Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 26, Nos. 3/4, June/August 2007, pp. 409 – 426

Between Mobility and Stability: Earle

Brown’s Compositional Process1
Elena Dubinets

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.

Keywords: Aleatory; Form; Graphic; Indeterminate; Mobile; Notation; Open; Schillinger

System; Serial; Time

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/07494460701414405
410 E. Dubinets
More than half a century after aleatory music was introduced into the lexicon of
contemporary art, it has become clear that Earle Brown’s approach to the opposing
problems of the exactness and randomness in a musical composition was pioneering
and unorthodox. During the period when Brown was creating his works, several
important trends in music had developed.
One of the main characteristics of the second half of the past century was
inundation with sounds, both musical and non-musical. Music was ‘dissolved’ into
the surrounding visual and sensory phenomena and entered everyday life. Radio,
television and sound recording technologies have turned music into mass art and, in
a way, devalued it. A person absorbed into this new ‘music-like’ world would thus
perceive all of his aural surroundings as a kind of music, regardless of the sources of
the sounds. It is on this principle that such theories as Pierre Schaeffer’s musique
concrète and John Cage’s chance music, which were developing at the time of Brown’s
formative years, were built.
The concept of a piece of art within this musicalised world thus takes on a new
significance: ‘piece’ now stands for a certain musical whole, not necessarily performed
in an acoustic venue and possessing a structure that depends not only on the com-
poser’s will, but also on the performer’s imagination. In the second half of the
twentieth century, not only the composer, but also the performer and even the listener,
became involved in the process of creating a piece of art. There are often no specific
indications in the scores regarding the performing cast or duration of the
piece, moments of sound attacks, and so on. What kind of piece will emerge
depends on the will of the conductor and of each of the performers. The result of such
quasi-improvisational performance can be described only as a conditionally finished
piece of art.
A similar situation exists in any folk art, when people know only the main idea,
some specific features and character of the piece, but not the exact pitches and
durations of the resulting sounds. While a traditional piece of art is characterised as a
whole by inner completeness and value, in contemporary music a piece is often
described as an ‘open form’, ‘event’ or ‘action’. It is important to note that most of
these words first came into the musical lexicon from the scores of Earle Brown, along
with some compositional and notational ideas.
The usage of the term ‘notation’ in modern music theory has been extended.2
Presently, notation has become a generic graphical coding of a composer’s subjective
ideas and other musical information. Notation can be called a visual representation
of the composer’s ideas, because it is directly connected with the methods of
composition used in a piece. Today, notation symbolically reflects not only the sound
form of the composition, but also the entire compositional methodology and the
process of its acoustical realisation.
The correlation between notation and compositional techniques is a major issue in
a contemporary theory of music—both in composition and in performance.
Composers must make their own decisions about how to notate their musical
thoughts so the performer and listener might adequately interpret them.
 Contemporary Music Review 411
Compositional techniques and the ways they are notated cannot, of course, directly
depend on each other: experimentation in musical notation accompanies innovations
in compositional techniques, as the function of the notation is to reflect and
represent these innovations. On the other hand, in contemporary music, there is
space for development in the opposite direction: notation itself can create
opportunities for compositional innovations. Notation thus becomes an act of
composition, which allows composers to make unprecedented discoveries and
contribute their inventions to compositional techniques.
A study of a contemporary piece, and especially of Earle Brown’s compositions,
requires taking into account all aspects of its notation, and the latter often throw
light on the sources of the composer’s intention, style, creative method,
compositional techniques, and aesthetics. Reconstruction of the compositional
process in order to understand its origins within the compositional and
psychological process is always interesting and revealing. As is well known, Earle
Brown invented at least three new types of notation which have become crucial for
the development of contemporary composition. All three (they will be briefly
discussed later) were created within a single year because the composer needed to
implement a change in his compositional aesthetics and to search for new means by
which to write down this new change.
Brown’s discoveries belong to the category of indeterminate notation. This type of
notation does not use static relations between components of the text, but allows
instead a flexible implementation of notational signs in sounds. The acoustic result of
indeterminate notation is music that draws not only from the composer’s intention,
but also from the performer’s creative initiative. The performer’s initiative in
translating the composer’s intention into the actual event leads to a multivalence of
text realisations, to unspecified results: an infinite number of sound phenomena can
be produced on the basis of a single score. In this case, notation becomes a text, a
‘semantic field’ that stimulates the process of its decoding; it is polysemantic and calls
for varied implementation.
But the varied implementation can be of a different nature. Until approximately
the time when Earle Brown began working on his Folio pieces, John Cage mostly used
the aleatory principle in the composing process known as ‘music of chance’. Cage
picked his pitches and other musical parameters according to a random system, but
the results were exactly fixed in traditional notation and the performers had to play
exactly what was written. Brown’s goal was quite different: he pre-composed specific
elements of the musical whole, including some melodic, harmonic, formal and other
elements, and then let the performer take his initiative in freely improvising within
the composer’s pre-existing ideas. In a letter to an unidentified friend (presumably
Claude Samuel) written approximately in 1963, Brown summarised differences
between Cage’s, Feldman’s and his own techniques:

