liner notes:

Earle Brown — Chamber Music

Folio, a collection of seven pieces written between October 1952 and March 1953, is historically Earle Brown’s most striking work. It was done after, at John Cage’s suggestion, coming to New York where he joined Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and myself. Though rather different in our particular ways, we were associated by our overall difference from the other music being done in the United States at the time, by our interest in and contacts with the then emerging European avant-garde, especially Boulez and Stockhausen, as well as Edgar Varèse, by our admiration of the music of Webern and by our usually being performed together, in many cases by David Tudor and in concerts organised by John Cage.

Five of Folio’s pieces call for the use of a piano — because of Tudor; two have open instrumentation — because access to performers at that time was very limited. Later Brown welcomed open instrumentation for the whole set, as on this recording. Compositionally the music is a mix that was to continue throughout Brown’s work: material based on serial or twelve-tone pitch relations with melodic gestures and sometimes textures akin to Webern and, the conceptual origin of Brown’s later fluid and mobile formal procedures, the introduction of the most radical graphic notations to be devised up to that time. Compared with Cage, Feldman and myself, Brown seemed then both more traditionally based, with the twelve-tone pitch material, and with the graphic scores, more extreme (Feldman’s earlier graph notated pieces are not so much ‘graphic’ — that is, images that do not in themselves contain a specific method or logic for their sonic realization — as another kind of musical notation.).

There was also in Brown’s background jazz, which he had played and in which at least for a while into the fifties he had maintained an active interest, and mathematics, which he had studied (along with engineering) and which may have been what led him to study and for a time to teach the methods of Joseph Schillinger. Schillinger had worked out a system of arithmetical formulas for composing music and for analyzing it, also coordinating it with the visual arts. (Surprisingly Schillinger’s most notable pupils were popular musicians like George Gershwin and Glenn Miller.) Whether or not Schillinger’s comprehensive schemes including music and art were involved, Brown also came to New York already familiar with and very much taken by the work of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock.

The Folio pieces include a range of indeterminate or, as Brown would later identify them, mobile elements. October 1952 is conventionally notated except for the absence of bar lines, rests and tempo indication, hence an unspecified or absent feeling of pulse, and movement through time is chosen and realised directly in performance, though individual rhythmic configurations (indications of shorter and longer sounds) are given and identify melodic gestures. November 1952 locates 33 notations of specified duration (quarter notes, dotted eighths, etc.) and dynamics over the space of a fifty-line stave. Instructions specify only that the stave grid be read so as to accommodate the pitch range of whatever instrument is playing. Movement through time, overall time of the piece, the sequence in which notes are played and their possible vertical alignment (simultaneous playing) are left open, that is, melodic gestures are not defined. Since the fifty-line stave implies a hundred pitches (notes are on or above lines), which is already a dozen more than a piano keyboard, not to mention the range of, say, a flute or trumpet, the reading of the notes will need otherwise unspecified procedures to make pitch choices possible.

December 1952 is visually the famous one: 31 horizontal and vertical lines of varying thickness (one is a small square), distributed freely over a space of more or less 11 x 17 inches. Some say the visual impression suggests Mondrian. One might think also of Malevich. But Brown refused to see the score as anything other than a score. It is visually elegant but intended simply to be functional musically. Unlike any painting it might recall, it neither has nor implies a frame, and there’s no visual tension between surface and possible depth (even though Brown imagined a three-dimensional scheme for the resulting sound). The notation indicates a musical reading that floats in time. It is in fact a variation of November 1952 with the grid lines left out and the shapes pointing to duration, density and degrees of loud and soft. Both pieces have about the same number of notations (33 and 31), to be read in any sequence, direction and combination. The instructions for December 1952 do suggest that the performer(s) not prepare the details of the realization of the score before the moment of actual performance. They make explicit the potential for improvisation within the score’s terms.

The next two pieces, identified only by their metronome markings, are like October 1952 without bar lines or rests indicated but otherwise fully notated in the conventional way, including a tempo. Both, like November 1952 and 1953 have continually changing dynamics for almost all individual sounds (a practice of the European avant-garde of the early 1950s, partially picked up in the U.S.).

