The Calder Foundation and Earle Brown Music Foundation are thrilled to announce a performance of Earle Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–66), to be staged for the first time in New York City since 2016 as part of the TIME SPANS Festival. In this radical collaboration, Calder’s large-scale standing mobile Chef d’orchestre functions as both a conductor for Brown’s open-form composition and as the central instrument. Tickets are available for purchase at https://timespans.org. Sunday, 20 August 2023, at 7

Someday

Earle Brown was born on this day in 1926. The American composer’s “first encounter with a [Calder] mobile in the late 1940s prompted his invention of ‘mobile composition,’ a type of music later popularised in Europe as open form,” writes Gryphon Rower-Upjohn. “Brown became obsessed with the mobile’s musical parallels.” After Diego Masson commissioned Brown to create a piece of music for the Percussion Quartet of Paris in 1963, the two men traveled to Saché to meet with Calder, and Brown began to