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Contemporary Music Review

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An Interview with Composer Earle

Brown
John Yaffé
Published online: 17 Jul 2007.

To cite this article: John Yaffé (2007) An Interview with Composer Earle Brown, Contemporary
Music Review, 26:3-4, 289-310, DOI: 10.1080/07494460701414124

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 Contemporary Music Review
Vol. 26, Nos. 3/4, June/August 2007, pp. 289 – 310

An Interview with Composer

Earle Brown
John Yaffé
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The following interview with Earle Brown, in which he discusses his evolution as a
composer, was conducted on 25 September 1995 in connection with the then-forthcoming
premiere recording of Brown’s complete piano works performed by David Arden, which
the interviewer produced: Music for Piano(s), New Albion Records. NA082CD.

Keywords: Earle Brown; Form; Graphic; Interview; Notation; Open; Schillinger System

[The following interview appears courtesy of the Earle Brown Music Foundation. It is
presented as it happened, with all additional clarifications, comments, etc., appearing
as endnotes.]

JY: Your chosen instrument was trumpet, and jazz was an important part of your
early musical experience. Yet you studied mathematics and engineering in college.
What role did each of these disciplines play in your life at that time?

EB: Let me start a little earlier than that. My parents, probably like everybody’s,
thought I should learn to play the piano. I hated the piano. Or, I hated the teacher.
Every time I was supposed to have a lesson, I would go hide in the woods somewhere.
But later, at the age of about ten, I started studying trumpet at the music store in
Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Later, I played in the school band, and I played in the town
band, like Ives’ father did. But until I got pretty good at it, I played in a dance band.
Wally Putnam, as a matter of fact, was the pianist. He had a little dance band with
only two trumpets, and I was the second trumpet. The first player was Jerry Gogan,
who became the trumpet player for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, much later.
Jerry taught me how to play in a dance band. Later, I formed my own dance band,
and we used to rehearse in the back room of our house. My father says, to this day, he
can see where the saxophonist used to go [he stomps time with his foot] on the floor. It
wore out the floor. And the piano player, also. This was during high school. We had a
station wagon, and I used to truck us around. We’d get eight bucks a night playing

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2007 Earle Brown Music Foundation
DOI: 10.1080/07494460701414124
 290 J. Yaffé
junior proms, senior proms, sophomore hops, and things like that. Then, when I
went to school at Northeastern University, I played in a big band called the Territory
Band. Three trumpets, two trombones, five saxes: you know, a big style dance band.
Gene Carlson—he was a great trumpet player and arranger from Levinson,
Massachusetts. He’s still around.

JY: Was there any thought, at that point, of a career in music?

EB: You know, in high school, the advisors would say, ‘You’re good in math and
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science. I think you ought to go to Northeastern University to study mathematics

and engineering’. It wasn’t my greatest dream. But I did it, because I wanted to
fly airplanes and be an aeronautical engineer. I did learn to fly before I went into
the Air Force. I dreamed of all these old biplanes, like in the First World War.
When I went in, I was classified as a pilot trainee. But I went in after V-E Day,
and while I was in basic training, V-J Day happened. So I lost out, and they
didn’t know what to do with us. They didn’t need any more pilots flying P-51s or
such, and people were leaving the service. And to be a pilot after the Second
World War was like being a bus driver. There was none of the glamour and
romance. I said, ‘Then, put me in a band’. So I was in a band in Louisiana, and
at Randolph Field in Texas—the West Point of the Air. Zoot Sims was in that
band, the great tenor saxophonist, who later played with the Woody Herman
Band.
We played music all the time, every day. We would have marching band rehearsal,
big jazz orchestra rehearsal, classical music—we had a big orchestra—and combo
rehearsals. We played for marches and all kinds of events, including dances at the
Officer’s Club. One of our favourite things to do at those dances was to play
something in 4/4 and drop a beat, or play a waltz and add a beat. You know, screw
everybody up. It was great! I remember sitting on my bunk at Randolph Field, with
my trumpet in my hand, and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be fantastic if this were all I
needed for the rest of my life: my trumpet?!’
When I got out of there, I returned to Northeastern University. But I had no mind
for it at all. In the band at Randolph Field, I had met a guy from New York who had
been studying the Schillinger system. I saw the books, a kind of mathematically
oriented system, and it intrigued the hell out of me. When I got back to Boston, the
Schillinger House was just opening. I was studying trumpet with a fantastic teacher
and clinician named Fred Berman, to whom Bobby Hackett, Dizzy Gillespie and
other great players would go for a lesson, when they were in Boston—you know, to
clean up their chops. So I stopped going to Northeastern. I thought of going to New
England Conservatory, and by that time, I knew I wanted to compose. But the people
I spoke to, there, said, ‘Aw, don’t come here. It’s such a bore. The only way to be a
composer is to study privately with a composer’.

JY: Had you done any composing to that point?

 Contemporary Music Review 291
EB: I had done some arranging, but I hadn’t done any real composing. At that point,
I thought I was going to be a Hollywood composer, because that was about the only
orientation I had. My father used to listen to the New York Philharmonic broadcasts
on Sunday afternoons. But basically, there was no classical music in Lunenburg,
Massachusetts to coax me in that direction. So I thought of the Schillinger thing. A
lot of film composers had studied with Schillinger.

JY: What was the allure of the Schillinger methods for you?
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EB: I don’t know. Being in Boston, I was bored with people like Walter Piston. I
wasn’t going to go study with him. So I studied privately with Roslyn Brogue
Henning, who was a terrific teacher. Her doctorate was in twentieth-century
polyphony. She started me in the ninth century, working all the way through the
different styles, up to Bach. Then we jumped to Berg. You see, she was a twelve-tone
composer. That was very, very important to me. But Schillinger was even more
important, because it kept me from getting academic. Schillinger died in 1943, but I
was studying with people who had studied with him, like NBC and CBS staff
composers from New York. They all had nervous breakdowns and retired to Boston
to become teachers. I mean, they’d have to compose an hour-and-a-half of music per
week. That’s a hell of a lot of music! There was Larry Berk, who ran the school, and
Kenneth MacKillop, who was my particular teacher. Really good stuff! I liked the
people, and I had a good trumpet teacher.

JY: Did it appeal to your scientific orientation?