In American music, Cage pre-dates this with chance techniques and Feldman with
his graphs pieces. Neither of these, however, are the characteristics of performance.
412 E. Dubinets
Cage’s chance technique produced a score by chance which was to be performed in
the same way every time. . . . Feldman’s graph music allowed the performer to
choose his own notes within a static formal schema. Both of these differ from Folio
and Available Forms in that they strictly maintained a static, pre-composed
structural (formal) plan. The details in Cage were placed by chance and the details
in Feldman were arbitrary. In Folio (in most pieces) the form is completely open
and different in each performance and the details (for the most part) can also be
filled in by the performers—although the tendency has always been to give the
details precisely (as I do in Available Forms) but to leave the form open to
spontaneous or pre-planned (but changeable) form and structure.3

Brown thus needed to find specific ways to notate his new aleatory methods of the
performing process. He then created ‘graphic’, ‘time’ and ‘mobile’ notations, all of
which were directly responsible for freeing the performer’s initiative in contemporary
music.
Brown’s earliest notational experiments led to the creation of the so-called time
notation, to use his own term. This type of notation, which was developed in 1952 –
1953 in his Folio pieces and was later transformed into different ‘proportional’
notational systems in many avant-garde compositions, primarily in Europe, tells the
performer to abandon the traditional metric and rhythmic parameters and to adopt
the dimensions of real time instead. It coordinates segments of the score and has a
flexible system of signs for notes of variable duration within the segments, allowing
for a rough approximation of correlations between the voices. Each performer needs
to approximate quickly the duration of each note and to compare it with other notes.
In Brown’s compositions, the performers usually play directly from the score
(without parts).
Another type of notation invented by Brown—‘graphic notation’—uses graphical
means instead of the traditional notes and verbal instructions (it is also called ‘eye
music’).4 Notation in graphic music has been emancipated, and the score has become
an aim in itself, both for its composers and for the recipients; it is now a part of the
creative process, which may or may not be translated into sound. Musicians try to
bring together the composer and the performer or recipient in order to give the latter
the possibility to express himself freely and to improvise, stimulating subjective
associations. Time in a graphic score is no longer given a linear treatment. It is not
‘measured’ or ‘counted’, and it does not correlate with the size of the music sheet: one
page of graphic notation may occupy any time, from nothing to eternity. The musical
space is also modified. The instruments no longer have definite positions in the score,
it no longer has any coordinates and the performer is no longer strictly guided by it,
because it has no notes.
One of the earliest, most elegant and famous examples of graphic notation is the
score of Brown’s December 1952. Although it is filled with nontraditional notational
signs and symbols, it should be perceived as a regular but three-dimensional score,
with the resulting shape totally unfixed and different each time. Thus, December 1952
became the very first instance of a form which Brown would later name an ‘open
 Contemporary Music Review 413
form’, and is one of the early examples of the aleatory principle in the performing
process.
This type of aleatory music became incredibly important for Brown’s own
development. The next revolutionary piece, Twentyfive Pages, appeared just half a
year after December 1952 and employed yet another new type of music notation,
‘mobile notation’.
This notation implies possibilities for chance selection of components of the
musical form and their unfixed sequence. Isolated fragments are selected and
combined by the performer or conductor during the course of the performance. The
resulting context is the implementation of mobile notation, which represents a
musical form with an aleatory sequence of its segments in real time. Notation here
merely points the way to a free sequence of separate events, which can be fixed with
any notational means.
One of the first compositions written in this form is Henry Cowell’s Mosaic
Quartet (String Quartet No. 3) (1935), the five movements of which can be performed
in any order, to accommodate the dancers for whom this piece was written (Miller,
2002). Almost two decades later, in June 1953, Brown created his ‘open form’,
Twentyfive Pages, which can be performed on up to 25 pianos. This piece, written in
time notation, is much more radical than Cowell’s Quartet: the pages can go in any
order, and it is possible to read from them in any direction (for example, from
bottom to top).
It is interesting that another revolutionary score dates from this year, 1953—
Intermission VI for one or two pianos by Brown’s colleague and friend, Morton
Feldman. It is perhaps the most visually stimulating and unusual image in all of
Feldman’s scores. The exact date of this composition is not listed in its printed
edition. However, the very first draft of the piece, made on a separate piece of
notepaper glued to his Notebook No. 3, now archived in the Morton Feldman
collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, has a handwritten date stamp:
November 6. It means that Feldman’s score followed the appearance of Brown’s
Twentyfive Pages, which Feldman may well have known.
All fifteen chords in Feldman’s score are written separately on small sections of the
note staves, distributed freely over the white sheet. There are no bar lines. This
composition represents Feldman’s concept of projecting sounds into time in the
clearest way, because time here loses its linearity; on the other hand, the sounds are
very precisely designated, making this piece a perfect example of the aleatory
principle in the performing process. Feldman did not use mobile notation in any
other work. Figuratively speaking, the idea of Feldman’s piece compressed Brown’s
idea down to one page—and became more famous than the original.
In 1954, John Cage and David Tudor made a European concert tour, performing
works by Cage as well as by his colleagues from the so-called New York School,
including Brown’s pieces from Folio and Twentyfive Pages. What was heard and seen
made the European attendees of their concerts think for two long years. Then, one
after another, appeared two piano works, Klavierstück XI (1956) by Karlheinz
414 E. Dubinets
Stockhausen and the Troisième Sonate (1955 –) by Pierre Boulez, which are generally
considered to be the pioneering aleatoric works, even though they only followed the
American examples. Soon after creating the third sonata, the five movements of
which, as well as the succession of sections within each movement, can be arbitrary,
Boulez published his famous article Aléa (Boulez, 1957), which has become a
theoretical underpinning of aleatory music. Another composer who is known
primarily for his use of ‘mobile’ forms, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, moved to
Europe from Israel in 1957, and that is when he began working in open forms.
For many years, Brown tried to establish his primacy in creating open forms. He
wrote about the fact that Stockhausen’s famous Klavierstück XI was created years after
Brown’s own first compositions in open form, and he insinuated that Stockhausen
stole the idea from him.
In an undated article draft beginning with ‘My first contact with ‘‘new’’ European
music’, he wrote the following:

