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Abstract
This article offers an integrated look at Earle Brown's oeuvre and investigates it by first placing it within the larger context of the twentieth-century avant-garde through the application of Jean Weisgerber's definition of the movement, and then by analysing its formal, notational and textual aspects. Furthermore, it applies Umberto Eco's concept of the open vs. the closed work to the analysis of Brown's compositional poetics. In addition, the author offers his thoughts on the double—Promethean and Epimethean—nature (‘split personality’) of the avant-garde as well as on the essential aspects of modern musical notations and forms.
Acknowledgements
My special thanks go to my friend Dan Albertson, through whose encouragement I decided to write this article during the hardest time of my life so far. I am infinitely grateful to the distinguished Canadian composer (and also my friend), Reinhard von Berg, for his very thorough reading of the text.
Notes
[1] Cf. the interview by John Yaffé with Earle Brown, elsewhere in this issue.
[2]‘There was, of course, no New York School. Certainly no walls, no formulated ideologies, no single-minded goals, not even a common language within their work. What they shared, however temporarily, was an identity, a radical perspective, pervasive interest approached from various personal points of view, an intersection of energy. As Morton Feldman said of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the same period, “The single thing that made it a school was a powerful, mysterious aesthetic. That is, they all searched within their own sensibilities for those energies, for everything connected with the painting”’ (Lange, Citation1992).
[3] To many artists and art philosophers living in the Soviet-controlled Central and Eastern Europe before (and after!) 1989, these often radical leftist, or ultra-leftist, obsessions and claims of their supposed colleagues such as Cornelius Cardew, Luigi Nono, Howard Skempton, Christian Wolff, and Isang Yun seemed outlandish and irresponsible. As those of a US citizen, Wolff's pro-Communist sympathies were particularly scorned and mocked, considered a clear sign of mental derangement, which this writer witnessed on numerous occasions. It is safe to say that Nono's popularity there—even before the fall of Communism around 1989—increased dramatically after his break-up with the Italian Communists. As a victim of the South Korean regime, Yun occupied a special position in Germany, hence his relatively high reputation there. Cardew, Skempton, Wolff, and others of the kind are still practically personae non gratae in the former Eastern Bloc.
[4] To quote Morton Feldman: ‘I think he's been ripped off more than any of us, in an overt way’ (Nicholls, n.d.).
[5] Cf. Potter (Citation1986, p. 679): ‘Earle Brown's name is invariably mentioned with that of John Cage. … Cage—the senior figure in this group who had already acquired a reputation for his avant-garde activities before the others came to maturity and whose influence was and is acknowledged by all three [Potter here excludes David Tudor] of his younger colleagues—has become independently famous for his philosophy and practice of chance, among much else. The others, however, have too often been seen as simply labouring in his shadow. And even when their individually pioneering ideas receive mention—in Brown's case, for example, the early contributions he made to the notational practices now generally known as “proportional notation” and “open form”—the blanket term “indeterminacy” tends to obscure the real differences of aesthetic and technique that separate them’.
[6]That woman was the outstanding Schaeffer student Barbara Buczek (1940 – 1993), whose mature, highly complex scores predate those of Brian Ferneyhough, and offer equally fascinating and convincing textural and timbral propositions. Her oeuvre, more than any other of the prematurely deceased composers perhaps, merits rediscovery and dissemination. But in her case, the author's subjective, enthusiastic eagerness to promote his own student at the expense of other women composers, also fully deserving inclusion in his book, led him astray this time.
[7] The title is quite misleading as this hardcover book, running to over 380 pages of small print, is loaded with information. Maybe Schaeffer referred to its physical dimensions: 13 × 20 cm?
[8] For the sake of information: between 1968 and 1973, he held the W. Alton Jones chair of composition and was composer-in-residence at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. In 1970, he received an honorary doctorate from that institution. He taught at several prestigious schools: the State University of New York at Buffalo, CalArts and Yale University among them. In 1965 – 1966, he held a Guggenheim Fellowship. His orchestral work Cross Sections and Color Fields was written on commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation and in 1998, he collected the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art's John Cage Award for Music.
[9] All in all, there are four texts bearing any significance, which will be some of those mentioned in the course of this argument—three articles appearing in Perspectives of New Music, Woodwind Magazine and The Musical Times; and an interview in a collection published by Oxford University Press.
[10] Cf. Cardew (Citation1964, p. 674), where he says in conclusion: ‘Yes, the Darmstadt Summer School has become an excellent Academy, and problems like Notation or Electronic Sound are competently handled in a rather academic way. What has got lost is the vital interest in new and serious experimental music’.
[11] Bürger's elegant and influential discussion is confined, and this is perhaps its main point of contention, to pre-selected avant-garde movements such as the post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde, Dadaism and early Surrealism. Cf. Scheunemann (Citation2000, pp. 8 – 11).
[12]‘First of all, one should remember that Russian futurism is intrinsically heterogeneous to the extent one can speak of two futurisms: pre- and post-revolutionary. In the early declarations and manifestoes of Russian futurists, one can hardly find any trace of overt and direct interest in technology and science. Unlike their Italian counterparts, they almost ignored the issue’ (Możejko, Citation1993). Cf. Folejewski (Citation1980). Says Folejewski: ‘Italian artists went as far as announcing that the machine should be adored as superior to man. But for the majority of the Russians these things remained rather alien…. In this respect the attitude of many 20th century Russian artists was no different than that of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and other 19th century men. The country poet [Y]esenin lamented the horse chased by the railway engine; the futurist Khlebnikov presented an apocalyptic vision of a monstrous mechanical bird…. Mayakovsky was one of the very few Russian poets for whom not only was the city street more familiar ground than a meadow, but also—in his own words—he “saw electricity in an electric iron” while Pasternak saw it “in the lightning in the sky”’ (p. 8).
[13]‘I have always been very sensitive’[said Brown]‘to all the other arts. And for some reason more so than a lot of other composers. I have been very influencable by paintings, sculpture, literature, etc.; basically the nature of compositional process!’ (Dufallo, Citation1989, p. 117).
[14] Not many people are aware that it was Brown who may well have initiated the practice of collective improvisation in New Music, using the December 1952 score as a basis. It was done by a group of twenty-three musicians of the Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble under Brown's direction at Darmstadt in 1964. Cf. Brown, Citation1970a.
[15] As Brown once said: ‘Neither Cage nor Feldman ever had, to this day, any interest in jazz. But my background in the spontaneous creation of music with other people, without scores, was very important; I would not have been able to make Folio and graphic scores and collective improvisational scores and a notation which allowed flexibility in 1952 if I had not had the experience of trusting musicians’ (Dufallo, Citation1989, p. 107).
[16]‘I've always considered my music romantic. The early piano pieces are very severe, but most of my music since then I have always thought to be very romantic. … It has a lot of color in it and delicacy, and it basically has a long gesture. The open-form pieces produce a sort of continuity which is not typical of what you might call romantic continuity; but from moment to moment I always think that … I guess any composer thinks that his music is beautiful. And I do think it is beautiful and romantic. I don't write ugly music, and I don't write “angst-full” music. I have never been wildly involved in middle European angst or expressing terror’ (Dufallo, Citation1989, pp. 113 – 114).
[17] Cf. The Scambi Project, http://www.scambi.mdx.ac.uk/
[18] Cf., for instance, Michael Daugherty's renditions of November 1952, December 1952 and Four Systems involving piano, computer and electronics, available on Earle Brown: Collected Early Works (CRI).
[19] The quote within DeLio's text is from Cardew (Citation1971, p. XV).