The Music of Earle Brown

Directly influenced by the visual arts, particularly the works of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock, Earle Brown was the pioneer of open forms, graphic scores, and improvisation. In 2000 he said, “The earliest and still predominant influences on my conceptual attitude toward art were the works of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock...the integral but unpredictable ‘floating’ variations of a mobile, and the contextual ‘rightness’ of the results of Pollock’s directness and spontaneity in relation to the materials and his particular image of the work…as a total space (of time).”



Brown went on to become one of America's leading avant-garde composers since the 1950s. In addition to many other achievements over the course of his life, Brown received a Guggenheim award, the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory of Music (1970) where he held the W. Alton Jones Chair of Music. Listen in on this episode of Sonorama for tracks like Centering (1973), Cross Sections And Color Fields (1975), December 1952 (1952), and more of Brown's best.

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