Between Mobility and Stability: Earle Brown's Compositional Process1

Abstract

Earle Brown's approach to the opposing problems of the exactness and randomness in a musical composition was pioneering and unorthodox. As the article makes clear from comparing Brown's aleatory methods with those of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutosławski, and other masters of aleatory music, Brown was in between different directions of aleatory music, and the matter that was behind his ideas about how to organise the musical whole was the problem of balancing between control and flexibility, between mobility and stability. Specifically, Brown's approach to aleatory music was at the staggering intersection between logic and the irrational—in particular, between serial and indeterminate music. Brown never rigorously followed either serialist or aleatory methods in their entirety; however, a mathematical approach and pre-composing structural planning were essential for his compositional process, regardless of the degree of visible freedom and spontaneity his scores provided. The composer carefully and deliberately pre-considered all aspects of the final realisation of the score, and it helped him implement his main compositional tasks that led to multiple performance options. Brown was among the first graduates of the Schillinger House in Boston (later known as the Berklee College of Music). Throughout his life, Brown used Schillinger's musical system as a yardstick to measure his own musical developments and to evaluate the surrounding contemporary musical scene. Using the Schillinger methods of pre-planning and of mathematical calculations for the major music parameters and then allowing the performers to reconfigure the pre-composed materials, Brown was able to create his own ‘sound’, full of shimmering beauty, organic cohesiveness and paradoxical flexibility. The article analyses some of Brown's pre-compositional planning based on Schillinger's principles and also examines Brown's understanding of his primacy in creating open forms.