Conversation with Earle Brown about Constructivism and Schillinger's System of Musical Composition

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Elena Dubinets' article ‘Between Mobility and Stability: Earle Brown's Compositional Process’ was published in the June/August 2007 issue of Contemporary Music Review. In a note to the title, Dr Dubinets acknowledged the use of the following telephone interview, conducted by this author with Earle Brown on 24 March 1996, as the foundation of her research. Brown studied and used aspects of Joseph Schillinger's system of musical composition throughout his career of some fifty years. He graduated from Schillinger House, later known as the Berklee College of Music, in Boston in 1950, and he was certified as a Schillinger instructor. Brown was a composer who was influenced by the visual arts, and he interpreted Schillinger's emphasis on pre-compositional planning as being influenced by Russian Constructivism, an early 1920s artistic practice. This author contacted the composer to ask him about a statement he had made in the liner notes of his 1962 album Feldman/Brown, by Time Records, in which he wrote ‘… if nothing else, [the Schillinger system] exposes one to an extremely iconoclastic, mathematically analytic, constructivist point of view.’ This interview is his explanation of the connections Brown saw between Schillinger's system and the Constructivist movement and how these connections affected his work.