Between Boulez’s first trip to the U.S. in 1952 and my first trip to Europe in 1956,
David Tudor and/or John Cage made 2 or 3 trips to Europe that were extremely
important as far as American music in Europe is concerned. . . . Tudor took these
rather radical scores by Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and myself to
Europe and they were seen, performed and were discussed with the young
European composers. Whether they accepted them or not, the scores turned out to
have a very great influence on the young European music. . . . These American
innovations and explorations were first taken seriously in Europe, and it is a bit
painful to see articles and publicity in America giving credit to Europeans for many
things that were innovations by American composers but were first understood and
taken up by Europeans. The resulting influences came back here in Europeans
scores, looking as if they had been innovations by Europeans.

Brown told the same story in a letter to David Tudor, written upon reading Joan
Peyser’s 1976 book, Boulez: Composer, conductor, enigma. The book quotes David
Tudor discussing open forms and saying:

When I was in Darmstadt in 1956, Stockhausen asked me how I would react if I

were given a piece in which I could choose what I would play next. . . . The fact is
that the idea may have been in the air in New York but if there was a specific
antecedent to Klavierstück XI, I am certain Stockhausen was not aware of it.
(Peyser, 1976, p. 124)

In response to Tudor’s remarks, Brown wrote the following to his pianist friend on
9 February 1977:

There is a most extraordinary and unbelievable quote from you in the Peyser book
on Boulez . . . As to your quote, it seems completely impossible that on your visit to
Stockhausen in the Fall of 1954 that he didn’t at that time see Folio and Four
Systems and, especially, Twentyfive Pages. Considering the technical and esthetic
character of Stockhausen’s work up to that point (Fall of 1954) and the closeness of
characteristics of P.P. XI to Nov. ’52 and Dec. ’52 (to be performed in any direction
 Contemporary Music Review 415
from any point in the defined space . . .) and to the ‘open form’ condition of
Twentyfive Pages, it seems highly unlikely that he would have taken that step
without some pretty strong influence. Your arrival with our scores at just that time
would seem to have more to do with it than anything in the European air. (Boulez
certainly heard about and saw at least some of Folio when he was here in the Fall of
’52. . . . Maybe it was from Pierre that Stockhausen got the news). I stayed with
Karlheinz and Doris in January or early February of 1957 and he said then that he
knew Folio and Twentyfive Pages, and about Schillinger5 too, which surprised me
(He said he knew EVERYTHING, naturally!).

