Upcoming Events

Carson Kievman: In Honor of Earle Brown
Thurs., Nov. 14, 2002 3:00 p.m. Free admission
The New School
66 West 12th St.
New York, NY 10011
(212) 229-5600

Earle Brown, a major force in contemporary music since the early 1950s, died on July 2. A leading composer of the American avant-garde for more than fifty years, Brown was associated with the experimental composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff who, with Brown, came to be known as the New York School. Composer Carson Kievman, who was Brown's student and friend of twenty-eight years, currently holds a Naumberg Fellowship at Princeton. In addition to the many chamber and solo instrumental works he has written, he has been dedicated to the creation of new music theater. Co-sponsored by the Institute for Retired Professionals and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School

"In 1980 he (Earle Brown) was at CalArts for one of several visits and oversaw a performance of his Calder Piece, extraordinary pan-sensual music for percussionists beating the bejeesus out of 100 instruments that included a sculpture created by Calder for the occasion. Hearing it contributed to my own decision to move to
California." Alan Rich, The Classical Music Guide

Earle Brown (b. 12/26/1236 - d.7/2/2002) was a major figure in the 20th century, his work has been, not only a major influence on contemporary "classical" music since the 1950s, but has entered historical status with its inclusion in almost every textbook available for use by teachers and professor of the humanities throughout the world. While we are aware that Earle Brown was part of an innovative group known as the New York School, in which composers and artists John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Robert Rauschenberg, and others, shared ideas and inventions, there are general misconceptions about the significance and meaning of brown's work, primarily because of the large shadow cast by the charismatic John Cage, whose books and conceptual ideas were widely disseminated throughout the world. Therefore most people erroneously conclude that Cage was a major influence, both musically and conceptually on Brown.

Brown was already a strong-minded innovative composer when he was invited by Cage to join the New York circle in 1952. And while there are significant differences in their musical output, Earle Brown's musical intent can, perhaps, be more likened to that of Hungarian-born composer György Ligeti. While his background in Jazz and Mathematics did play a role in Brown's musical thinking, like Ligeti, he was strongly influenced by a fundamental rediscovery of Early Music which took place in the 1940s and 1950s while these two men were coming into his own as composers. During this period there was a major increase in both performances of Early Music and scholarly analysis. This activity not only signaled the beginning of a renewed interest in Early Music by performers and scholars, but though the imaginations of Earle Brown and György Ligeti, found its way into the consciousness and experimentation of post-war musical circles and particularly developments in spirituality and multidisciplinary activity in the last few decades.

Of particular interest to Brown, and Ligeti, was the transcendent and structurally ambiguous work of composers such as Guillamue de Machaut (14th century). Earle Brown, through his encounters with this music as well as his close friendship with modern artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, turned the music world on its head, not only through a complete break with the prevailing paradigm of "classical style", but by reinventing musical notation and language altogether with his ground breaking work DECEMBER 52' from FOLIO, which began his own journey into the rediscovery of ambiguity (wrongly labeled as indeterminacy) in music or the antithesis of the classical ideal of structural unity as the ultimate goal in music.