Trio for Five Dancers (June 1953) looks like an occasional piece. Brown describes it as a transcription of spatial notations of a dance by Carolyn Brown. It’s like a performance realized as a composition, using an external given as its notation. 1953 (these dates are strictly speaking not titles but signatures at the bottom of the scores, as though marking diary entries) is a page that introduces on paired staves, as though for keyboard, what Brown called time notation, durations indicated not by the usual notational symbols (that are usually further ordered into metrical shapes with an underlying pulse) but, both more directly and more ambiguously, by the lengths of extended lines, that is, as if note heads are extended visibly for the length of their duration. A virtue of this notation (which was to be widely adopted by others) is that it makes especially clear the relations of individual sounds, or sound masses, to one another, the ways and extent they relate vertically. Evolving sound complexes are represented transparently, and so may be thought of and played in those terms rather than according to a notational image that is linear or represents the counterpoint of lines. The notation can be read either end up (the way December 1952 can be read from any of its four sides), a literal, visual application of the common musical practice of inversion. In addition staves may be read freely in either treble or bass clef, which allows the unpredictable possibility of displacing Brown’s usual chromatic (twelve tone) pitch patterns.

These innovations carry over to Twenty-Five Pages, music for one to twenty five pianos from 1953, for which 1953 was a preliminary study, and to Four Systems. (The idea of a rhythmic or durational notation represented by location in space on the score page did first appear in Cage’s Music for Changes in 1951, but to supplement a conventional rhythmic notation that had become too complex to be normally manageable. In the cycle Music for Piano in 1953 Cage simply notates the entrance of a sound, without further specification, by its location in space.) Four Systems uses the December 1953 notation, but much more densely, the piece originally made as a birthday present for David Tudor and evidently looking to his virtuosity.

Corroboree comes ten years after Four Systems in1964, a German commission (Radio Bremen), dedicated to the Kontarsky brothers, three pianists specializing in new music, mostly European (Stockhausen’s Mantra was written for Aloys and Alfons). By the late 1950s Brown had become well established in Europe independently of the interest there in, and very mixed reactions to, Cage. This was due in part to sympathetic personal relationships with European musicians, and perhaps because of the basis of some of Brown’s material in serial procedures, the only ones admitted as viable by the European avant-garde at the time. The title Corroboree, though, refers to Australian Aborigine celebrational dancing or ‘any large or noisy celebration.’ Pitch is for the most part specifically notated, and sometimes approximately, as part of visually represented sound gestures for clusters, or plucking and muting of the piano strings. The details of rhythmic articulations are free, as is the distribution of sounds over approximately fixed time-frames. Each pianist proceeds independently within those frames (so there is no fixed score). Sometimes dynamics are free as well. Amidst these flexibilities the players are urged ta make their performing choices with an ear to one another, that is, when improvising an aspect of the music, to do so as an ensemble.

The structure of this piece is a scaffolding of twelve parts, time-frames of from 30 to 120 seconds, each frame characterized by the kind or kinds of material appearing in it. There are eight such kinds, e.g. forearm clusters, muted strings, strings plucked with fingernail, single keyboard notes, etc. There are a few suggestions of overall structural shaping. Two of the twelve time-frames are left open for the players to choose any material from any where else in the piece, a kind of fragmented free recapitulation or anticipations. One of these frames follows after the piece’s first frame, the other precedes the last. The last frame includes material repeated exactly from the first and eighth frames. Generally, though, the form of the piece is shaped by the ongoing variation and distribution of its material, over varying segments of time, in various combinations and juxtapositions. The continuous rearrangement of a limited set of materials recalls the mobiles of Calder. And there are analogies to Pollock. Brown speaks of his materials as colors; the gestures of the sounds, and sometimes their appearance on the score, are like brushstrokes and regulated dripping of paint. Brown had spoken of wanting to compose with the directness and immediacy of a performing improviser (performing as in jazz, with some formal framework), with the immediacy, one might also say, of a painter putting paint to canvas. This analogy to painting may be distinguished from one made for Feldman. Brown’s gestures are like the direct application of paint, in particular strokes, lines and. loops, overlaid and intertwining, as in Pollock. For Feldman gesture is not the main thing. What really matters is a sustained feeling of surface, apparently flat yet generating a kind of glow, as in Rothko or some of Guston.

