Earle Brown: Synergy (hatART)

Another one of those out-of-print hatART discs from the 90s. This one offers three compositions by Earle Brown, with the oldest one, "Event: Synergy II" from 1967/68, in two different versions.

from the liner notes by Art Lange:

The score of "Event: Synergy II" offers five possible instrumentations; an ensemble of nineteen (eleven winds and two string quartets), only the winds or strings, or combinations of six or five winds with one string quartet. It is suggested that two conductors divide the material between them, in order to create additional complexities of density, interplay, and unrelated activity. (These two versions use only the designated "B" material, with the composer conducting the five winds and Steffen Schleiermacher conducting the string quartet.)The notation consists of four "events" or types of activity:
- a sequence of five numbered sections which specify pitches and dynamics with only relatively proportional durations,
- graphic and less rigid pitch indications on staves without specifying instrument,
- five chords to be used as fermatas, and
- a page of notes on staves without clef, barlines, tempo, dynamic, or durational indications.

Following the composer's detailed instructions and using these pages as a map, each conductor must direct his ensemble through the score, choosing who plays what, and when, with or without regard for what the other ensemble is doing. The assures that each performance will be drastically different from any other, as the two performances here reveal.

Page from "Tracking Pierrot"

"Windsor Jambs" (1980) and "Tracking Pierrot" (1992) extend these concepts even further, specifying the instrumentation (the latter using the same as Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" - composed 80 years earlier! - with the substitution of percussion for the voice; it's title is an homage though the music doesn't otherwise refer to the earlier work in substance or atmosphere) but providing a more complicated interweaving of "closed form" and "open form" sections and wider range of possible instrumental combinations to the lone conductor.... The music is no longer intended as a one-dimensional icon, but an unpredictable tracking of the "dynamic process" of form as it is created. It is not a statement of being, but of becoming...

The manner in which Brown has opened up the score to ambiguous aspects of formal organization does not lessen the demands of instrumental accuracy required of the musicians, nor does it dismiss the personal qualities of Brown's compositional efforts. There is an undeniable lyricism, as well as a quickness of line and gesture... His inventive scoring creates sounds and, more importantly, attitudes of performance that are unavailable in conventional notation; moreover, there results from the spontaneous measures a heightened level of creative tension and energy that is unobtainable from normal classical procedures.

1 Event: Synergy II (1967/68) - 1st version
2 Tracking Pierrot (1992)
3 Windsor Jambs (1980)
4 Event: Synergy II (1967/68) - 2nd version

Ensemble Avantgarde Leipzig
conducted by Earle Brown

(1)