The interview with Earle Brown tells the attentive reader rather a lot about the composer’s personality. It could of course be just my subjective interpretation. At the time Brown came into his own as a creative personality, in the early 1950s, composers were motivated by the ambition to invent genuinely new music which went far beyond the prewar achievements of their older colleagues such as Arnold Schoenberg. If they hit upon a feature which appeared to have no precedence in music history, they strove to have it “patented” as their intellectual property.

In talking to Earle Brown, I had the impression that he needed the universal acceptance of his authorship of his new notational system and conducting techniques to buttress his self-esteem. Perhaps he felt that time was running out, that his claim to fame was proving tenuous, with his friends and colleagues of the New York Group, John Cage and Morton Feldman in particular, having an international following while he, Brown, apparently had none. Perhaps I was less conscious of this in 1984 when we did the interview than in the late 1990s when he came to Vienna to lecture to students at the university and it was obvious that his health was deteriorating. Time is ruthless but it is also inscrutable. Perhaps it will decide to relegate Earle’s music to the footnotes of music history but it may just as well ensure that his oeuvre will enjoy a comeback—not for its novelty, which will have faded, but for its intrinsic value.

I.

I’m not sure if Lutosławski “learned his notation system” from me, as Feldman said, but it is very likely that he saw it and was influenced by it sometime between my development of it in 1952 and whenever it was that he first used “proportional notation” and/or my “open-form” scoring and conducting techniques. If you know my FOLIO (1952/53) (published by AMP Schirmer), you know that it contains what I believe to be the first use of proportional notation, open-form, graphic scores, what I called “time notation” (to differentiate it from metric notation), etc.

David Tudor took FOLIO and other works of mine, Cage, and Feldman to Darmstadt in 1953 or 1954. Our works and methods were a very great surprise to the Europeans and had a tremendous influence from that point on.