2024 . . . 16:36
In the 1950s, the New York School of composers, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown led a mid-century American avant-garde movement with their radical musical experiments. Brown in 1954 published his Folio and Four Systems, a collection of striking abstract-sound compositions emblematic of his concept of “open form.” They were minimalist both in material and somewhat in notation, inspired by the abstract art of Alexander Calder and Jackson Pollock. The famous score of Brown’s Dec.’52 in the Folio was just a stark rectilinear graphic of black rectangles separated in white space.
My massive project, Animated Landscapes – Sketchbook for Small Orchestra took Impressionist art as its inspiration. Wanting now to turn a fresh aesthetic page, I actually turn back to my own avant-garde experimental roots of the 1960s and ’70s. This FOLIO is a collection of 2024 abstract sound sculptures, in the form of mobiles: sound-mass textures that reappear in various orders and combinations. Following Brown’s model, their subtitles are dates referring back to significant times and places in my personal history — a kind of musical memoir.
The first mobile, Aug ’76 (Ann Arbor), builds massive sonorities isolated by silent time-space, similar to some of Morton Feldman’s piano music. The second, Dec ’86 (Denton), pays homage to Brown’s Folio with playful pointillism. My next Folio page, July ’17 (Good Harbor Bay), captures the rhythms of sparkling sunlight on windblown Lake Michigan. And the last, June ’24 (San Marcos), is directly inspired by Brown’s Dec.’52 in its narrow palette of static sound blocks, separated by lots of silent time-space in open form.
Thomas Clark - composer / digital artist 