EB: To a certain extent, yes. But Schillinger was truly a mathematician and composer.
Pieces of his were played by Stokowski and the Columbia Orchestra. He was a close
friend of Leon Theremin. Henry Cowell brought Schillinger to the United States to
teach at the New School. Henry Cowell wrote the introduction to The Schillinger
System,1 and Schillinger was also a close friend of Nicolas Slonimsky. George
Gershwin studied with Schillinger at the time he was writing Porgy and Bess. A lot of
the techniques are the normal inversion, retrograde, cellules, splitting, and all of the
things that we do. But Schillinger never established a good reputation. I’ve heard
Milton Babbitt belittle him terribly. In the academic community, he was just looked
down upon as a mathematician. The thought was, if you learned Schillinger
techniques, anybody could write music. Baloney!
I guess I’m an oddball. My family gave me a tremendous feeling of confidence that
I could do anything I wanted to do. I wanted to fly airplanes, then I wanted to study
engineering, then I wanted to study music; and they supported me. That’s
tremendously important. Because, if you’re not given confidence and support, and
the feeling of being able to take a chance—without someone saying, ‘What the hell
are you doing? Will you stop it and get serious?!’—then it’s tough. Maybe they were
too permissive, or just permissive enough. I always had very strong discipline from
 292 J. Yaffé
them, but never criticism. I don’t know what possessed them to be that way, but they
were. So I’ve always credited them with my being able to choose not to study with
Walter Piston at Harvard, but rather to study Schillinger. It intrigued me a hell of a
lot more. I used to read Piston’s book on harmony, counterpoint and such. But
Schillinger was really involved in some heavy stuff. There were four species of
harmony: diatonic, diatonic-symmetric, pure symmetric, and atonal. I mean, that’s
really something! Then, binomial periodicities and coordination of time structures;
all that stuff was very interesting.
I started off, on the GI Bill, in a class of about twenty-five people. By the end of the
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four years, there were only five of us left. I was there from 1946 to 1950. In 1950, my
first wife, Carolyn, and I got married, and we took off for Denver, where she would
dance, and I would be a Schillinger teacher.

JY: Your first serious opuses, and your first published works, were for piano. Why
this instrument?

EB: When I was a kid, I used to buy jazz records a lot at a particular record shop in
Fitchburg. When I would go in there, I would see this 78 rpm Charles Ives Concord
Sonata recording sitting there. And Concord, Massachusetts is only about fifteen
miles from Lunenburg. That was a time when you could go into a booth and listen
to a record. I went primarily to buy jazz records, but I kept seeing this Concord
Sonata and didn’t understand what it was all about. So I would pick it up and take
it into the booth with me, once in a while. I’d play one side, get really knocked out,
and say to myself, ‘Oh, my God! What is going on here?! How can anyone play
that, let alone write it?!’ This was the first contemporary music I had ever heard.
The pianist was John Kirkpatrick. It was the first real record anyone had ever made
of Ives. It cost twelve dollars; I couldn’t afford that. I remember, it was six discs!
Finally, the guy who owned the shop—who, later, married my sister—finally said,
‘You keep taking that into the booth. Why don’t you buy it? Nobody else ever
listens to it. It’s been sitting there for months’. I told him that I couldn’t afford
twelve dollars, and he said, ‘I’ll sell it to you for half price’. Well, that Ives really
turned my head around. I think maybe that’s why I wrote so much piano
music . . . and the fact that David Tudor would play it. He was the first person to
play my music. He was the first, and only person to play John Cage’s, at the time I
met John.
Perspectives,2 which came after Three Pieces,3 was written for David. When I first
met John Cage in Denver, in 1951, I had already written Three Pieces. John was kind
of astonished to find that kind of music in Denver in 1951. He said, ‘Send it to me in
New York’, which I did. He gave it to David Tudor, and David played it in a concert
at the Cherry Lane Theater. That was the first New York performance I ever had.
After that, I went on to compose Perspectives for him.

JY: What was the impetus for the move to New York?
 Contemporary Music Review 293
EB: We had no intention of spending the rest of our lives in Denver, anyway. And
meeting John Cage and Merce Cunningham was such a revelation. Merce gave a
master class, and Carolyn just knocked his eyes out with her dancing. Her mother was
a Denishawn dancer,4 so she had been dancing since she was six years old. She ended
up a fantastic dancer. So it was Merce’s being so impressed with her, my meeting
John and his looking at Three Pieces. That first conversation with John was at a party
for Merce and him, at the house of a dancer with whom Carolyn was dancing: Jane
McClain; she used to dance with Martha Graham, and she knew Merce from those
days. At the party, John played his Sonatas and Interludes. Afterwards, I said to him,
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‘Do you think your music has any connection to Anton Webern?’ He said, ‘What do
you know about Webern?!’ It didn’t seem strange, to me, that I knew about Webern,
but he seemed shocked. He probably thought, ‘This dumb kid in Denver, Colorado—
what does he know about anything?’ Then he came to the studio, where I was
teaching, and I showed him Three Pieces. He was astonished.

JY: I assume, then, that Three Pieces for piano and Perspectives are Schillinger-based
works.

EB: Yes. Three Pieces is simpler than Perspectives. But they’re both twelve-tone works
with the Schillinger concept of rhythmic groups, which is what Messiaen and Boulez
call cellules. It’s amazing, because I did Schillinger long before I knew of Boulez and
Stockhausen. And when I first talked to Stockhausen in Cologne, in 1956, our
vocabularies were very similar. I had the Schillinger background, and he had the serial
background, the Messiaen kind of thing. David Tudor had Messiaen’s Mort d’adieu5
and Intensités6 when I first met him. They were astonishing. There, you have
coordination of time structures, rhythm, pitch, duration, and dynamics. It’s a first
example of total serialisation. I didn’t do total serialisation, but rhythmic
organisation was tremendously important. And that’s all Schillinger.

JY: Was it similar to the principle of earlier isorhythmic music?

EB: Yes, it was. We obviously had twelve tones. But the rhythmic group may be, say,
fifteen attacks. So it would keep cycling and extending itself. It’s a generative growth
principle. That’s the way I did those pieces. And just as with Messiaen, you could cut
up the rhythmic group into three groups of five attacks each: A, B and C. Then you
do the permutations of that, B-C-A, et cetera, to get six different versions. It was a big
thing with Schillinger: economy, and creating coherence through such rational
division. The same material keeps coming back, but it doesn’t sound like Philip Glass
or Steve Reich, though there’s a similar kind of coherence injected into it. The
Schillinger thing gave me a completely fresh and individual point of view from other
people I knew.

JY: Did dance have an influence on your music?

 294 J. Yaffé
EB: Well, yeah. We moved here in August or September of 1952, and Carolyn
immediately started taking classes with Merce. She became a member of his company
right away. I think it was soon after that they did their first company performance.
Paul Taylor was also dancing with Merce, at that time. I would go to rehearsals
frequently, and I remember sitting in Merce’s studio, it was on Seventh Avenue, a
small studio upstairs. Merce was choreographing something. I was in the midst of
Folio.7 Merce handed me a stopwatch and said, ‘This dance is supposed to be fifteen
minutes long. Would you mind timing it for me?’ So bang! I start the stopwatch, and
he does it. He has no music; the dancers had no music. Seven or eight dancers, fifteen
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minutes around the room, not bumping into each other. And Merce used to do [he
alternately claps his hands and snaps his fingers loudly in rhythm], but only once in a
while. Basically, they were just dancing off of each other, in relationship to each other.
Finally, Merce finishes the dance and I stop the stopwatch: fourteen minutes and
forty-five seconds! Over a period of fifteen minutes, they were fifteen seconds off. But
that wasn’t off, it was just a flexible situation.
That rehearsal was a revelation to me, in the sense of ‘kinesthetic memory’. I was
experimenting in this weird notation idea, where I wanted there to be more intimacy
between things, and I didn’t want the regimentation of metre. And rather than have
musicians, like a string quartet, counting, it gave me the conviction that they can hear
each other and play within a certain amount of time, even in a new piece. That’s
when I came up with time notation—they later called it proportional notation—
notation relative to time rather than metre. That was a very important thing. It came
mostly from the way those dancers had physically put together the piece without
music.
This is one of the things John Cage and Merce were so wildly devoted to: the fact
that the music is not supported by dance, and the dance is not supported by music.
It’s not a Mickey Mouse situation. They exist separately, then they go together, simply
because time goes on; the music’s played, and the dance is danced. But Merce was far
more structurally coherent, and logically developmental, in his choreography than
John was in his music.
I’ll tell you an interesting story. Merce choreographed to three or four different
works of mine. One piece was to a David Tudor realisation of Four Systems.8 Merce
called it Four Dancers. And for the first time, he choreographed an open-form dance.
I don’t think he did it again after that. I asked him, ‘You don’t like the way it turned
out?’ He said, ‘Yes, but it’s so dangerous!’ What he meant was, I can have ninety-eight
musicians performing, and the sounds can collide without anyone getting hurt; but
four dancers not knowing what the others are going to do . . . they could break each
other’s bones. That was how he explained not doing open-form dance pieces again.

