E. Brown, 75: Avant-Garde Composer

Earle Brown, who was a member of the New York School of composers in the 1950s and among the first to think of music as being as formally free as the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and as flexible as a kinetic sculpture by Alexander Calder, died July 2 at his home in Nyack, N.Y. He was 75 and died of cancer.

Brown first came to attention in 1952, when he was invited by John Cage to be a regular part of his circle, which included other young composers Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff and pianist David Tudor. Brown’s first wife, Carolyn, was a founding member of the Cunningham Dance Company in 1953. As a couple, they were active in the Greenwich Village social scene that included the Abstract Expressionist painters, New York School poets and members of the Living Theater.

With a background in jazz and engineering, Earle Brown was an early innovator in graphic notation. In “December 1952,” one of a series of works from 1952-53 grouped together as “Folio I,” he became the first modern composer to attempt a score that eschewed musical notation altogether.

Looking more like a sketch for a Mondrian painting than a musical composition, 31 horizontal and vertical bars of varying length and thickness float in space. It is up to the performer or performers to decide what instrument or instruments will be used and to figure out a way to associate the graphic scheme with pitches and rhythms.

When played as a solo piano piece by Tudor, “December 1952” had an ethereal, floating quality that proved surprisingly seductive. It influenced the subsequent graphic scores of Cage and Feldman, as well as those by such European avant-garde composers as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, who were also seeking to free their music from formal constraints. And although it was Brown’s most radical work, it did set him on the path of exploring what he came to call “open form” music that could be a parallel to the kind of work he admired in the other arts.

“What made me write music the way I wrote it,” he said in 1986, “and still write, is more connected to my experiences as a young artist, influenced by Kenneth Patchen’s poetry and James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and the Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors.” Pollock’s paintings, he also said, looked as he wanted his music to sound.

Born in Lunenburg, Mass., Earle Appleton Brown was drawn to aerodynamics from an early age, an interest that led not only to his enrollment at Northeastern University in 1944 to study engineering and mathematics, but also to his lifelong love of fast cars. The next year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, in which he received his pilot’s license and played trumpet in the Air Corps Orchestra. After his discharge in 1947, he spent three years in Boston studying jazz trumpet and 12-tone writing, also becoming a disciple of Joseph Schillinger’s mathematical approach to composition.

In 1950, Brown married Carolyn Rice, and they moved to Denver, where he taught the Schillinger method. The next year Cage and Merce Cunningham came through, and the Browns immediately hit it off with them. Cage suggested that Earle work with him in New York, and Cunningham invited Carolyn to take his dance classes.

Arriving in New York a year later, the young composer immediately joined Cage on his Project for Music and Magnetic Tape. For six months Brown and Cage sat at the same table splicing tape to create electronic music compositions.

Brown would later parlay this experience into a job as a recording engineer at Capitol Records from 1955 to 1960 and work at Mainstream-Time Records, where over the next dozen years he produced a series of long-playing records that helped document the experimental music scene. He also commissioned paintings for the jacket covers by such emerging artists as Yoko Ono.

In Brown’s music during the 1950s he continually refined his methods, trying to achieve a balance between his compositional control of the material and a sense of freedom in performance.

In one of his finest pieces, “Available Forms,” he produced an open-form score in which performers played written-out material but the conductor decided during performance when they would play.

In 1964, Brown created “Available Forms II” for the New York Philharmonic and two conductors, himself and Leonard Bernstein. In these pieces, the composer joined his instincts as an improvising jazz musician with an engineer’s penchant for precision and his passion for artistic adventure into genuinely distinctive music.

In 1963, Brown had collaborated with the creators of the visual art that he admired most. For the percussion quartet, “Calder Piece,” he asked the sculptor to build a mobile, “Chef d’Orchestre,” which would be a sort of conductor, its movements indicating for the percussionist what and when to play. Delighted to make a sculpture for this purpose, Calder told the composer, “You can’t just go around banging on someone else’s mobile.”

Brown composed steadily but slowly during the remaining decades of his life, ever further refining his approach to open forms. His first marriage having ended in divorce, he wed Susan Sollins, an art curator, in 1972. He taught regularly around the world, including a stint as a composer in residence at the California Institute of the Arts from 1973 to 1985. From 1984 to 1989, he served as director of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University and of the Fromm Weeks of New Music at Aspen, Colo.

Brown’s late pieces did not have the impact of his earlier works, as the composer had become somewhat marginalized by the new music scene. But he never lost his large following in Europe, especially Germany. After the deaths of Feldman in 1988, Cage in 1992 and Tudor in 1996, Brown was much in demand for panels and guest appearances as one of the two remaining members of the New York School, along with Wolff.

But in such late pieces as “Tracking Pierrot” for chamber ensemble and “Summer Suite ‘95” for piano, Brown achieved a consolidation of his jazz roots with his experimental practice that generated a new lyrical impulse. “I certainly have never been embarrassed by writing a beautiful melody, a very lyrical passage or what I consider a beautiful chord progression,” he said in 1995. Even so, he never lost his collaborative spirit in wanting his music to soar as it could only through an interaction between composer and performers.

Among Brown’s honors were a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory and a “Letter of Distinction” from the American Music Center.