Tracking Pierrot (1992) is for a chamber ensemble like Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) — flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello and, instead of voice, percussion (marimba and vibraphone). There are procedures like those of Corroboree. Eight categories of material are disposed over eleven pages of score, each page a structural unit or frame. The time frames, though, are now determined not by clock time but fluidly, by the many improvised choices of a conductor who may also specify dynamics, tempo and which subdivisions of the ensemble play and in what combinations. Much of the material is repeatable, partly at the choice of the performers and overridingly by the free determinations of the conductor. This role for conductor as a kind of active performer, making of a piece its particular one-time realization at any given performance, was devised first by Brown in 1961 for the orchestra pieces Available Forms 1 & 2 (the latter using two conductors, making a kind of improvisation duo). In Tracking Pierrot the return of previously heard material is more transparent than in Corroboree. The piece begins and ends with the same patch of material, which is unlike anything else in the piece. Another distinctive kind of material, quiet, noise like non-specifically pitched sounds, appears after the first two pages of the piece and before the last two. The piece also has, unusually for Brown, an assortment of referential items making collage like appearances. The opening and closing material, delicate and transparent, is a hommage to Morton Feldman. A three-times recurring sequence of pairs of overlaid dominant seventh chords (a chord that’s a cliché of pop music), played on the piano, follows a procedure worked out by Schillinger. And a sequence of lush chords played by the winds and strings refers to Messiaen (whose harmonies are felt by some to be ‘in unbelievably bad taste’). One may recall that Schoenberg’ s Pierrot was itself an odd mix of avant-garde writing and suggestions of Berlin cabaret.

The materials of Earle Brown’s music are close to what has become one of the standard languages of a great deal of contemporary music since the 1970s. But the music itself maintains its originary status and persists in its sense of freedom and a distinctive lightness and transparency. And there’s always a fine sense of instrumental sonority and a feeling for formal procedures whose particular realizations — a given performance — convey both their particularity and the potential of their mobility — the range of their possible realizations. Not quite this but something surely related is indicated by what Feldman once wrote: “‘The late Edgar Varèse once spoke about the time sound needs in order to speak. Very few composers have understood this thought. No one has understood it better than Earle Brown.”

Christian Wolff © 2003

Some Notes on Folio and Four Systems

Folio in this recording was approached as an ensemble version. Shortly before Earle Brown’s death in July 2002 I spoke with him about the various approaches to the pieces and he was very enthusiastic about the potentiality of ‘arranging’ Folio in a variety of manners.

October 52: This exists in two versions here: first with marimba, piano, harp, and secondly harp and string trio. Both make different use of phrasing and rubato etc., as implied by the notation.

November 52: This also exists in two versions. Both attempt to make use of each note – or phrase – as a mobile event operating within different speeds and interactions with their immediate environment. The first makes use of pianos and harp halfway through. This is omitted in the second version, which also attempts to ‘colour’ the notes derived from the score a little more.

MM=87 is, in this version, for harp rather than piano (its original designation) and given pedal changes etc., it is not all played at the given tempo but, using a free rubato, at times slightly more slowly.

M=135 for piano, following the original indication on the score (which also suggests the possibility of multiple pianos).

December 1952 is perhaps the most famous (and difficult) of the pieces in the set. This present version was treated freely, with (as the notes to the score suggest), simply a pre-set time limit. Therefore, the vertical or horizontal positioning and reading of the score, the speed and direction of moving through the material, the decoding of the graphic signs, etc. were at the discretion of the individual performers.

1953: On the present disc this appears as three versions: version 1: solo piano, version 2: solo harp (inverting the page): version 3 for 2 pianos and harp simultaneously.