JY: Paint me a picture of your artistic environment in New York City in 1952.

EB: For some reason, when we arrived, John was not here. But Morton Feldman was
here, and John had given us an introduction to Morty. Morty was so friendly, so
 Contemporary Music Review 295
marvellous. He was very much into the world of painting and was friends with a lot
of painters. So the artistic milieu which we fell into was not so much musical as it was
the world of abstract expressionism: Bill De Kooning, Franz Kline, Rothko . . . these
people were just beginning to get known. Morty worked in his family’s clothing
business. But John had no money, Carolyn and I had no money and most of the
painters had no money. They were not these famous people, at that point. They were
getting bad reviews. The Herald Tribune . . . and I remember her name: Emily
Genauer. She used to knock abstract expressionism as self-indulgent nonsense. But
we all believed in it.
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John and I used to work on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape from ten in the
morning until four or five in the afternoon. Then we’d meet Merce and Carolyn.
They’d make dinner, or we’d make dinner, or we’d go over here to the Cedar Bar, on
University Place. Anyway, David Tudor and John had started the project before I ever
came to New York, and when I came, I immediately started working on it. John,
David and I were each paid forty dollars a week! David seldom showed up to cut and
splice. Number one, it bored him. And two, he was practising our piano music—John
was setting up concerts, and David had to practise all the time. We were splicing
John’s Williams Mix9 and my Octet.10 We also worked on a piece by Morty, which he
ultimately rejected [a hearty laugh], after we had worked so hard on it! One of the
main pieces, before I arrived, was a piece by Christian Wolff, which Merce
choreographed and entitled Suite by Chance.11 It was a purely electronic score. But
the Project used any sound that we could hear normally, or not. Paul Williams was
sponsoring it. We had no machines, nothing. We had splice bars, razor blades and a
degausser. We were recording at 15 inches per second and had the scores on quarter-
inch graph paper, the same size as the tape. With splicing tape and talcum powder,
we just followed the score. John always compared it to following a dressmaker’s
pattern: cut it out and stick the pieces together. That went on for about four years.
Morty, being a good friend of John’s, had immediately taken over. He was a big,
stout, boisterous, overbearing, obnoxious, sweet character. So he helped us. We
finally got an apartment on Cornelia Street, by Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, a
little tiny place. It was right next to Washington Square Park. Morty took us through
the park. You know those chess tables in the far corner? Well, he said, ‘Now this is
OK. You can be here. But we sit on these benches, here. We never sit on the other
side. We always sit here. This is where you walk, and don’t pay attention to those
other people. You meet Bill De Kooning here sometimes, you meet me here
sometimes . . .’ He introduced us to the park. Then he said, ‘So who’s your
psychiatrist?’ Carolyn and I came from little towns in Massachusetts. We didn’t have
psychiatrists. But he had had a psychiatrist all his life. I’ll never forget that incident!
He made dinner for us at his apartment one time, broiled scallops. And one of the
first people he introduced us to was Danny Stern, the novelist . . . also a cellist. He also
introduced us to Paul Brock and Mimi Shapiro, very aesthetic, and very involved,
people in the visual arts. Then we went to the Cedar Bar, and there’s Bill De Kooning
and Franz Kline, arguing and drunk, playing around. Joan LeCho was insulting
 296 J. Yaffé
everybody, taking Morty’s pants down. It was a wild time, and awfully, awfully
exciting! We were all involved in something we believed in tremendously. But
nobody was taking us seriously. We’d give a concert up on 57th Street, and twenty-
five people might come. But it was the beginning.

JY: You once mentioned a walking route to your apartment along which there were
bookstores you would frequent. You were reading books on the subject of time.

EB: You know, I gave a lecture, one week ago, on my Calder Piece.12 That morning I
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got a call from a German girl, Ulrike somebody, who was doing research on the
relationship of abstract expressionist art to our—the so-called New York School—
music. I said that I was giving a lecture that afternoon and suggested she come. She
came. She’s actually an art historian studying in Paris. She obviously knows a lot
about philosophy and literature. She said that, at the moment, she was very interested
in writing about the connections between order and disorder.
I told her I thought it was interesting she talk about order and disorder, because it
had fascinated me so much, at one point. While I was doing research on Folio, and
into Twentyfive Pages13 and other stuff, I did a lot of research on time. It was one of
the things that gave me a great deal of faith in what I was doing. When our music, like
Three Pieces, Perspectives, Morty’s music and John’s music, was played at Carl Fischer
Hall, up on 57th Street—David Tudor also played pieces by Berio, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Maderna, Bengt Hambraeus, et cetera; a lot of new European music was
introduced in those concerts—invariably the critics would say, ‘There’s no continuity
to this music. It’s just a jumble!’ And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as
no continuity. Then I find, in a book called Time and Free Will14 by Henri Bergson, a
statement: ‘Disorder is merely the order that you are not expecting’. And that’s what
the music critics were doing, expecting a Beethovenian order. It was so stupid to say
that there was no continuity. It reminds me of what Gertrude Stein said about Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon: ‘When Picasso first painted it, everybody said, ‘‘Oh, how
ugly!’’ Now, everybody says, ‘‘Oh, how beautiful!’’’
Do you know Betsy Jolas? Well, her father was Eugène Jolas, editor of transition
magazine, a fantastic publication. It published, for the first time, Finnegans Wake,
entitled Work in Progress. Joyce was friends with Eugène Jolas, and Betsy grew up with
Joyce’s kids. Anyway, Eugène sent out a big questionnaire to a lot of artists in Paris, at
one point. And one of the most important questions was: ‘What do you think of
modern art?’ Everyone wrote paragraphs and paragraphs on modern art, and on
history. Gertrude Stein wrote back, ‘History takes time’ [a howl]. She said that there
are so few masterpieces because everyone is remembering themselves. She knocked me
out!
All of this influenced me. And so it wasn’t from music that I was inspired to come
up with open form, or even write most of my music. It was the feeling that I was
developing in a time when there were very exciting things happening, breaking with
simple narrative structure. I remember making the comparison, as Gertrude might
 Contemporary Music Review 297
have, of being narrative as opposed to mosaic. My music is definitely mosaic, not
narrative. I’ve never wanted to tell a story. I wanted to create abstract sound objects,
objets sonores. And so I’ve reflected upon that for a long time.
I have a few writings in my notebooks, from that period, with ideas like that. At one
point, I write, ‘If things progress the way they’re progressing right now, I think we need
to invent a new notation’. This was around the time of Folio. Folio is a sequence:
October, November, December, March, et cetera. And it was a sequential search for a
new notation. The new notation gelled, it seems to me, with Twentyfive Pages.
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JY: Would you say there was a kind of collective awareness of what was evolving, at
the time, in the arts and literature?

