Energy Fields: Earle Brown, Open Form, and the Visual Arts
- Submitting institution
-
Anglia Ruskin University Higher Education Corporation
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 512
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.3998/mpub.9688443
- Book title
- Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown
- Publisher
- University of Michigan Press
- ISBN
- 978-0-472-13058-0
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book chapter contributes to the first monograph devoted to the American composer Earle Brown (1926-2002), a seminal figure of the 1950s and 60s. Whilst Brown’s involvement with, and inspiration from, the visual arts have been commented on in various articles and more generalist essays, this is the first to try and understand the fundamentals of that relationship drawing on Brown’s own, previously unseen, artwork. In writing the essay the author’s research drew on various conversations, rehearsals and interviews undertaken with the composer, and had access to his archive of manuscripts and artworks in New York. The essay bases its research and arguments around some works that have been largely unknown (the paintings/’Folio 2’). These provide the tools for an insight into Brown’s very early and later work. During the research in New York at the Earle Brown Foundation the author discovered pieces in 2007, often mentioned by Brown and thought lost, ‘Home Burial’, ‘Tender Buttons’, a String Quartet, ‘Passacaglia for Jane’ and others. ‘Home Burial’ has since been published by Edition Peters New York. Through an examination of his early ‘Folio’ (1952-3) and the unpublished work now known as ‘Folio 2’ (c1970-2000) a dialogue is observed between formal constructive practices of the visual design and articulation, and a more informal gestural approach to notation, and in particular how these relate to the diverse demands on the performers, and reveal the composer’s compositional strategies in both Folios. Line, gesture, colour, fantasy, are examined to search for a means of thinking through Brown’s explorations in these works thinking across the musical notation and his early paintings. Brown’s archive has now (2018) been purchased by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Switzerland, which also houses the manuscripts of Boulez, Stravinsky, Feldman and many others.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