It is not known whether or not Brown ever received a response from Tudor. And,
unfortunately, not many scholars have heard Brown’s words. In the updated edition
of Joan Peyser’s book, To Boulez and beyond (1999), Brown’s name is not mentioned
at all. However, in volume five of the recent and widely read survey by Richard
Taruskin, The Oxford history of western music, Brown’s role has finally received the
recognition it deserves: ‘As for Earle Brown, his most widely performed pieces were
‘‘open form’’ compositions (a term of his coining, later applied to the work of many
composers)’ (Taruskin, 2005, p. 96).
Considering the phenomena of aleatory music, Pierre Boulez distinguished
between its European and American types, that is, between the ‘true’ aleatory music,
which is fully composed but open for some improvisational element during the
interpretation, and ‘chance music’, created from randomly appearing, noticed or
prescribed sounds, without any conscious involvement on the part of the composer.
Another master of European aleatory music, Witold Lutosławski, much more
carefully distinguished between ‘limited’ and ‘unlimited’ aleatory music. In the latter,
the improvisational elements predominate; compositional and/or performing aspects
of composition are indeterminate, and the resulting sound shape depends on a
totality of random elements. ‘Limited’ or ‘controlled’ aleatory music implements
fragmentary inclusions of improvisational sections within the totally controlled
compositional structure, with many sound options foreseen and carefully predicted.
In his art, Lutosławski confined himself to the usage of ‘limited’ aleatorics. It was
very important for him to control both rhythmic and pitch aspects while allowing
inner harmonic interrelations to be slightly more flexible with the help of ‘aleatoric
counterpoint’. The latter is the improvisational linear development of the harmonic
components when individual instrumental parts do not exactly correspond to each
other in terms of pulse and metre. Lutosławski’s first aleatoric work, Jeux vénitiens
(1960 – 1961), which was also among the composer’s first mature pieces, was
famously influenced by listening to John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
Although it did not include any of the features that this Concert proposed,
Lutosławski’s work has an uncompromised formal structural skeleton within which
some flexible nuances are possible.
The division of aleatory music into ‘limited’ and ‘unlimited’ raises a question
about the area to which Earle Brown’s works should be attributed. According to
many statements of the composer, as well as to the evidence present in his scores,
416 E. Dubinets
Brown was much more ‘extreme’ than the European pioneers of aleatory music—
Boulez, Stockhausen and Lutosławski—but much more ‘conservative’ than its
American proponent, Cage. Brown was between these two areas, and the matter that
bothered him the most was the problem of balancing between control and flexibility,
between mobility and stability. Brown’s first real ‘open form’ written in mobile
notation, Available Forms I, was created in the same year as Lutosławski’s Jeux
vénitiens. Brown tried to break the moulds and make the splinters spread out
elastically in a new combination with each new attempt.
Discussing the main principles of aleatory compositions, the Russian composer
and music theorist Edison Denisov, the author of one of the first and most exquisite
analyses of Brown’s December 1952 score,6 describes four types of interrelations
between stable and mobile components of musical form and texture:

– Both texture and form are stable (as in classical music);

– Texture is stable, but form is mobile (as in Boulez’s third sonata, where it is
possible to play sections in any succession);
– Texture is mobile, but form is stable (as in Lutosławski’s Jeux vénitiens);
– Both texture and form are mobile (as in many works by John Cage).

Whenever one tries to place most of Earle Brown’s aleatory compositions within
this scheme, it becomes obvious that they do not exactly follow these four patterns,
but instead fluidly cross the borders between the stereotypes. Brown’s approach to
aleatory music was at the staggering intersection between logic and the irrational—in
particular, between serial and indeterminate music. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any
other composer who was or has been so fluent in these opposite techniques and used
them both on equal terms and with such imagination. It is necessary to emphasise
that Brown did not fully accept either serialism or aleatory music and never
rigorously followed them in their entirety. In an article draft entitled Serial music
today (1965), he wrote the following:

I am as impatient with ‘chance’ (the non-utilization of choice by the artist) as a

‘compositional technique’ as I am with serialism as a justification. The former
producing a pseudo-lifelike entropy and the latter a pseudo-machinelike entropy,
as their purest point of self-realization of principles. Both tend to eliminate the
possibility of involvement and contextual freedom of action which, it seems to me,
should exist at every instant and at a high pitch of creative intensity. This
‘contextual freedom’ is the only freedom which interests me and is the
indispensable factor in the equation for any activity and is the most difficult to
‘control’. This point of balance between control and non-control is the most urgent
matter at hand now . . . somewhere ‘out there’ is where serial, a-tonal, chance, open-
form, and all of the challenging ‘problem’ musics are going . . .

