This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Earle Brown, the influential modern composer who was part of a revolutionary avant-garde musical movement in New York and who influenced a generation of neoclassical, jazz, improvisational and electronic artists.
Central Connecticut State University is celebrating Brown’s life and music with a day-long event on Oct. 9 titled “Perspectives on Earle Brown at 100.” That day will also mark the opening of an art exhibit inspired by Brown’ work, “Seeing and Being in Sound: Earle Brown and Beyond” that runs through Nov. 12 in the university’s Chen Art Gallery.
Brown is known for his close association with another major modernist composer in the avant-garde New York arts scene of the 1950s, John Cage. Brown also worked with jazz artists Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan and is considered a major influence on John Zorn. He and Leonard Bernstein simultaneously conducted Brown’s audacious “Available Forms II,” in which an orchestra is split in half, playing against itself, at New York’s Lincoln Center with the 98-piece New York Philharmonic in 1964. Brown also composed a score for the legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham that deliberately challenged how the dancers could move in time to the music.
Beyond composing and conducting and theorizing, Brown is renowned for creating his own new notation system so he could more accurately and graphically convey his musical ideas.
“He had really big ideas, but he was not always sure how to realize them,” said Drake Andersen, an assistant professor in the CCSU music department and the centennial event’s main organizer. “He was working out solutions to problems, like getting classical musicians to play spontaneously. He was close to John Cage and had ideas that were every bit as interesting.”
Brown was particularly interested in live improvisations. He did innovative things with electronic music, including samples and tape loops, and in his later career embraced the synthesizer. Brown’s 1950s and early 1960s work had an impact on the next wave of avant-garde composers such as the Fluxus group, Lamonte Young and Zorn, placing him in a creative continuum that led to Yoko Ono, the Velvet Underground and others.
Brown himself didn’t have any deep associations with Connecticut. He lived in Rye, New York and performing mostly in New York City. But Andersen points out a key Connecticut artistic bond between Brown and the renowned metal sculptor Alexander Calder, who lived in Roxbury from the 1930s until his death in 1976. Calder — whose gigantic “Calder Stegosaurus” stands outside The Wadsworth in Hartford —and Brown saw themselves as like-minded artists who happened to be working in different mediums. In the mid-1960s, they collaborated on the famous “Calder Piece,” for which a percussion composition by Brown was played on a specially constructed Calder mobile structure by four musicians using around 100 different instruments from mallets to sticks to pieces on leather. Brown’s work has also been compared to the “action paintings” of Jackson Pollock.
The CCSU exhibit, Andersen said, will display different kinds of graphic scores and musical notation, as well as work by faculty composers, some of whom were inspired by Brown. This includes a sound installation in the Brown style, with samples collected by CCSU students and faculty members.
One of the goals for the project, Andersen said, is to make sure Brown’s scores can become available again. He published over 40 compositions, most of them for chamber groups. Andersen noted that he wrote for ensembles that could range in size from two players to 18.
Andersen and his colleagues have been working on the event for nearly a year, and Andersen himself has been researching Brown for over a decade. He said “Perspectives on Earle Brown at 100” is the only major acknowledgement of Brown’s centenary. One of the people organizing the CCSU event with Andersen is Rebecca Kim, editor of “Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown,” who will be one of the guest speakers on Oct. 9. Other guest speakers and panelists that day include Dr. Simon Obert, who curates the Brown archive at the Paul Sacher Stiftung research center in Switzerland, and musician Matt Ward, who recently performed Brown’s “Calder Piece” in New York with the Talujon Percussion Quartet and also leads the Tacitus Ensemble will be performing at CCSU.
The Oct. 9 conference includes presentations of scholarly papers on Brown, a public dialogue on the Earle Brown Collection and several concerts including performances by the Tactus Ensemble from the Manhattan School of Music at 1:30 and 3:30 p.m. and a concert of electronic music at 7:30 p.m. The talks and concerts will be held in the Founders Hall area of the Lawrence J. Davidson Hall on the CCSU campus at 1615 Stanley St. in New Britain. The talks and concerts will be livestreamed.