Earle Brown - Octet No. 1

Octet No. 1, for 8 tapes (1953) Octet I for eight loudspeakers was created as the second work undertaken by The Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. This was an enterprise begun by composer John Cage in order to explore the possibilities of creating electronic music directly onto magnetic tape, a technological development that had only lately become available. The main participants in the project were composers Cage, Earle Brown, and David Tudor, with the husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron providing studio access and a library of sounds. The first piece produced by the team was Cage’s Williams Mix, completed on January 16, 1953. Earle Brown’s Octet I for eight loudspeakers was constructed immediately afterward, and like Williams Mix, it was created in eight-channel Surround Sound. This was achieved by making eight separate half-track mono tapes to be played on eight tape machines -- Brown’s score contains a diagram recommending placement for the individual speakers. In the twenty-first century the technology to create a Surround Sound CD capable of playing back all eight channels in exactly the configuration Brown originally specified is a reality; this indicates how ahead of its time The Project for Music for Magnetic Tape really was. In terms of content, Octet I for eight loudspeakers utilizes the same basic cricket and frog sounds collected by the Barrons that appear in Williams Mix, but has an entirely different effect. Whereas the Cage work was derived from a 183-page score and a typically rigorous application of the I Ching, Brown based his composition on a simple graphic score of only a few pages. The pieces are roughly equal in length, but the Brown is as spatially distinct and understated as the Cage is dense. Brown created a sequel to this work entitled Octet II, of which the score is still extant, but it was never realized in Brown’s lifetime. [] Art by Amédée Ozenfant