These two qualities—balance and control—were the most important aspects

behind Brown’s ideas about how to organise the musical whole. These particular
aspects created a revealing difference between his and John Cage’s art. In an
 Contemporary Music Review 417
important letter written from Luciano Berio’s house to Pierre Boulez on 31 May
1964, in response to Boulez’s article on his own third sonata in Perspectives of new
music (Boulez, 1963), Brown emphasised his understanding of Cage’s inventions and
expressed an astonishing unity with Boulez, the father of European aleatory music:

This is, in my opinion, where Cage makes his mistake . . . he takes a philosophical
short-cut by producing an entity which has not been transformed by the
involvement of a consciousness totally away and responsible to the esthetic
principle on which this entire thing is based.

In the autumn of 1952, soon after the premiere of Cage’s famous piece 4’33’’ and
right at the time that Brown was composing his Folio, Boulez visited New York only
to realise that his friend by correspondence, John Cage, while rejecting along with
Boulez any connections with the world musical heritage, was going in a totally
different direction. The correspondence between the two music masters was soon to
wear out because of the divergence of their views on the art: Boulez was rejecting the
past in order to become himself; Cage was rejecting the past in order to let the sounds
be themselves. Brown could probably occupy a position directly in the middle.
Describing the processes behind the creation of Available Forms I, in a letter to Bruno
Maderna written on 9 January 1970, Brown again insisted on his major priority—that
is, to be able to make the artistic choices, ‘esthetic decisions’, while freeing up the
music and the performance:

There is a definite necessity to conceive the events as a total (gestalt?) composition

but also necessary to expand the usual compositional awareness so that there is
enough variety between events so that the conductor’s ‘forming imagination’ is
stimulated!!! It is not just the conductor’s responsibility to make ‘interesting’ forms
but very much MY responsibility to write the events in such a way that they can be
multi-combined interestingly and their content is STIMULATING!!!
My ‘open-form’ work is not to evade compositional responsibility!!! My original
motive, in 1951 – 1952, was to create a newly intense poetic exchange and
collaboration within the performance (realization) of a work!!! Out of this
‘motivation’ (the performer aspect of me) came an entire new relationship between
the composer and performer . . . yes?? (COMPLETELY different from the fixed
performance ‘chance pieces’ of Cage at that time (’52)). Please point out that the
Available concept is music of CHOOSING, not of chance!!! I am FOR making
esthetic decisions!!!

The orchestral score of Available Forms I (1961) was the first composition in which
Brown combined all three types of his own notation and framed them within a
concept of open forms. Describing the score in the same letter to Maderna, Brown
mentioned several important points which could have been applied not only to this
particular score, but to most of Brown’s open-form compositions as well:

There are definite ‘techniques’ that I use in composing the notes and chords in
the Available pieces but they are very complicated and don’t fall into a single
418 E. Dubinets
‘formula’ kind of technique . . . sometimes they are mathematically derived and
sometimes just intuitively written (my personal taste and choice of sounds . . .).
Because of the ‘open-form’ realization potential (rather than a strict continuity
from left to right, in sequence, as in closed score) I have a kind of technique of
balancing the content of the events in any one score between different kinds of
energy (density of motion through time) potential and color contrasts (instrumen-
tation), and acoustic weight . . . (a combination of instrumentation and register and
interval).

A mathematical approach, mentioned in the above quote, and pre-composing

structural planning were two components essential for Brown’s creative process,
regardless of the degree of visible freedom and spontaneity his scores provided. It
does not matter how free a performer can be when deciphering these scores. What
is important is that the composer carefully pre-planned and deliberately pre-
considered all aspects of the final realisation of the score. This pre-planning helped
Brown balance between the mobile and the stable, which was one of his main
compositional tasks that led to multiple performance options. This is clear from the
following statement which Brown made in the third person in a sketch titled Cage,
Brown, Feldman, Wolff, dated from February 1971:

Earle Brown had been experimenting with highly spontaneous techniques of

composition and performance and in 1952 composed Folio:—experiments with
spontaneity of performance relative to subjectively and mathematically composed
materials (proportional notation); solo or collective improvisation in relation to
‘graphic and mobile scores’ (graphic and open-form); and proportionally notated,
fully composed sound materials in ‘mobile, open-form’ scoring conditions.
Different formal and/or content results in each performance.

Thus again Brown mentioned his mathematical approach to music composing.

