Earle Brown

However, the war ended while he was still in basic training, and he was assigned to the base band at Randolph Field, Texas, in which he played trumpet.

John Cage invited Brown to leave Denver and join him for the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape in New York.

Composers such as Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna promoted his music, which subsequently became more widely performed and published.

Brown is considered to be a member of the New York School of composers, along with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.

Brown cited the visual artists Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock as two of the primary influences on his work.

He was also inspired by author, Gertrude Stein, and by many artists he was personally acquainted with such as Max Ernst and Robert Rauschenberg.

[3] A great deal of Brown's work is composed in fixed modules (though often with idiosyncratic mixtures of notation), but the order is left free to be chosen by the conductor during performance.

[citation needed] Brown relates his work in open form to a combination of Alexander Calder's mobile sculptures and the spontaneous decision-making used in the creation of Jackson Pollock's action paintings.

[citation needed] December 1952 consists purely of horizontal and vertical lines varying in width, spread out over the page; it is a landmark piece in the history of graphic notation of music.