On December 1952

By Earle Brown

My first impulse was to work in scoring and performance-process as such, both of which are represented in the score. I was first moved to think about such things by observing mobiles of Alexander Calder and the very spontaneous painting techniques of Jackson Pollock. Both of these things I vaguely remember becoming aware of in Boston around 1948 or '49 and I had very much the impulse to do something in "our kind of music," which would have to do with this highly spontaneous performing attitude—improvisational attitude, that is—from a score which would have many possibilities of interpretation. Under the influence of Calder, I considered this kind of thing to be a mobility, which is to say a score that was mobile—a score that had more than one potential of form and performance realization. I moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1950, and continued to think a great deal about spontaneity in performance and mobility in scoring techniques. But it was a considerable leap or difficulty to conceive of a score that would in itself be something and in itself imply many more things.