EB: I thought so, and I’m sure Morty did. He was very close to Philip Guston. And it
always strikes me how my music and Morty’s and John’s are all so different, but how
we remained such good friends until they died. We were very different. It seems that I
was more influenced in a Jackson Pollock sense: texture, density, et cetera. And Morty
was influenced by a minimalist thing, like Philip Guston, who was called not an
abstract expressionist, but an abstract impressionist. He used a palette knife and sort of
rich, but cool, pastels in very beautiful surface. Morty’s music was just like that.
Guston’s work changed radically just before he died, and Morty hated it. They got
into big fights about it. John, being twelve years older15 than Morty and me, had been
influenced by Duchamp more than we were—although we met Duchamp. It was a
tremendous feeling. I don’t know if young composers today feel that, or have the
interaction between painting and music and theatre and dance that we did.
I guess it was like Picasso, Diaghilev and Satie—although they weren’t as close of
friends as we were—or Picasso and Braque. The feeling that, out of impressionism is
evolving something new. Gertrude, in her inimitable way, said, ‘Well, it’s just that out
of all that impressionism, you need something like cubism!’ That’s what happens.
After abstract expressionism, Bob Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly come
along. They don’t want to repeat Bill De Kooning, so they went off and brilliantly did
three totally different kinds of work. And, like with John, Morty and me, there was a
kind of collaborative revolution, without being conscious that we were even doing it.
I once wrote an entire article without ever mentioning music, because I was talking
about the things that led into what I consider to be an unintentional revolution. You
know, we weren’t firebrands that said, ‘Let’s knock down the Aaron Coplands!’ We
were just doing what we did. What brought John, Morty and me together was the fact
that we had a wide, wide range of interests, not only music. Music was our material,
but art was our subject.
I also knew Max Ernst quite well, because he lived in Sedona, Arizona, and so did
my uncle. Max wrote a book called Art to Border,16 I believe. And in it is a story which
I will not forget. Max is in a hotel room, in Cologne I think, painting or drawing.
Pieces of paper were on the floor. It was an old hotel room with old flooring, and a
lot of texture in the wood. As he was walking around the hotel room doing his work,
 298 J. Yaffé
he would unintentionally walk on the paper and get an impression. Then he began to
look at them and said, ‘My God, this is beautiful!’ So he would take this thing which
happened by chance, add to it, and turn it into an amazing surrealistic artwork. In the
book, Max talks about that discovery—it’s known as frottage—and being very
surprised. He writes that, if such things as discovered art, recognised haphazard
chance art objects turned into art, continue to develop, it will infuriate a lot of critics,
but it will hasten to bring about the crisis of consciousness due in our time. Now, where
the hell did he get that phrase?!
I discovered that in Sedona in 1949 or 1950. My aunt—who was a painter—and
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uncle had the book. Max lived about three miles away. And when he and Dorothea
Tanning were in Paris, my uncle and I took care of his ranch. Max and my uncle used
to have contests, among themselves, to see who could make the most bizarre drink.
They would put tequila, scotch, gin, maple syrup, anything they could find on the
shelf, into the drinks and stir it all together. They got along beautifully. They were
both very funny people.
I just fell into that world of nonacademic, experimental thinking. For some reason,
it was natural to me. But we didn’t call it experimental. Varèse always said, ‘I don’t
experiment; I write pieces, and the audience has to experiment’.

JY: Perspectives, an awesomely difficult work, was completed in October of 1952. In

the same month, you composed October ’52 from Folio, a drastic departure from the
formalities of the earlier work. What aesthetic developments were taking place for
you at that time?

EB: I don’t remember exactly when I finished Perspectives. I don’t know if I finished
copying it when I got to New York, or what. But I wrote it, ninety-nine per cent, in
Denver. Then we moved, and I put the finishing touches on it. In a certain way, like
with flying, and music, and science and mathematics, I was always schizophrenic. Or,
to express it better: far more broadly than narrowly focused. I think real geniuses are
narrowly focused, almost obsessed with one thing. But I still play tennis, I still ski, I
still like to do a lot of things besides writing music.
This development had to do with so many different dimensions of things that
interested me. When I was still studying in Boston, I used to go to a little poetry
bookshop on Boylston Street. I came across poetry pamphlets by Kenneth Patchen—I
started to write a major work on his Sleepers Awake—Henry Miller, Ferlinghetti and
Rexroth. I used to haunt that bookshop. Among other things, I found a book called
Vision in Motion by Moholy-Nagy, a visual artist. He did everything from making
kinetic sculpture to films, photography, highly experimental stuff. There were also
Museum of Modern Art booklets on Calder. And, I remember that in 1949, Life
magazine came out with the first major colour spread of the abstract expressionists—
which was where they called Pollock ‘Jack the Dripper’ [wicked laugh].
You see, paying attention is where it’s at for me. I don’t care whether I have sixteen
string quartets and nine symphonies, or not. I’m really interested in the creative
 Contemporary Music Review 299
process, in trying to do something very personal that nobody else has done before.
And if you say that, some wise guy will say, ‘Oh, novelty for novelty’s sake’ [he slams
his fist into the opposite palm]. It’s not that. It’s invention. It’s experimentation. It’s
using your mind, using the culture you’re involved with to expand the possibilities. I
mean, art is for anything but decoration; it’s to expand awareness and to bring things
together. I brought Moholy-Nagy, Gertrude Stein, Max Ernst, Kenneth Patchen, and
a lot of other things, into my world. I was able to make connections between all these
diverse cultural influences, because I was interested in everything.
I still have that MoMA brochure on Calder. It just knocked me out, because Calder
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spoke about the likeness of a mobile to an aspen tree, the fluttering leaves, et cetera. I
just paid attention, and not just because I paid attention; I guess I have a low
threshold of boredom. I would look everywhere at everything. It just interested me,
that’s all. So all these things were happening while I was in Boston. And when I got
married and moved to Denver, this was all still in my mind. While I was there, I used
to make mobiles, to see what it felt like, and I used to paint paintings à la Pollock, to
see what the spontaneity felt like, and how much control you could have with paint
coming off a stick. There are still some of those paintings around, somewhere. It was
these things, the spontaneity of jazz and the immediacy of what’ll-I-do-next—you
don’t think, ‘What’ll I do next?’ You just do it. It was Gertrude Stein talking about
‘this-ness’, ‘it-ness’, ‘being there’—William James’ influence on her—psychology,
and so forth. It just all added up.
I had been working for a long time on how to get out of metric music, probably
not even consciously. But as I said, being schizophrenic, I was interested in the
constructivism of Schillinger and, at the same time, very devoted to the spontaneity
of jazz. So that dichotomy was always in my mind. After stopping studying with
Roslyn Brogue Henning at Schillinger House, in 1950, I began thinking on my own,
and began to meditate on putting these things together in different ways. The
question stayed in my mind for years: how to expand the potentials to include the
spontaneity of Pollock and the mobility of Calder. But it didn’t just pop out in
October 1952. I figured out, slowly, how to get at it, and it still took me a long time to
come up with how to do anything like that for orchestra.

