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"Composing New Music: On Earle Brown and Morton Subotnick"
Earle Brown, Morton Subotnick, Art-Engine
 Press Kit
Event Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Location: Slought Foundation
Film Premiers Series
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Aaron Levy
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US Premiers of 2002 Earle Brown and Morton Subotnick documentaries. Art-Engine is comprised of: Evelina Domnitch, Dmitry Gelfand, Duff Schweninger, Willoughby Sharp.
Earle Brown, a major force in contemporary music since the early 1950s, died on July 2, 2002. A leading composer of the American avant-garde for more than fifty years, Brown was associated with the experimental composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff who, with Brown, came to be known as the New York School. Although only 25 when he first met Cage and began working with him as a colleague, Brown's musical experiments and philosophy pre-dated their first encounter. Among Brown's key works was Folio (1952-53), which Brown described as "experiments in notation and performing processes," a series of sequential experimental single-page scores that explored space and time parameters in variable and flexible ways. Brown composed December 1952 (the score was a stark, abstract series of floating rectangles) as a musical equivalent to Alexander Calder's mobiles.In the 1960s and early 70s, Earle Brown created the now legendary series of eighteen recordings, underwritten by Time-Mainstream, through which he introduced the works of composers such as Nono, Maderna, Kagel, Birtwhistle, Giacinto Scelsi, Boulez, and others to the United States. Brown was a collector of Porsches and first editions of Gertrude Stein.
Morton Subotnick (Mel Powell Chair in Composition) is one of the acknowledged pioneers in the field of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media. He was the first composer to be commissioned to write an electronic composition expressly for the phonograph medium, Silver Apples of the Moon (Nonesuch, 1967). This now classic work and The Wild Bull (also an electronic commission for Nonesuch, 1968) have been choreographed by leading dance companies throughout the world and remain in permanent repertory. In addition to composing numerous works in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written eight works for orchestra (including a Bicentennial commission played by the six major U.S. orchestras), chamber and ensemble works (including The Fluttering of Wings premiered by the Juilliard String Quartet) and music for the theatre and multi-media events.
Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch, as part of the Art-Engine collaborative team, edited the Earle Brown and Morton Sobotnick documentaries in 2002. As artists, Gelfand and Domnitch create interdisciplinary art works which integrate chemo-physical experimentation with optics and computer science. Curent findings, particulary regarding waveform phenomena, are employed by the artists for investigating questions of perception and immortality. Selected shows: White Box, New York; an outdoor water vapor and light installation in Wellington Tunnel, Montreal, curated by Quartier Ephemere; Belarussian Museum of Contemporary Art, Belarus; Museum Carolino Augusteum, Salzburg; Inauguration Show, Mains d'Oeuvres, Paris; "Interferences 2" International Media Festival, Belfort, France; 9th New York Digital Salon, School of the Visual Arts and Leonardo Magazine (MIT). They are currently in residency in Japan, at work on "Camera Lucida: 3-Dimensional Sonic Observatory."
To Cite this Page using MLA Style:
Earle Brown, et al. "Composing New Music: On Earle Brown and Morton Subotnick." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[12 February 2003;
Accessed 23 July 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11147/>.
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