This approach would be obvious were he a serialist, but we know that he never was an
adept follower of this strict system of composition. What, then, is the mathematical
approach that he continues to mention? What was the platform on which he based
his compositional pre-planning process?
In the aforementioned letter to, presumably, Claude Samuel, Brown listed the most
important art phenomena that influenced him:

Other things, apart from Calder and the painting situation, which confirmed my
feelings that such things were ‘right’ were the Schillinger theories (objective and
statistical creation of a work . . . having practically nothing to do with our inherited
definitions of art values but everything to do with materials and mathematical
manipulation of proportions), the Joyceian [sic] concept of ‘multi-ordinality’
(more than one ‘reading’ of a set of circumstances, which I believe he got from
Vico, and in effect, produces a kind of collage of meanings on different levels of
consciousness), the esthetic theories of consciousness and experience of Gertrude
Stein, and the Mallarmé ideas which you know better than I do. It all added up to
an entirely new approach, for me.
 Contemporary Music Review 419
It is indicative that, of all of the musical influences on his work, Brown singled out
only Schillinger’s theories. Apparently, he used Schillinger’s musical system as a
yardstick to measure his own musical developments and to evaluate the surrounding
contemporary musical scene. In his aesthetic biography, which he kept updating from
the mid-1950s until his death in 2002, Brown consistently talked about his
compositional roots.

A good part of my impatience with the conceptual inflexibility of historical

rules was due to my (simultaneous) involvement with Schillinger techni-
ques (1946 – 1950), which, if nothing else, exposes one to an extremely
iconoclastic, mathematically analytical, and constructivist point of view having
no track with the ‘loose thinking’ of historical practice . . . a rather extreme but
assimilable and valuable approach if the ‘mathematical’ aspect doesn’t induce
panic at first encounter. The empirical, ‘no nonsense’ approach to art, based as
it is on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of SOUND, the physical
material of the art, and the suggestions of innumerable bases for ‘objectively’
controlling and generating the material within whatever ‘aesthetic’ context one
chooses, is still the most reasonable and complete mental and technical
approach available; a ‘structural functions of sound’ approach. I subsequently
discovered that such Schillinger concepts as, the coordination of time
structures, generation and variation of rhythmic groups, density as a primary
determinant, distribution in strata fields, so-called ‘total’ organization of all
of the characteristics of sound, somewhat parallel the techniques taught
by Messiaen at about the same time or before (Schillinger died in
1943) . . . principles which are largely responsible for the ‘serial’ basis of much
recent European music.

And in an unpublished typescript entitled The Schillinger System of musical

composition, he said that this system ‘is by far the most complete and advanced
presentation of the theory of music yet brought forth’. This unpublished typescript
was presumably written in the late 1940s. At that time, Brown was studying at the
Schillinger House in Boston. There, a mathematical approach to music called the
Schillinger System was taught as the basis of all of the theory courses. Half a century
later, Brown stated in a 1996 interview with the Schillinger scholar Lou Pine that ‘the
Schillinger techniques have always been an influence on me. I’ve never given them
up, and I believe in them still’ (Pine, 1996).
The Schillinger System of musical composition was an approach to music that
Joseph Schillinger, a composer who emigrated from Russia to the USA in 1928,
developed in part as a mathematical approach to studying the arts. His theories
created such an interest that, during the 1930s and early ’40s, he was considered the
most prestigious composition teacher with whom to study.
Schillinger’s most famous student was George Gershwin, who studied with him
from 1932 to 1936. A number of the well-known composers of that time were
Schillinger’s students, including Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and
Vernon Duke (who continued to write concert music under his birth name, Vladimir
Dukelsky). Lawrence Berk, founder of the Schillinger House (later known as the
420 E. Dubinets
Berklee College of Music), was also a student of Schillinger’s, and Earle Brown was
among the first graduates of Berk’s original school.
After his studies at the Schillinger House, Brown expressed his gratitude for
Schillinger’s theories and intended to write a book on them—a project that never
happened. In a letter to Frances, Schillinger’s widow, in August 1967, he explained
how vital a role Schillinger’s ideas played in his work:

Your husband’s work has been so tremendously important to my life and

music . . . It is impossible for me to lecture or write an article in which I do not pay
homage to the tremendous significance of his work. Serial music, electronic music,
computer music, ‘statistical’ composition, mixed-media arts, kinetic arts, ‘total
environments’ . . . all of those things are in those books; and no one, to this day, has
formulated the ‘control and generation’, rationally and intelligently, and with the
vision, of Schillinger.

