The music of Earle Brown tends to be overshadowed by his New York School colleagues John Cage and Morton Feldman but as this collection of chamber works attests his is a unique compositional voice. Brown was a seminal figure in the development of aleatoric composition and the use of graphic scores, and inspired by the visual art of Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Where Cage aimed for an abstract Zen calm and Feldman a protracted stillness, Brown’s music is restless, nervous, and questing.
The earliest work here is Event Synergy II from 1967/68, which slides in gracefully enough on a bed of sustained, slightly dissonant strings before skidding, kicking up dust, lurching and spluttering short bursts of sound from wind and strings. Like Cage’s work of the time, there’s a haphazard nature to these gestures, a kind of puzzled apathy, the motifs seeming to shrug in confusion. By Tracking Pierrot of 1992 there’s a greater degree of direction, patterns unfolding more patiently, although the penchant for rpaid staccato flurries remains. At 21 minutes Windsor Jambs (1980) is the longest piece here, and with the spare daubs of colour applied by woodwinds and strings, recalls the shorter works of Feldman. Each pieces presents a different web of cul-de-sacs within which to lose oneself.
Joshua Meggitt