JY: Can you trace for me the evolution taking place in the Folio pieces, from October
’52 to November to December and into 1953?

EB: I was looking for this thing of time and space. The only thing unusual about
October ’52 is the absence of rests. I think I wrote it with rests and then took them
out. It’s a dumb-looking thing, but it’s standard notation; just the rests are not there.
I was intentionally trying to throw the performer into a relational space, rather than a
counting space. It has to be read at a constant rate of speed through the systems, but
no two pianists will feel the space exactly the same. Again, if fifteen different pianists
played that, you’d recognise the piece, but it would never be the same twice. That
intrigued me, just knocked me out: never the same twice, but always the same thing.
 300 J. Yaffé
Like people: we’re the same person, but we never do something the same way twice.
Anyway, that was the first step. It was in standard metric notation, but uncountable.
It seems like I’m doing a dastardly deed on the performer, because I’ve taken more
and more away from him, taken more security away, taken more information away.
He’s thrown more and more into his own volition, based on my stimuli.
So October takes the rests away, but uses standard notation. Then, with November
’52 (Synergy), I just lined in between the five-line staves of regular music paper, added
lines making more fields of possibility. I used standard quarter notes, half notes, et
cetera. But now, I’ve taken away left-to-right. You’re thrown into a you-can-begin-
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here-and-go-there, or begin-there-and-go-here situation: multi-directionality. That

forces the performer into making choices and being creative. I’ve created a field of
activity in which you can go from left to right or right to left, up, down, or whatever.
Those images can be considered floating in space, moving forward and backward. If
they’re coming toward you, it’s a crescendo; if they’re going away from you, a
diminuendo. They can be higher or lower; it’s multi-spatial. The things are on
moving tracks. You can go from any point to any other point in any direction. If
there’s a half note over here, and an eighth note over there, and they happen to
coincide here, boom! They could be played simultaneously. Taking that to its logical
conclusion, the tracks could all end up together, with one huge chord cluster. Or, if
you consider the space collapsing from left to right and right to left, and from top to
bottom and bottom to top, everything will meet at the centre and just . . . [He makes a
loud popping sound. Mischievous laughing]. This is not exactly in the nature of my
conception, but it’s absolutely, technically, true.
Now, December ’52, as you know, is a rarefied, simplified thing: just sounds in
space, a kind of purist finality. John was against the piece when I wrote it. He was
against improvisation, and he felt that musicians would just play their favorite little
licks, that they would quote everything. I said no, no, no. He never played jazz, and
Morty never played jazz. But I knew that people who improvise do not just play
quotations. There’s such a thing as improvisational composition, but John didn’t
understand that. I had this idealistic, romantic feeling that I could, with a graphic
score and classical musicians . . . I couldn’t understand why classical musicians
couldn’t improvise, and why so many looked down on improvisation. The whole
series of October, November and December was progressively trying to get them free of
having to have every little bit of information before they had guts enough to play.
And I was convinced. John was not convinced at all.
To his dying day, John did not believe in improvisation, although he did a lot of
scores that people screwed up badly through improvisation. I heard so many bad
performances, mistaken, distorted and violated performances. And so did John hear
some. But he was not willing to put enough control into the score to give it an
identity. And people would mess it up. He used to get very sad about how people
would misunderstand him and his music. He thought, when he started doing chance
music, that everyone was going to be David Tudor. David could dress up in white
bow tie and tails, blow a duck whistle and pour water into a saucepan in the most
 Contemporary Music Review 301
elegant way imaginable. But when you put it in front of the Cologne Radio Orchestra,
they all clown it up, they’re embarrassed, and they don’t know how to be free with
honour. He was incensed. But he wouldn’t say don’t do. He was so devoted to so-
called letting-everybody-do-what-they-want-to-do, and then he’d be very disappointed
that they were not noble. David was always noble, and John thought an orchestra was
going to act like seventy-five David Tudors.

JY: It has been written that Twentyfive Pages is the first piece in music history to use
open form. But what about Folio? It predates Twentyfive Pages.
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EB: There are things in Folio which are open form, but I’ve always considered the
Folio pieces to be steps on the way to making a really, truly open-form composition.
In an improvised piece, the content is open as well as the form. The Folio pieces were
a first shot. But when I did Twentyfive Pages, it was twenty-five pages of fully
described material, of pitch, dynamic and duration, in a relative sense, but
nevertheless . . . And therefore, once the pitch is determined, the duration relatively
determined, et cetera, then you really have open form, and not open content, and not
improvisation. That’s an important distinction.

JY: Then ’53, for example, is a precursor of Twentyfive Pages?

EB: That’s right. It was a sketch on the way to Twentyfive Pages. Actually, it was at
Black Mountain College, and Merce wanted me to write some single-page pieces for
his choreographic teaching. There were more Folio pieces than were published, but
they just didn’t publish them all, and I have no idea where they all are. Also, I
orchestrated the entire Folio for some concert in Europe. So there’s a chamber
orchestra version around, somewhere.

JY: You mentioned once that June 1953 has as its impulse the floor plan of a piece of
Carolyn’s choreography.

EB: That was an amusing turn of events, if you’ll excuse the expression. She had the
floor plan, and I turned it ninety degrees and superimposed staff paper on it. Where
the dancers were positioned in her floor plan, that became sounds. That was just a
trick.

JY: November ’52 from Folio bears the subtitle Synergy. An allusion to Buckminster
Fuller?

EB: Yes, it’s in the sketch for November ’52 which is printed on the back of the
published complete Folio. When I was doing Folio, I read about Buckminster Fuller
and the concept of synergy; I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said that synergy is
the result of two or more forces coming into contact with one another, the result of
 302 J. Yaffé
which is unpredictable. In other words, the result is more than the sum of the two
forces by themselves. And it occurred to me: I have an idea, I put it on paper, I give it
to, say, David Tudor, and he does something else with it. I make it highly ambiguous,
I don’t know what David’s going to do with it, and sometimes David doesn’t
know what he’s going to do with it. So it’s like creating something, sending it out into
the world, and having it be a force. My concept is a force, the piece of paper is a force,
it goes to a performer—or many performers—and what they bring to it is a
synergistic force. Then it goes out to the audience, and we don’t know what they
think of it.
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It was a big thing, at the time of Folio, to allow the listener, or the reader, to be a
part of the creative process. We artists began to realise that we were unable to control
what the viewer of, say, a De Kooning was going to think. He had to bring himself to
that painting. Before that, classically speaking, artists would say, ‘Oh, I’m doing this
for the public, and they will understand’. But once you get into abstraction, where
multiple interpretations are possible, that’s where open form occurred to me: because
of the multiple ways of interpreting a Bill De Kooning. Some see Marilyn Monroe in
it, others see something else. With Joyce it’s the same. It’s impossible for two people
to agree on what Finnegans Wake means. Once you accept that as an artist, you say,
‘Yes!’ Then, the thing to do is to create a world in which each person interprets it
differently. Because that’s what they’re going to do anyway. So let’s take into
consideration the fact that everyone is different, and that there can also be different
versions of the same piece.

JY: Did this create any problem for you then, or at any time, with respect to the
question of whose music it really is, or of proprietary rights?

EB: No. I think it could occur to John. But it would never be a question in relation to
Morty Feldman’s music or my music. Unless you create the content by chance, it’s
very personal. And Morty and I didn’t work impersonally; we wrote sounds that we
wanted to hear. In my case, the form was open, and in Morty’s case, the form was
closed. I’ve heard so many performances of John’s music, the Piano Concert for
example—in Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin—and it didn’t say that John Cage did it. It
doesn’t have that identifying thing. Again, Gertrude Stein: The Geographical History of
America or The Relationship of Human Nature to the Human Mind.17 That’s a zinger!
‘I am I because my little lord knows me.’ That famous phrase! There’s a difference
between an entity and an identity. John creates entities, but they have no identity. If
you hear fifteen performances of my Available Forms I or II,18 you’ll recognise, from
the second part on, that it’s the same piece, that it’s the same content. That’s identity.
But if you hear fifteen performances of one of John’s chance pieces, because there is
so much latitude, they wouldn’t be identifiable as the same piece.

JY: Nonetheless, you’ve often been carelessly lumped together with Cage and
Feldman as so-called chance composers.
 Contemporary Music Review 303
EB: Completely inaccurate! The three musics are demonstrably very different from
one another. John’s influence, Duchamp, and his non-art, was very different than
Morty’s influences. Morty never did anything by chance in his life. When I do formal
lectures, I try to emphasise to the young composers that chance is not the only
aleatory potential. Xenakis’ stochastic processes are similar to chance, but they’re
mostly statistical processes that he uses. My Available Forms I or Available Forms II
are not chance compositions. I did not write the sounds by chance, I wrote them by
choice. One has to make a big distinction. I say that if you’re going to do something
by chance, you have to use a vehicle exterior to yourself, like flipping coins or yarrow
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sticks, or whatever. I could not tell you to go over to that piano and play a note by
chance, unless we blindfold you, turn you three times around and let you go find the
piano. But as soon as you touch the bottom of the piano, or the top, you are not
playing by chance. The only way, especially for a musician, to play by chance is to
have eighty-eight possibilities. That’s why John came up with what he called chance
procedures. Now, I never did that, and Morty never did that. But Morty’s early music
on graph paper allowed the pianist to play any three notes in the high third of the
piano, or any two notes in the bottom third of the piano. It was not open form, it was
structured in time and metre. But the notes were not chosen by Morty. That’s
aleatory, because it gives the volition to someone other than the composer.
Again, Available Forms I and Available Forms II are not chance compositions. I
wrote, knowingly and knowledgeably, every sound in them. The exception is one
event in Available Forms II. It’s in graphic notation, because what I want is a wall of
ninety-eight instruments mumbling. You can write a million notes, and it’s beside the
point. What I want is not counterpoint. What I want is ninety-eight instruments
indistinguishable from one another. And that’s a statistical event. I didn’t do it by
chance. I did the graphics. I didn’t flip coins, I didn’t use yarrow sticks, I didn’t use
dice. When Available Forms II is conducted, the two conductors are aware of what
each other has done. Therefore, they’re processing information knowledgeably, in
order to choose something from the other score that goes with this, or contradicts
that. So it’s a very accelerated process of choice. It’s aleatory, by Boulez’s definition.
Pierre is the one who came up with aléa, from the French. Pierre’s article in 1957,
which I think I influenced to some extent, was called Aléa. It means events not
controlled by the artist—I objected to the word; but there’s no possibility of getting it
out of the vocabulary, now. His Third Piano Sonata,19 like Stockhausen’s Klavierstück
XI,20 comes about four years after Twentyfive Pages, and Pierre knew Twentyfive Pages
from when he was here in 1952. I could get onto a big thing about it, but both of
them did it wrong after Twentyfive Pages. With Boulez’s piece there were different
routes. The performer can choose. It’s not really open form. You can go from here to
Santa Fe by five or six different routes, according to your choice. But again, it’s
aleatory, not chance.
When Lenny21 did Available Forms II, the concert was called Chance Music. I
objected and said, ‘As you will find out, because we are conducting this together, we
are not doing anything by chance. We’re on the spot and will make distinct choices’.
 304 J. Yaffé
He said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. But it’s just called Chance Music like that’. At this point, we
should be getting it musicologically straight, especially the kids in school!

JY: Writers have sometimes referred to you and your buddies as belonging to the
Cage School. Was there a Cagean school, and what was Cage’s influence on you and
the others?

EB: Morty always said, and I agree with him totally, that we didn’t study with John,
and we weren’t influenced that much by John. But John gave us permission to be
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ourselves, and to take a chance on our own instinctive artistic potential. He sort of
liberated and supported us. He would say to us, ‘That’s fantastic! How’d you do that?
What did you do?’
He was not even considered a major composer at that time. Most American
composers of the 1950s thought he was off his rocker. They just thought he was
cuckoo. But we didn’t. As I said, he was twelve years older, and, to us, he was a
recognised personage and composer. He had already done his percussion groups
and had concerts at the Museum of Modern Art. So when he went from Sonatas
and Interludes to the pieces for string quartet, you know, no vibrato, the whole
thing, he went into a chance thing. He went from tremendous colouristic detail,
precision and lushness to, all of a sudden, accepting Zen Buddhism: every day is a
good day; one thing is as good as another. He once told me frankly that he came
to a crisis in his own life, where he either had to accept psychoanalysis or Zen
Buddhism, and he didn’t believe in psychoanalysis. Also, I remember him once
saying, ‘Edgard Varèse is very important, because he writes directly for the
instruments’. I said, ‘So what else is new?’ But John thought it was extraordinary.
He was so naı̈ve about a lot of things. Often, such single-mindedness results in
self-repetition. I hate to say it, but I think John rode the chance horse for about
thirty years, which no longer makes it an avant-garde idea. But he was so hooked
on it.

JY: Was Four Systems originally a part of Folio?

EB: Not originally. But at that time, Associated Music Publishers would have looked
askance at me if I had said that I wanted this one page published. So I called it Folio
and Four Systems. It just seemed to be a reasonable place to put it.
It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music rehearsals for Spring, Women and People,
Merce’s choreography of my Indices,22 that John and I found out it was David
Tudor’s birthday. We were backstage, and Merce said, ‘Are you coming to the studio
for David’s birthday party?’ John and I just looked at each other . . . I immediately
found a piece of cardboard, and John found something. John wrote Music for Carillon
I, and I wrote four systems of piano music, right there on the spot. We presented
them to David that night, at the party. The title actually came from David. He called
me up once and said, ‘I’d like to play that piece you wrote for me on my birthday,
 Contemporary Music Review 305
next month’. ‘You mean you can actually play it?’ I asked. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘and I think
we should call it Four Systems.’

JY: Tell me about Forgotten Piece.23

EB: I’ve forgotten [a belly laugh]! Actually, I just discovered it in my manuscripts, one
day. It’s written for four pianos. We did a concert for multiple pianos, in the early
days, and I think I must have been writing it for that particular concert. But I never
finished it, and I forgot about it. When David Arden said he wanted to record the
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complete piano works, it occurred to me that it was a viable piece, some very good
writing, and that I could make—or he could make—a version for one piano.

JY: How do you account for the European musical community taking to your music
so avidly?

EB: They locked on to my, and John’s, music because we were what they called
antiauthoritarian. They had just gone through that Hitler thing. I was in Europe for
the first time at the end of ’56 and beginning of ’57. In Cologne, I met Heinz-Klaus
Metzger and Sylvano Bussotti, who were living together, and Hans Helms, a
musicologist. Helms and Metzger were both disciples of Horckheimer and Adorno,
and those two philosophers were absolutely, insanely, against authoritarianism. You
know, Adorno lived in this country during the war. He wrote a book called The
Authoritarian Personality.24 Helms and Metzger were crazy about my music. Because,
they see Folio: the composer’s not there, it doesn’t need a conductor; it’s completely
antiauthoritarian. And they hated Karlheinz,25 because Karlheinz was real
dictatorial . . . control, control, control.
John and I represented Nirvana to them, because we were anti-dictatorial and
allowed freedom to people. Morty and I were once interviewed by Metzger for an
RCA record,26 in Cologne, and I could not get it into Metzger’s mind that I had not
done these things politically. I said that I’m interested in inviting the performers into
the process. I used to play with jazz musicians. We were equal. We played together,
we worked together, we conversed together [he scats an exchange of jazz improvisation
between instruments]. But he couldn’t understand that. In his world, it was a political
statement. You’ve done away with the conductor, you’ve done away with everything
authoritarian. They were—and still are—so ingrained with political activism.
When Maderna and I first conducted Available Forms II in Cologne, Helms wrote
an introduction to the programme. He wrote, ‘It’s like the Declaration of
Independence! America the Beautiful! Everybody is free!’ Well, everybody is not free
in that piece. But he was so far to one side that he couldn’t get it. Morty had the same
problem. They thought his very quiet music was a statement against rock-and-roll, or
something. It was very shortsighted, from people who have quite developed intellects.
Early on, Carolyn and I used to stay with the Metzgers when we were in Cologne.
Carolyn would get into big arguments with Heinz, because he was so dogmatic. He
 306 J. Yaffé
fancied himself this liberator, or something. I’ll never forget an incident that knocked
us out. He had the idea that people in America were very, very advanced. He asked
what kind of a house we lived in. We said that, in Denver, we had a wooden house in
the country. ‘A wooden house?!’ he said. You see, he was always demanding money
from rich Germans. He had an IBM typewriter and an Eames lounge chair. He didn’t
make a nickel. He would just go to people—and Karlheinz did this, too—and say, ‘I
have to do my work. You have to give me money. I need an IBM typewriter, a
comfortable chair and a very good apartment’. He had a better place than Carolyn
and I ever had, and he’s crying about how exploitative Americans are. Of course,
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anyone who has a wooden house couldn’t possibly be serious!

JY: One of the most exciting features of the new recording of your solo piano works is
the premiere of Summer Suite ’95, written especially for David Arden. It’s your first
composition for solo piano in more than thirty years, since Corroboree.27 What was
your goal this time around, and what particular challenges, if any, did the
composition of the piece present to you?

EB: The BBC wanted David to record a programme of my piano music, and they
demanded that a brand new piece be included. So David asked me. Part of the
challenge, and part of the solution, was the computer, which I had never used before.
It intrigued me to see what I could do with it. As usual, I started with graphically
sketching an idea, or structure—range density, et cetera—then saw if I could play my
sketches. It’s like a dancer dancing, or a jazz musician performing, except I’m not
following anyone else’s tune. I would work at the keyboard, and one of the reasons
some of the things are so odd is because I’m not a good pianist. But I could play my
sketches and have them printed out. I kept surprising myself. It came out unlike what
I might write plodding along daily with a fountain pen, but it came out highly
personal, because I played it. And then, I’d edit it.
Apropos density: there are two volumes of Schillinger’s work, and they’re thick.
There are twelve books in there: Book of Harmony, Book of Rhythm, Book of
Counterpoint, Book of Orchestration, and so on. Within this, he talks about density:
density as a primary component, melody as a secondary component, or vice versa. To
me, density, as a compositional principle, was one of the most impressive of
Schillinger’s ideas. It led me into working on an orchestral piece, where I would think
of what the maximum density was that I could achieve. Let’s say I have eighteen
instruments. I would use a stopwatch and count numbers to myself as quickly as
possible. Within five seconds, I could usually get to about twenty-two, the maximum
number of attacks in that amount of time. Of course, that’s not taking into
consideration leaps, et cetera. So I would bring it back to twenty, as a useful figure.
Now, the maximum density I could get out of eighteen instruments is eighteen times
twenty. That’s a hell of a lot of notes! And it comes like a tidal wave. I would do that
for one instrument, eighteen instruments, or combinations. Maximum density,
minimum density, density vertically, or sparseness vertically . . . from the lowest note
 Contemporary Music Review 307
of the piano to the middle note, to the highest note, is a kind of minimum density of
attack and interval. But maximum would be a wild arpeggio. And so, even Schillinger
led me into graphic notation.
I have many, many graphic scores, some of which have been realised and others
which have not . . . yet. I have always sketched them with the idea that they could be
realised. In effect, what I was doing with the new piano pieces was realising my own
graphic scores. Once I got the basic material in, I could take this note or that, run it an
octave up or down, lock it in, or try it and save it, or not save it. The whole series for
David was stimulating, in the sense that I was able to experiment again, this time with
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something with which I had no experience.

JY: Did you find yourself doing much editing?

EB: Not so much of the rhythm, but of colour and interval. Not that you have much
colour differentiation in the piano, but the relationship of an open fifth to a minor
second, to me, is colour. I would adjust those things in the editing process, which, at
the computer, was great fun.

JY: I recall that you had a tough time getting started on the composition of the piece,
because you didn’t want to repeat yourself, or anyone else.

EB: Right. I thought of doing something like Corroboree, for one piano. I always
wished that I had a solo piano piece like Corroboree. I love that piece, and in writing
it, I think I solved a particular compositional problem. I wrote it in a café near
St. Sulpice in Paris, in the wintertime. I’ll never forget: I used to write these big pages
of piano stuff. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I always wished that
it would not be restricted to three pianos.
So I thought, originally, of writing for David Arden a Corroboree-like piece for one
piano. But that’s another funny thing: I have never used the inside-the-piano sounds
in a solo piano piece, because it diminishes the potential for forward thrust. With
three pianos it works, because I could always have one piano playing on the keyboard
like nuts. There’s always movement, and it can go as fast or as slow as I want it to;
and, I can have all the colours. But with one pianist—unless you prepare the piano,
like John did, which was a brilliant idea—you’re inhibited and restricted by the one
pianist having to dive in there, find a harmonic, or a string to pluck or strum, then go
back to the keyboard. You’ve got this guy up there doing acrobatics. That didn’t
appeal to me.
I tried three or four different things, and I threw away a lot. Then, I finally worked
it out. It’s typical for me. You know, I worked for months in Basel trying to figure out
how to write a piece for harpsichord, before I could find a solution which satisfied
me. Everything I tried sounded like ancient music. It took a long time to find a way to
make it sound like my music. As always, it’s a struggle, confronted by a blank piece of
paper. What do you do? It’s frightening.
 308 J. Yaffé
JY: I’m seduced by both the lyricism and rhythmic vitality of the Suite. And, I believe
it’s the ‘jazziest’ of your piano pieces. Am I off the track?

