Earle Brown - Open Form

Open Form

For a great deal of Brown's compositions the music is composed as fixed modules (though often with idiosyncratic mixtures of notation), but the order is left free to be chosen during performance by the conductor. The material is divided in numbered "Events" on a series of "Pages." The conductor uses an arrow pointer to indicate which page, and with his left hand indicates which event is to be performed while his right hand cues a downbeat to begin an event. The speed and intensity of the downbeat suggests the tempo and dynamics.

Brown's first open-form piece, Twenty-Five Pages, was twenty-five unbound pages, and called for anywhere between one and twenty-five pianists. The score allowed the performer(s) to arrange the pages in whatever order they saw fit. Also, the pages were notated symmetrically and without clefs so that the top and bottom orientation was reversible.

Through this procedure, no two performances of an open form Brown score are the same, yet each piece retains a singular identity and his works exhibit great variety from work to work. Brown relates his work in open form to a combination of Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures and the spontaneous decision making used in the creation of Jackson Pollock's action paintings.