This morning I found myself suddenly very involved with the first of Earl Brown�s 25 pages. It is really quite a nice surprise that someone has bothered to put MIDI files of all this quite rare music up on the net for free. The best way to get to it is to put �Schoenberg� �MIDI� and �Little Piano Pieces� into Google. It would be good to find out what the �rules� were that Brown wanted to be applied to these pieces � I get the impression that the pieces could be played in parallel. The MIDI files play quite nicely on this machine � the piano sounds quite good and I think there is a fair amount of expressive information in the files. I have had a quick-ish scout round on the net to see if there is any summary of the overall scheme � no success so far. Anyway the files loop away which is useful in terms of getting into what they might be �about�.

Brown has just died and here is the obituary from the Village Voice � by the same criric who wrote about the Well Tuned Piano . Of the four composers of the New York School I am most familiar with Cage and Feldman, a little familiar with Brown and pretty ignorant about Wolff. Now read on.

�Composing in the Air

Within the context of what's been called the "New York School"�John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, whose freedom-inspiring musics so complemented each other�Brown always struck me as, in a way, the most European. European in his elegance, his polish, his expensive cigarettes, and the way his music fit into the sound world of the European avant-garde. Cage, Wolff, and Feldman wrote music in which conventional expressivity was sabotaged, precluded by chance processes or some procedure that prevented the performer from imposing his or her own emotional curve. Although Brown's graphic scores were not that far from Cage's and Feldman's conceptually, his music seemed to be all expressivity.

In fact, I've always thought of Brown more as performer than as composer. His music was so open that many of his best-known pieces, like the Folio pieces and Available Forms I and II, have little sonic identity. Brown's composing seemed to take place after the score was finished. He composed his music in the air, using the raw materials generated on paper as paint for improvised canvases. And he had a conducting technique, a style of moving, that seemed to make that concept of music inevitable. His arms seemed long and his hands elegant, making crisp gestures that elicited flourishes of sound in ever surprising ways and with great exactitude. Those hands turned orchestras into acoustic theremins. I've never heard a performance of a Brown score conducted by someone else that seemed quite as alive and authentic as the ones he conducted himself.

Which makes his achievement the most ephemeral among the New York School, but hardly the least relevant. In an era in which Cage and Boulez were both condemning improvisation, from opposite viewpoints, for its tendency toward performer habit, Brown made improvisation respectable. The mistrust of the performer embedded in a lot of early chance scores was not an aesthetic calculated to endure, and Brown's freer notation, flinging notes across a page the way Jackson Pollock flung paint, became a paradigm for an entire tradition of notation that specified pitch and harmony while leaving timing and order up to the player. It worked because Brown's counterintuitiveness was in his hands, and he didn't need it in his notation. Ironically, and more than those of his colleagues, his performances often sound much in the same sound world as European avant-garde music of the 1960s, but achieved with spontaneity instead of a million structural calculations and stringent rehearsal.

Of the four, Brown was admittedly the one whose music I felt never transcended its original premises. That perception might be an accident of performance history; perhaps his death will precipitate a slew of recordings of unknown work, as happened with Feldman. But Cage changed direction at many points in his career, going from percussion to prepared piano to chance to indeterminacy to theater and on and on; Feldman went through an amazing style transformation around 1970; and Wolff has gone through several phases, chance oriented, composition oriented, and political. But one heard little new music from Brown late in his life, mainly new performances of old works, and the rare more recent pieces like Tracking Pierrot�one of only two post-1980 works of his I've found�never left behind the pointillistic feel of the '60s avant-garde for a new, utterly distinctive sound world.

Nevertheless, Brown's musical practice may have had more influence on American made music than any of them except Feldman, and while Feldman's influence is easily recognized, Brown's is so pervasive and fundamental that it crops up in areas you wouldn't expect. He was a kind, gracious man, a charming foil to his thornier and more provocative colleagues. I remember him, at June in Buffalo, quietly disagreeing with Cage about Zen, saying he felt its purpose was to charm the ego, not merely bypass it. His work was a decisive influence on younger composers in the 1980s improv movement. And he set a standard for cleanness, precision, and originality in improvisatory work that remains an inspiration. �

Sooooooooo - I have started with the first of Brown�s 25 pages � both rightway up and the upside down versions. One of the versions became a slow piece � with tuba taking the bass, elec piano the middle and picollo the high elements in the music - lots of space. Somehow the second part used a rap beat and a more intrusive degree of manipulation of the original. Both sections took a fairly clangy Telecaster/valve amp guitar part (improv) - and looping was an important feature of the second section. As is often the case with me the material appears very quickly and then there is a much longer period of reflection and assessment. I am wondering if there is something like the New Orleans jazz funeral about what has resulted - slow rather doleful at first and exuberant to finish. So the obvious thing is to make it some kind of In Memoriam piece.

My way into using these pieces is broad and gestural to start and then gradually narrowing in on specifics.

I listened to the pieces about 10 hours after I first put them down � and still found myself enthused by the feelings that led to their generation. Well it�s a start...literally.

