Arcana is excited to perform works by Earle Brown celebrating his centenary this year.

more info coming soon

PROGRAM

Four Systems (1954)

December 1952 from Folio I (1952)

One Through Five from Folio II (1970)

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Earle Brown (1926–2002) was an American experimental composer whose works in graphic notation and open form were seminal to the history of postwar music. He explored the limits of traditional staff notation to the point of abstraction in Folio and 4 Systems (1952–54) and prompted performers to make their own determinations about pitch, time, intensity, timbre and attack—an approach that contrasted sharply with the composer-controlled treatment of sound implicit in serialism and total organization. Brown used graphic notation sparingly after 1960 when he began writing large-scale open form works for orchestra. He had composed 25 Pages (1953) for piano in open form, but to achieve collective mobility among 18 musicians and conductor in Available Forms 1 (1961), and 98 musicians and 2 conductors in Available Forms 2 (1962), Brown wrote predominantly through-composed events and devised a cueing system for conductors to signal in-performance decisions about the order and phrasing of these events. This cueing system appears in over a dozen open form works across his career. Brown described his sound ideal as spontaneous, warm and responsive to the moment. Unbeholden to the stylistic boundaries that dictated new music during his time, Brown embraced a wide range of influences including jazz improvisation, twelve-tone technique, the Schillinger system, the indeterminacy of his New York School colleagues (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff), electroacoustics, action painting, collage and the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder.