‘What needs to be done’

Abstract

Earle Brown's music suggests a return to the beginnings of modernity within the American experience, how composers came to terms with the ‘events’, the innovations of the 1950s. Jackson Pollock and the concept of flatness was one such ‘event’, but also the ‘unknown’, the indeterminate, ‘voids’ and ‘spaces’, mobile and static, as from Alexander Calder's work. In this article the discussion is limited simply to paradigms and contexts that the author found in early Brown, where his creativity began, and only two of his works, placed in a more philosophical context, speaking about the ‘working through’ of an idea and where it may have originated.

Keywords:

• City
• Context
• Duration
• Ethics
• Graphics
• Libidinal
• Physicality
• Place
• Process
• Shelf-Life
• Space
• Void

Notes

[1] Rhizome is a figurative term used to describe non-hierarchical networks of all kinds. ‘A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers … The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 6 – 7).

[2] Paul Virilio believes that whoever controls speed also controls time, place and geography, as in situations of war, the conquering of continents or markets, and so on (Virilio, 1998).