comes to mind).
Last year, I saw Calder’s gigantic steel mobile hanging at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC and it was not moving! I pointed out the problem to the curator and she said, ‘There is not enough air circulation; the fans are off’ Even Calder needs a conductor.
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Earle had it down. Like all great composers who develop a style all their own, Earle refined and honed his craft and sound throughout his career. I remember him mentioning to me that he was trying to compose in a way as freely, spontaneously and quickly as if he were playing the part live.
Earle played trumpet in jazz bands in his youth. It was as if he were creating an ‘improvisation-in-writing’ in real time. He knew his harmonic and melodic vocabulary inside out and attempted now to write ‘freely’ in the same amount of time that it would take to play the line. Certainly, MIDI and keyboards today are commonplace for such procedures, but Earle heard it and could get it down as quickly as Pablo Picasso could sketch a figure. He was an artist.
PIcasso drawing with light
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Earle was probably one of the finest orchestrators I have ever heard. One needs only to listen to pieces such as Available Forms I and Available FormsII and later works such as Cross Sections and Color Fields and Windsor Jambs: these are lush scores, rich in orchestral textures and bold, brilliant chords. After composing Trailing Vortices (1986), my Fromm commission, I visited New York City.
I showed it first to a composer of some renown – with a Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award and the Metropolitan Opera in his pedigree – and he correctly identified a problem in the work but only offered criticism (I am grateful that he pointed it out). A low oboe line that appeared throughout would not blend softly as desired, but would instead stick out like a sore thumb.
The part could not simply be bumped up an octave, as it was part of a unison chromatic pattern that was integrally staggered with the ensemble. I left the meeting with one thought, ‘How can I fix this part without wrecking the whole piece?’
The next day, I met with Earle at his home and showed him these problematic sections. He took one look at the score and said, ‘Oh, that’s no problem, just give those lines to the English horn!’ (The result was that it sounded great. Thank you, Earle!)
Originally published in: “Earle Brown: From Motets to Mathematics” Contemporary Music Review, Volume 26, Issue 3 & 4 June 2007 , pages 371 – 375
Music, Polyphony and Polyrhythm 