One specific might be what the final chord of that short Sch piece is � it is effectively an Eb minor and a G major playing simultaneously � does that chord make any more sense with a C and and E in the root? I am really not sure it does. If it exists as G B Eb F# Bb D � then at least it�s the same as the basic scale in Fifths � a combination of G maj 7 Eb maj 7 and B maj 7 � not that I am suggesting for one moment that this is anything other than an accident! Or maybe Sch was fooling with symmetrical hexachords � this is one of those. If you take the tritone of all the notes here � Db F A C E Ab � then you get the remaining notes out of the set of 12.

There is clearly a "rundown" at the end of the piece - a kind of rhythmic and harmonic game - where the "riff" elaborates into a low , major third and the G/B pair. The low third moves down stepwise - G F Eb Db and then C - quickly followed by the big hexachord. The G/B is in the gap between each step. What does it mean to "mean" the ending as a plagal cadence from C to G rather than a bebop style sidestep from a Db 7 to a big contradictory C chord. Is this meaning written into the piece at the start by events in Schoenberg's head - or are we always free to interpret the signs on the page - which is what Brown "intends"?

Suppose we decide to "mean" the opening minor third of the middle of the Three Piano pieces as a blues riff - which it obviously is - it happens at the beginning and the end of the piece and sounds like "Spoonful". Do we have to play it on valve amp setting or loop it with some Wille Dixon?"

After I finished with assaulting Earle Brown James came back from school � he had been clubbing most of the night � not what he usually does � but this was a kind of postgraduation binge. (He has been offered a job in Heals.) The school were advising him where to apply and they have suggested my old college � I think this is more a coincidence than a carefully crafted bit of nepotism � but it would be an irony not least because he would fit into the ethos of the place much better than I ever did. I said to him that an advantage would be that its not far to the History Faculty and so you can lie in bed later. This seemed to be a pluspoint as he headed upstairs to nurse his hangover. There is all this barmy stuff about offspring and identity. Because of the school pattern, up to here the two careers are in parallel - and onviously they diverge more from here on. There have been times when I have wanted to clip James round the ear, tell him to stop playing computer games and go out and join an art rock band.

They all looked so sane and sorted at the graduation - well nearly all - maybe there was a vein of reassuring barminess in the girl photographer. Maybe Vita will join an art rock band - she has already started the term by striding round with one of those big black rectangles with a handle.

Gilbert mailed with an encouraging message about the recent diary pages, I asked him if he knew Merterns � he said he had done one session with him which he had not enjoyed,. I read more of the philosophical final section of his Minimalism book � do you have to say that because a work abandons conventional dualistic development that it is about the ecstatic dissolution of the ego � or the overwhelming focus on the present and ego dissolution that characterises sex (sometimes)? I am not sure I am happy with that! If it were true it would make musical minimalism very different from the visual arts �where it is a bridge into conceptualism.

Part of the the minimalism of the eye is an enclosed "bluff" by the artist who throws the a shroud of simplicity over the work - others come along and read complex meanings into his gesture. Richard Wollheim redefines art as a result of inventing the term "Minimalism" and banging his head on it.

Andrew K mentioned a composer today in his diary � an English minimalist that I hadn�t heard of � Howard Skempton � he lives in Leamington � and dates back to The Scratch Orchestra and Cornelius Cardew. Well that�s propitious � I kind of wondered whether I would mail him - but my nerve failed at that point. There�s a site -http://www.musicnow.co.uk/composers/index.html - which has got about a minute of his from a piano piece � from a list of about 20 contemporary UK composers � quite a revelation to me and I would encourage readers to go and take a look especially at the Cornelius Cardew page � CC was Stockhausen�s assistant at the time that Lamont Young was at Darmstadt. This is Morton Feldman on the death of CC:

�For an artist, it is not one's conscience, but one's talent, making cowards of us all. Cardew's courage to dismiss an earlier abstract artistry of his own is indeed heroic. His career bears a comparison to D. H. Lawrence. Both set aside an evocative use of the language of their medium for a kind of "message" of sorts. Cage in his own way did likewise. In this regard Cornelius Cardew is not in bad company. However, it is in a work such as The Great Learning which I feel Cardew found a unique equanimity of means between a musical poetry and his political beliefs - something akin to what Christian Wolff is doing with similar concerns. As perhaps the last indigenous esoteric composers surviving on this planet, I deeply mourn Cardew's death. He wrote beautifully about my own music and played it exquisitely. Perhaps we are not that far apart than one might think. There will always be ... Cornelius Cardew.�

Well here�s a path to follow��.I think mine came closest to it when in my gap year besides studying jazz with Owen Bryce , I did some modern improvisation classes � but I can�t even remember the name of the teacher. I can remember Steve P doing an early version of �In C� with a group of �new� musicians loosely based on Kings but that�s about it.

(Oh � thinking of politically committed musical endeavours - I also played in a big band in the 1980s which only played left wing music from Barcelona � I think it was for a kind of dance called �sadana� . The band � Hullabuloo - convened itself as an evening class in South London and had an association with another left wing big band called Happy End (after a Brecht play).)