Although the Schillinger System was not the only influence on Brown’s
development, and he never followed it in its entirety, the system did open the world
of European avant-garde music for him. In the August 1967 letter to Mrs Schillinger,
he explained:

I do enjoy a reputation as a ‘good composer of good music’, an independent, and a

kind of underground thorn in the American Establishment . . . [My work is] much
more accepted in Europe than in America . . . thanks (and I’m not being ironic) to
my Schillinger background.

Indeed, Brown conceived of his Schillinger training as a key component in his self-
esteem—particularly, in his belonging to the academic spheres—and in the ways
other musicians evaluated him. In an unpublished article draft beginning with ‘My
first contact with ‘‘new’’ European music’, he wrote:

Certainly in the case of Boulez, my credibility wouldn’t have been very good to
begin with if I had not written 4 or 5 works using 12 tone rows and Schillinger-
based principles of rhythmic organization, which strangely enough, paralleled the
kind of rhythmic organization and ‘total serialism’, aspects of things that Boulez
and other Eur. had been learning from Olivier Messiaen.

In the above-mentioned interview with Lou Pine, Brown professed the following
thoughts:

When I first met Stockhausen and Boulez in Europe in 1956 . . . I was able to talk to
both . . . instantly on complicated levels of serial composition . . . So . . . [the
Schillinger System] stood me in good stead. I was way ahead of most people in
that way . . . the fact is that I have been, particularly all my life as a composer, very,
very interested in the visual arts. And the constructivist movement in Russia with
Tatlin, and many other Russian visual artists . . . did what I call a ‘hard edge concept
of assemblage’, assembling pieces in addition to conceiving them. It seemed to be a
 Contemporary Music Review 421
big thing, obviously, with Schillinger, because of his emphasis on pre-composi-
tional planning, which has been very big in my work . . . He speaks for the conscious
creation of a work of art.

Simplistically speaking, the Schillinger System of musical composition requires the

composer to:

– Separate the main musical elements from each other;

– Determine and regulate the mathematical relations in the elements;
– Synchronise and combine the elements into a musical composition.

At least some principles of Schillinger’s techniques were incorporated into Brown’s

compositions, starting in the 1950s. These included his 1951 composition Three
Pieces for piano; Perspectives for piano and Music for Violin, Cello and Piano, both
written in 1952; his 1957 – 1958 piece for nine instruments, Pentathis; his 1972
orchestral composition Time Spans; and other works.
One of Brown’s late compositions, Tracking Pierrot for six players, an open form in
which chordal sections are infiltrated with expressive rhapsodic solos, was
constructed mostly by means of the system. In the preface to the score of Tracking
Pierrot, Brown acknowledged that the pre-compositional planning and the chordal
progression on p. 2 were derived using Schillinger techniques. However, from some
unidentified sketches for this work, which I unearthed in Brown’s archive, I
discovered that most of the major inner components of the work were also derived
using Schillinger.
On 25 July 1991, Brown drafted on a sheet of graph paper a plan for creating
Tracking Pierrot. He provided for the development of rhythmic figures and pitch
material for the instrumentation, which is similar to that of Arnold Schoenberg’s
Pierrot lunaire.
On a similar sheet of graph paper, the composer sketched out a melody in a format
that he learned from the Schillinger System, where each vertical square represents a
pitch of a half-step and each horizontal square represents a certain minimum
duration (Figure 1).
Brown then developed two main parameters of musical sound separately: in
addition to numerous rhythmical patterns, he created a handful of 12-tone pitch
rows which he called ‘Schillinger harmonic progressions’, most of which later
became part of the piece. According to the rules of counterpoint that were the
foundation of Schillinger’s methodology of work with pitch rows, each row was
written out in the form of retrograde, inversion and retrograde inversion. Then all
four-note horizontal patterns (each 12-tone row had three of them) were
combined into chords, sometimes with enharmonic substitutions (after the double
bar in Figure 2), and the rows were transposed to start on pre-determined pitches
(as, for instance, on the second four-line system in the example shown in
Figure 2).
422 E. Dubinets

Figure 1 A sketch of a melody for Tracking Pierrot. Courtesy of the Earle Brown Music
Foundation.

