Elizabeth Brown

Elizabeth Brown (born 1953) is an American contemporary composer and performer, known for music described as otherworldly, which employs microtonal expression, unique instrumentation and a morphing, freewheeling language. Her work is frequently commissioned for specific ensembles (e.g., Newband, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra) and has been performed internationally in solo, chamber and orchestral contexts at venues including Carnegie Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. She has written extensively for flute, unconventional instruments such as the Partch complement and theremin, and the traditional Asian shakuhachi and đàn bầu; she combines them in original ways that mix Western and Eastern, ancient and modern, and experimental and conventionally melodic sensibilities. Composer and critic Robert Carl calls Brown a "gentle maverick" whose avant-gardism bends and subverts traditional tropes with an unironic, unpretentious manner "that is fresh and imaginative, but never afraid of beauty, nor of humane warmth."

As a multi-instrumentalist, Brown is best known for flute, shakuhachi and theremin. She has performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, and the World Shakuhachi Festival (London), among other venues. Her music was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007; she has also received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New Music USA, and composition competitions in Tokyo for traditional Japanese instrumentation, a rarity for a Westerner. Brown lives in Red Hook, New York in the Hudson Valley and is married to visual artist and frequent collaborator Lothar Osterburg. Elizabeth Brown, Rural Electrification, staged chamber opera for voice, theremin and recorded sound, 2006, performance still.

Early life and career Elizabeth Cecile Brown was born in 1953 in the small town of Camden, Alabama and grew up on an agricultural research station and working farm there. After a year at University of Southern Mississippi, she transferred to College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (BM, 1975), studying with Robert Cavally. In the 1980s, as a member of a dance company, Gathering Wood, she began her composing career while in her late 20s, despite the lack of formal training in composition. After studying in the Kinko School tradition with Ralph Samuelson, and Mizuno Komei and Yamato Shudo in Japan, the instrument became a major influence on her musical language. She has incorporated all three instruments into her composing.

Composing Brown's experience as a performer has shaped the way she composes. The NFA later commissioned Brown to write a solo flute piece for its 2000 high school contest: "Trillium" (1999), a delicate, three-part work. In 2006, Brown joined Flute Force and together they premiered her "The Baths of Caracalla" (2007) at Carnegie's Weill Hall; the piece surrounds four alto flutes with pre-recorded theremin, flute and psalter whose dissonances, shrieks and slides represent the sights and sounds of the ancient Roman public baths. Critics such as The New York Times'''s Bernard Holland compare its approach to Charles Ives and the repetitive phrases of Janacek, while noting Brown's characteristic "clouds of unreconciled fragments" (e.g., a stray, poignant passage of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" on clarinet). The recording Blue Minor: Chamber Music by Elizabeth Brown (2003) contains five of Brown's flute compositions in chamber music contexts, including "Acadia" (1999), "Blue Minor" (2001), "The Memory Palace" (1990) and "Liguria" (1999), the latter commissioned for the New York New Music Ensemble. The fifth piece, "Figures in a Landscape" (1995) opens with harmonies recalling Aaron Copland, before creating what Kyle Gann calls "an inescapably eerie scene" by juxtaposing a straight-pitched piano with a wavering violin line like "a warped 78 rpm record." Several works—some created during national park residencies—exploit the shakuhachi's ability to evoke specific natural settings; these include "Acadia" (shakuhachi and flute), "Shakuhachi Duos from Isle Royale" (2005, evoking sound moving across Lake Superior), and "Afterimage" (2011, inspired by the Grand Canyon).

Brown's first shakuhachi composition, "Migration" (1990), combines the instrument with a string trio in a dreamlike, spare sonic landscape that recalls traditional Japanese music and theater while retaining a sense of European melody and harmony; reviews suggest the work, a memorial to a friend, evokes both familiar and alien, tragedy and transcendence. Two pieces on Brown's recording Mirage (2013) won Japanese composition competition prizes. "Mirage" (2008; Senzoku Gakuen shakuhachi competition prize) integrates Brown's western training and eastern practice with an iconic shakuhachi riff answered by a string quartet and gentle waltz. "Shinshoufuukei (An Imagined Landscape)" (2010; Makino Yutaka Grand Prize for traditional Japanese instruments, 2011) is a four-movement work using a traditional Japanese orchestra in a nontraditional way; it is a somewhat austere and atypical work for Brown, exploring themes of contemplation, focused attention and longing with meditative, but insistent action driven by percussion rhythms. "Archipelago" (1990) imposes a lyrical cello line over a hazy, multi-instrumental microtonal texture, balancing poetry, detail and the uncommon. "Delirium" (1997) challenges listeners with quietly playful, segueing quotations from "Oh! Susanna" and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Compositions for theremin Brown purchased a Moog Etherwave theremin in 1999; like the shakuhachi and đàn bầu, the instrument's flexible pitch and bending tones create an unearthly vocal quality. whose expressively deformed, liquid-like sound (blended theremin and acoustic slide guitar) reviews have likened to "submerged" Segovia or Albéniz. A meditation on progress and labor exploring the effects of the advent of electricity on a young rural woman, it was inspired by Brown's Mississippi farming predecessors and historic pamphlets distributed by the Alabama Power Company. "Piranesi" (theremin and string quartet) blends expressive, microtonal vibrato and the high octave and rare lowest register of the theremin to create airy, eerie patterns; Other theremin works include "Arboretum" (2013) and "To Walk Humbly" (2014), a memorial to Vietnam War veteran and peace advocate Colonel Robert Rheault. For the AIDS Quilt Songbook, she set Marie Howe's poem A Certain Light to music (for baritone and piano) in 1992.

Recognition and awards Brown has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships (1992, 2000), and Composers Assistance Program Grants from New Music USA (1994, 2008, 2011). In 2004, she was awarded recording grants by the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and Aaron Copland Fund. Blue Minor: Chamber Music by Elizabeth Brown, Albany Records (2003) The Universal Flute, Ralph Samuelson, Innova (2016) – "Afterimage" Emergency Music (Bang on a Can Live Vol. II ), Various artists, Composers Recordings, Inc. (1993) – "Migration" The Aids Quilt Songbook, Harmonia Mundi (1994) – "A Certain Light" Dance of the Seven Veils, Newband (1996) – "Archipelago" eyewitness'', Flute Force, Innova (2002) – "Travelogue"