EB: No. You’re absolutely right. And, I’m not embarrassed by the beautiful harmonies!
Really, those are chords that I love to hear. A lot of my chamber orchestra music has
lush chords like that, especially Tracking Pierrot.28 The first page and the last page are a
kind of homage to Feldman, pointillistic with very fine, subtle harmonics, pizzicati and
such. Then, there is a chord passage, an homage to Messiaen, a series of parallel
chords, very jazz-like. I’ve always loved Messiaen’s music. I love Turangalı̂la.29
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JY: Do you feel that these new piano pieces are part of an organic evolution in your
composition?

EB: No. In fact, I think they’re a significant departure, because I performed them
myself. It’s the advent of the computer, which was new to me. I’m too old to have
done it in college. So I had to struggle with it, to figure out what the hell it could do,
and what I could do with it—if anything. Ultimately, I figured out a way that I could
combine old ways of my working and new ways of generating results. My notebooks
from 1951 to ’52 say, ‘I want to get the time of composing closer to the time of
performing’. I wrote that a long time ago. I was not a pianist, and my teacher Roslyn
Brogue Henning taught me to write twelve-tone music by playing it on the piano,
before I would actually write it down. I couldn’t play it, so it slowed me down. I’d go
to her, and, a week later, I’d come back with ten bars, because I was punching and
hunting all over the keyboard. I had lost the conception of totality that I had when I
began the piece. I remember thinking about how much time I was wasting worrying
about whether this F-sharp is going to be unacceptable to me, in relationship to that
E-natural. It’s ridiculous!
So I learned how to write without a piano. I never use a piano, except to check the
sound of large chords. But I never use the piano to write melody. I started writing
very rapidly, graphically sketching, then going back and filling in the notes. I wanted
to outdistance my critical faculties; in other words, get a direct output from my mind,
and get it down as quickly as possible. Again, it’s the immediacy, the improvisation,
the spontaneity, the it-ness, the now-ness of the whole thing. Well, now, after forty-five
years, the computer comes along! Basically, it has enabled me to take dictation from
myself, and to be able to edit it, transform it and modify it as I desire.

JY: In some of the pieces of Summer Suite ’95, you’ve specified, completely, such
things as dynamics, articulation and octave displacement. In others you have not.
Why this discrepancy?

EB: Basically, what is unique about my music is that it’s identifiable but flexible. I’m
interested in the difference between your mentality, Boulez’s mentality, Bruno
Maderna’s and mine. However, you can’t change the notes! In my Hodograph,30
 Contemporary Music Review 309
there’s what I call explicit notation and implicit notation. I was very curious to see
how much the performers’ realisation would be consistent with my specification. I
wanted some things fixed, and some flexible. It occurred to me, at one point in
writing these new pieces, that, here as well, this would be perfectly reasonable; the
performer’s creativity would be more greatly engaged.

JY: So in a way, it’s a kind of tutorial: you’re saying, ‘I’ll give you an example, I’ll hold
your hand for a couple of pieces . . . now, you do it’. It’s an interaction between Earle
Brown the composer/interpreter and the actual performer/interpreter; you lead him
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into it, then let him take over.

EB: Yeah, what’s wrong with that?!

JY: My final question: if the entire music world could be gathered together, and you
could stand up on a soapbox and, once and for all, make a clarifying statement about
yourself and your music, what would it be?

EB: It’s so frustrating to spend forty-five years writing music, and then to be talked
about in connection with only one or two pieces. I would like people to realise the
range, the aesthetics and the optimism of my work. And, I would certainly want to
clarify the differences between the pieces for which I am notorious and the pieces that
people don’t know. Everybody wants to reproduce December ’52 and the graphic
things. Even Grout,31 used in colleges, universities and conservatories everywhere,
reproduced a page from Available Forms I—which everyone was astonished by. But
I’ve written so much music in so many different ways. I’ve never understood why
people want to put me into a box and throw me away. The fact is, Elliott Carter doesn’t
know more than two works of mine, and most music critics don’t know more than
two or three.
Also, there’s a basic misunderstanding: I’m not interested in avoiding
responsibility. I certainly have never been embarrassed by writing a beautiful
melody, a very lyrical passage or what I consider a beautiful chord progression. But
I’m interested in activating, more and more, the interaction between composers and
performers, and making performance simply a more collaborative world—not in all
cases, but in some. Whether you succeed or fail is your business. The ones that are
failures to you may not be failures to someone else; and the ones that are successes to
you may not be successes to someone else. But the entire gestalt is so intricate, that
I’m going to die, and hardly anybody is going to know my oeuvre. Except David
Arden, and he’s making a difference with this new CD.

Notes
[1] See Dowling & Shaw (1946).
[2] Composed in 1952.
[3] Composed in 1951.
 310 J. Yaffé
[4] The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts was an influential Los Angeles dance
academy founded by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, in operation from 1915 to 1931.
[5] It is unclear which work Earle means. Messiaen has no works or movements with this title.
[6] In full, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, 1949, from Quatre études de rythme, 1949 – 1950.
[7] Composed in 1952/53 and later known under the collective title Folio and Four Systems,
1954.
[8] Composed in 1954; see above.
[9] Composed in 1952.
[10] Formally Octet I, composed in 1953.
[11] Composed in 1952. In an email to Dan Albertson on 4 December 2006, Christian Wolff
explained, ‘The tape piece used by Merce was called For Magnetic Tape and the dance was
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called Suite by Chance’.

[12] Composed in 1966.
[13] Composed in 1953.
[14] The common English title of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience.
Occasionally, the proper French title is taken as a subtitle, An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness.
[15] Earle’s memory is somewhat mistaken, as he was more than fourteen years younger than
Cage, and Morton Feldman was nearly thirteen-and-a-half years younger than Cage.
[16] Earle may be right; I have been unable to confirm this.
[17] Earle was nearly right. The precise title is The Geographical History of America or the Relation
of Human Nature to the Human Mind.
[18] Composed in 1961 and 1962, respectively.
[19] Notoriously unfinished, despite being premiered in 1957; in progress since 1955.
[20] Composed in 1956.
[21] Leonard Bernstein.
[22] Composed in 1954.
[23] Composed in 1954.
[24] Written in 1950 with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford.
[25] Karlheinz Stockhausen.
[26] Earle is referring to Music Before Revolution, released not on RCA, but on EMI Electrola.
[27] Composed in 1963/64.
[28] Another late work, written in 1992.
[29] In full, Turangalı̂la-Symphonie, 1946 – 1948.
[30] Formally Hodograph I, composed in 1959.
[31] Earle is likely referring to Donald Jay Grout’s History of Western Music. As this book was first
published in 1960, before the Available Forms were composed, he must be referring to the
1973 revision.

Reference
Dowling, L. & Shaw, A. (Eds). (1946). The Schillinger system of musical composition (vols. 1 – 2).
New York: Carl Fischer.