The score for Earle Brown’s December 1952 is little more than a series of horizontally and vertically oriented black rectangles spread out on a square piece of paper. One of the earliest instances of graphic notation, December 1952 is largely open to the choices of the performer: the page may be oriented in any direction, while the shapes represent sound events in time, with various intensities, aggregates of pitches, or durations (though no key is supplied as to how that might work). Influenced by the delicately twisting mobiles of Alexander Calder, the spontaneity of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism, and the Afro-modernist traditions of jazz improvisation, Brown’s early drafts of December 1952 proposed a physical three-dimensional mobile of ever-changing rectangular shapes that would inspire a performer (he originally imagined a pianist) to be similarly spontaneous in “reading” the notation. The published version of the score, which he produced with the aid of random number tables, was intended as a snapshot of these mobile forms, in what Brown came to call a “conceptual mobile.” Unlike John Cage’s chance-based works of the period, which required a disciplined execution detached from expressive choices, Brown’s works were known for their openness to improvisation. It stands among the more pictorial contributions to An Anthology of Chance Operations.
December 1952 can be found in the Getty Research Institute’s unique copy of An Anthology of Chance Operations (1962), published by Jackson Mac Low and George Maciunas and edited by La Monte Young.
Used by permission of the Earle Brown Estate.
