Sculpture in Sound

The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.

So wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841. And so believes American Composer Earle Brown, 42, whose music bears an unmistakable relationship to the plastic arts. Brown's work owes a debt to the mobile sculpture of Alexander Calder and the abstract expressionist painting of Jackson Pollock. His scores are graphic in their detail and precision, but he believes in a certain improvisation or mobility within a performance itself. Therein lies the influence of Calder, whose mobiles are made of 15 to 20 parts moving freely in space and changing their relationships with one another from minute to minute. Pollock's paintings, created by the "action" of dripping paint onto canvas, suggest the spontaneity and freedom accorded the conductor, who cues the musicians as he sees fit.

This does not mean that Brown's works are meant to represent specific works of Calder or Pollock. "I am not trying to make the listener hear a mobile or visualize a Pollock painting," Brown explains. "I was inspired by the manner, the process of their way of working."

Broken Glass. Brown favors what he calls "open form" music. Last week he displayed his style at a concert at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory of Music. One of the works on the program, Available Forms I, which is scored for 18 wind, string and percussion players, is a Calderian example of what Brown calls "conceptual mobility." Each of its six pages contains five musical "events," which the instrumentalists play on specific orders from the conductor. In front of the podium is a numbered board with a sliding red arrow; the conductor moves the arrow to give the page and holds up one or more fingers to indicate the event he wants played. To Brown, a work like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is "closed form," meaning that no options to choose materials are given to the conductor. In "open-form" music, every note is precomposed (and rehearsed) and determined, yet the piece at hand can never sound the same way twice. "What I am actually doing when conducting," says Brown, "is creating a piece in the moment of performing it. I can feel it happening under my hands."

As Brown led Available Forms I and a second open-form work called Novara (1962), his long fingers fluttered, his hands twirled, his palms undulated in an assortment of uniquely personal and specific hand signals. Clenched fists brought forth hard, crashing sounds. He touched index finger to thumb to produce tiny streams of pizzicato noises. Occasionally a player would press down a trumpet valve without blowing, and let it go just for the click. Or another would blow through a trombone to achieve a breathy effect. There were prolonged single notes and furious tonal scurryings up and down the scale. Yet the Peabody Contemporary Ensemble blended it all into a fascinatingly rich texture of abstract, color-crazy sound in which dense sonic images were rent by small plinks as sharp and gleaming as broken glass.

Not surprisingly, Brown has been strongly influenced by John Cage, the father of aleatory, or "chance," music. But he no longer agrees with Cage's belief that random aberrations in a performance are as valid artistically as the composed parts. What Brown is after is a responsible, controlled and more human improvisatory collaboration between composer and performer. "This is music by choice, not chance," he says. "My music enlarges the potential for musicians to take a more creative part in the music; yet I am not interested in everybody just doing his thing. I didn't compose by chance. I composed what I wanted to hear."

Up from Jazz. Brown learned the value of creative interaction early on: he grew up playing trumpets in small touring jazz bands. Although little known outside avant-garde circles, he was awarded the W. Alton Jones Chair of Composition at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore this year. In Europe, he ranks as one of the most influential American composers, and is admired by such leading musicians as France's Pierre Boulez, Germany's Karlheinz Stockhausen and Italy's Bruno Maderna. Available Forms II, which is Brown's most ambitious work, was performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1964, with Brown conducting one orchestra of 49 players and Leonard Bernstein another. Brown is now putting the finishing touches on a work for 30 instrumentalists that he will perform with Boulez's Domaine Musical ensemble at the Zagreb Festival in May.

Meanwhile, his 18-year marriage to Dancer Carolyn Brown of the Merce Cunningham company seems to be enough proof of his conviction that "art is the fruit of human relationship." And vice versa. To Brown, what counts about art is that it changes people's lives. "Art observes the condition of the world and asks how we can make things relate better," he says. "What I value most is the way people relate to each other. Life today is about transition, not monuments. I don't want to make monuments. I want to be here, now."

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