After the rows and the rhythms were separately developed, Brown synchronised
them. Figure 3 demonstrates a symmetrically organised rhythmic structure with the
identified axis combined with all four versions of row B.
In the final score, there are eleven pages with one to five events on each page. Most
of the events incorporate, at least partially, Schillinger techniques. According to
Brown’s preface to his score for Tracking Pierrot, one of the main events is based on
the Schillinger method—it is event 5 on p. 3 (Figure 4). In addition, event 4 on the
 Contemporary Music Review 423

Figure 2 Tracking Pierrot, pitch rows. Courtesy of the Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Figure 3 Tracking Pierrot, rhythmic structure. Courtesy of the Earle Brown Music
Foundation.

same page is completely constructed from the rows that were determined by using
Schillinger. At the same time, the vertical predetermination does not exist in this
event. The conductor, in real time, chooses random combinations of the voices that
can sound in this particular performance, as well as the moments when they should
enter. The instruments play their parts in a loop mode, starting the part again as soon
as it is over, until the conductor stops them. When the conductor cues them again,
they should begin playing from the point at which they had stopped. In this way, in a
piece with strictly calculated pitch, the rhythmic elements and other details provide a
desired degree of freedom.
As one can see, aspects of Schillinger’s system are surprisingly close to that of
serialism, in its ways of achieving conscious control and balance of the music
material. However, the fact that Brown used the Schillinger System did not mean that
he preferred to use horizontal and linear structures. On the contrary, he thought in
vertical constructions and harmonies. Agreeing with Cage, Brown tried to find ways
to free up the sounds with which he worked. But he did so in such a manner that the
sounds he used do not lose their own inner beauty and interrelations. That is why
sonic and harmonic aspects in his work prevailed over counterpoint and other
techniques.
424 E. Dubinets

Figure 4 Tracking Pierrot, event 5, p. 3. Courtesy of the Earle Brown Music Foundation.

Brown’s vertical constructions, derived from corresponding rows, were always rich,
sensible and idiosyncratic, because, as he mentioned in his letter to Boulez, he wanted
them to possess ‘stylistic recognizability within themselves’. Explaining this approach
in his unpublished article on serial music, Brown wrote that it had its roots in a new
direction started independently by Edgard Varèse and Schillinger:

The ‘proto-type’ closest to me (in America in 1950, not conceptually) was Varèse,
who knew but had no close connection to Schillinger but whose music seemed to
be ‘explained’ by Schillinger principles . . . his thinking in terms of ‘masses, planes,
volumes, densities’ rather than of a series of notes . . . and his term, ‘organized
sound’ . . . implies this. . . . Here, in Varèse and Schillinger, was a starting point for
the development of a new dimension of sound thinking rather than to go on
complicating old forms and attitudes. Not notes but sounds (multi-dimensional
complexes); serialized or merely existing as a ‘collision’ of character, qualities, and
quantities; systematically or subjectively. . .

Brown attached a special importance to the quality of sound, and especially to the
beauty of sound—the sound which is allotted freedom, but at the same time does not
lose its integrity and harmony. In his art, harmony prevails over counterpoint, and no
 Contemporary Music Review 425
random elements are allowed to disturb it. The composer explained his interest in the
aspects of harmony in the aforementioned letter to Boulez, describing his own
harmonic structures in almost the same words used to describe Varèse’s innovations:

Each ‘sound object’ or element of the material being very different from the others
in rather sonically ‘objective’ ways . . . highly defined trajectories, rhythmic
densities, intensities, and instrumentation . . .

Summarising his compositional approach, Brown made an important statement in

the 1970 letter to Maderna:

I think that all of my work has a characteristic SOUND which is MY sound and the
result of my personal ‘theory’.

Brown’s theory worked. Using the methods of pre-planning and of mathematical

calculations for the major music parameters and then allowing the performers to
reconfigure the pre-composed materials—that is, balancing and controlling the
mobile and the stable components of musical canvases—Brown was indeed able to
create his own ‘sound’ full of shimmering beauty, organic cohesiveness and
paradoxical flexibility.

Notes
[1] I would like to express my sincere gratitude and to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to the
Schillinger scholar Lou Pine, who has been guiding my work for many years and to whom I
owe access to many materials and documents. His interview with Earle Brown from 24 March
1996 has become the foundation for my research for this article. The last section of the article
is re-written from the paper Earle Brown and the Schillinger System of musical composition,
which was originally co-created with Mr Pine and presented at the Society for American
Music’s thirty-first national conference in Eugene, Oregon in 2005.
[2] See more about contemporary music notation and its functions in Dubinets (1999, 2006).
[3] This and all subsequent letters, manuscripts and typescripts mentioned in this article are held
at the Earle Brown Music Foundation in Rye, New York.
[4] This term was not popularised until much later, perhaps after the appearance of the book Eye
music (Griffiths, 1986).
[5] As shall be seen below, Schillinger played a major role in Brown’s development.
[6] See this analysis, as well as the statements described below, in Denisov (1971).

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