Trio for 5 Dancers : This is largely based on Earle Brown’s orchestration for the Dal Niente 2 concert at the Union Chapel in 1999. It has been slightly adapted to make use of the particular selection of instruments here, and also makes use of unconventional percussion including glass bowls, bowed vibraphone etc. We attempted to approach it whereby the sounds became – to borrow from Feldman – almost ‘sourceless’.

Four Systems was realized by two players: Simon Allen and myself. It was agreed to approach it as sonically diverse and multi timbral, drawing on clarinets, bass clarinets, harmonicas, bass harmonicas, glass harmonica, water phone, percussion, found sounds, ocarina, whistles, stylophone, and home-made stringed instruments. We followed strictly register-placement and duration, and proceeded more freely with timbre, dynamics and articulation. The thickness of a given line was either a cluster or variable pitch articulation within a given registral band. The score also reminded us of a plan for tape splicing (as Earle Brown had been involved with the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape from 1952-55 with John Cage) – hence the hard edits that appear here and there and which bring attention to this realization as a ‘construction’ rather than performance. This is most evident in the 3rd system, where the instrumental character of the sounds is less apparent. The approach to realizing this score was rather like an improvisation in extreme slow motion.

David Ryan © 2003

Dal Niente Projects was formed by David Ryan and Ross Loraine in 1998 in order to establish quality performances for modernist and experimental works, and to provide a wider context for their understanding and appreciation. It functions as a concert series drawing on flexible instrumental ensembles and soloists for specific events and recordings, and aims to bring together music from diverse traditions and outlooks within both the experimental and modernist milieu. Concerts have included: Dal Niente 1: Gyorgy Kurtag, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Helmut Lachenmann, at Kings College, London; Dal Niente 2 : Earle Brown, with the composer conducting, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Harrison Birtwistle, at the Union Chapel, London. Soundings at the Cochrane Theatre, London: John Cage: Europera no. 5, and works by Saariaho, Donatoni, Evangelisti, Ferneyhough, Alvarez, improvisations by Such and others. As part of Japan 2001: Japan and the Experimental Tradition: Works by Feldman, Kondo, Takemitsu, Cage, Takahashi, Stockhausen, at the Cochrane Theatre, London. Dal Niente 3 is proposed for 2003 and will examine works by Luigi Nono and composers associated with the Rome Nuova Consonanza group. Dal Niente Projects draws on a pool of outstanding performers and soloists including, Simon Allen, Paul Bevan, Tania Chen, Robert Coleridge, Bridget Carey, Rhodri Davies, Francesca Hanley, Nicolas Hodges, Mieko Kanno, Lore Lixenberg, Anton Lukoszevieze, Zoe Martlew, Manon Morris, Fiona Ritchie, Nancy Ruffer, Hilary Sturt, Andrew Sparling and John Tilbury.

Simon Allen — vibraphone, marimba, percussion (1,2,6,7,9,11)
harmonicas, various sound-producing media (11)
Peter Bevan — trombone (2, 6, 7 ,9)
Bridget Carey — viola (2, 5, 6, 7 ,9)
Tania Chen — piano (2, 4, 6, 8,10)
Robert Coleridge — piano (1, 2 ,6, 8, 9)
Francesca Hanley — flute (2, 6 ,7, 9)
Nicolas Hodges — piano (10,12)
Mieko Kanno — violin (2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12)
Lore Lixenburg — voice (2 ,7, 9)
Zoe Martlew — cello (2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12)
Mannon Morris — harp (1,2 ,3 ,5, 6, ,8, 9)
Fiona Ritchie — vibraphone, marimba (12)
David Ryan — clarinet, bass clarinet (11)
Nancy Ruffer — flute (12)
Andrew Sparling clarinet, bass clarinet (2, 6, 7, 9,12)
John Tilbury — piano (10)
Earle Brown — conductor (12)

This CD was made possible by generous support from Dr. Mick Peake and Chelsea College of Art and Design.