Earle Brown, who has died aged 75, was a leading composer of the American avant-garde, and during the 1950's was associated with the experimental composers John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff who, with Brown, have come to be known as The New York School. Brown was born in Lunenburg, Massachusetts in 1926, and as a trumpeter in his earlier years experienced the typical New England band tradition. His early love of Ives, a fellow non-conformist composer, is reflected in an anecdote whereby in his teens he would listen to John Kirkpatrick's recording of the Concord Sonata at the local record shop's listening booths. He did this so many times the frustrated shop owner suggested that he simply took the record before wearing it out. Brown participated fully in the musical life on offer in small-town New England at the time, also sampling the jazz big bands that came to town and nurturing a long-time love of jazz improvisation. He went on to study mathematics and engineering at Northeastern University, playing in a big band at weekends. Hoping for the chance to fly in the Air Force, Brown entered the forces between V-E and V-J Days and so rather than flying the skies - much to his disappointment - his main participation was in military bands in Louisiana and Randolph Field in Texas where he became friends with, and played alongside, legendary jazz musician Zoot Sims. It was here, through a colleague from New York, that he became introduced to the writings and compositional theories of the Russian-born mathematician Joseph Schillinger. After studying composition privately with twelve- tone composer Roslyn Brogue Henning in Boston, Brown entered Schillinger House School of Music to study further the compositional techniques of the mathematician, who had influenced George Gershwin amongst many others. It was in fact jazz composition and arranging that Brown was teaching in Denver, Colorado, where an eventful meeting with John Cage took place in 1951. Cage was there on tour with Merce Cunningham while Brown's first wife, the dancer Carolyn Brown, danced in a master-class that had impressed Cunningham immensely. Later during their stay, after a performance of a Cage piece, Earle asked him "what is the connection of your music to that of Anton Webern?" - Cage was surprised that somebody was familiar with Webern's music and with the highly experimental music that Brown was writing at the time, especially in Denver, and after further acquaintance with the Browns, it was agreed that they both join Cage and Cunningham in New York.

Carolyn was to become one of the stars of the Cunningham Company while Earle worked with Cage on the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, with both Cage and himself spending most of the weekdays painstakingly assembling tape parts for electronic pieces. Brown's own 'Octet for 8 Channel Tape' was constructed using the off-cuts of material leftover from the other pieces. Brown had now joined an informal grouping of composers that were later to be known - perhaps artificially - as the 'New York School' with Morton Feldman, pianist David Tudor and Christian Wolff together with Cage himself. Brown's work at the time, even before his meeting with Cage, reflected his interest in a variety of cultural activity - from the poetry of Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others, through to the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters, in particular Pollock, Alexander Calder as well as scientific thinking around probability, randomness, and indeterminacy. Always interested in the visual arts Brown also became friends with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, feeling a particular affinity for the latter' s combine paintings and other work.

A key work was 'Folio' of 1952 -53, which Brown described as "experiments in notation and performing processes", a series of sequential experimental single page scores exploring space and time parameters in variable and flexible ways. 'December 1952' - a stark abstract series of floating rectangles - was composed as a musical equivalent to Calder's Mobiles. As a graphic score it is perhaps one of the most famous and audacious examples. Like Cage's 4' 33", it was a watershed through which the composer passed and he felt no need to repeat it. It did, however, open up the whole question of interpretation and mobility within performance. It can still inspire animated discussion as to its viability as a score, and its relation to composition and improvisation, especially with regard to Brown's own realisations which often, surprisingly, did not always easily fit the visual impression of the score itself. Brown's next task was to realize a mode of composition that would allow for both highly determined events and spontaneous flexibility. The result was what he called 'Open Form' exemplified by '25 Pages' (1953) for 1-25 grand pianos, precisely notated but with each page to be played in any order, and designed so cleverly that they can be played either way up. Brown wryly noted that he had not had many performances that made use of the full quota of pianos he had suggested. It should be said that Brown brought to the Cage group a very different sensibility - at times aggressive, virtuoso and rapid-fire, at others, exploring an austere, monumental and mobile stillness - always a far cry from the fragility of some of the music of Feldman and Wolff at that time.

Around the mid-fifties, Brown's music created considerable interest in Europe, as the pianist David Tudor had performed '25 Pages' at Darmstadt shortly after its New York premiere. Many composers followed suit with mobile structures, graphic scorings, and aleatoric elements, and Brown soon found himself in the thick of the European avant-garde. By the sixties at least, Brown was probably closer, intellectually and musically, to the Italian conductor and composer Bruno Maderna than Cage, and Maderna championed pieces such as 'Available Forms 1 & 2' for chamber orchestra, and large double orchestras respectively. Brown objected to the use of 'Chance Music' as the title of the infamous portrait concert of the New York group in which he conducted 'Available Forms II' with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1964. Here, he suggested that not all the music could fall under the rubric of Cage's attempts to banish subjective taste. Certainly Brown's approach welcomed intuitive and subjective decisions within performance. It was, after all, the inheritance of the influence of jazz improvisation - which favoured spontaneity - that had led him to Open Form in the first place. During this period Brown composed some of his most impressive and explosive works - 'Corroboree' for three pianos composed for the Kontarsky brothers, and the 'String Quartet' for the LaSalle Quartet. A busy schedule of recording sessions for Time Mainstream Records was also undertaken, where many first recordings of avant-garde and experimental works of historical importance were put out on LP's. He had also worked as a recording engineer on various jazz ventures, sometimes acknowledging many features in his own instrumental writing: the breathy wind-only blowing of Jimmy Guiffre being one example. The influence was reciprocal, and with the blossoming of the avant-garde in Jazz, it was only a matter of time that post-serial structures such as Open Form were of interest. Brown remembered conversations with innovators such as Eric Dolphy and others interested in such techniques. Orchestral pieces such as 'Cross-Sections and Colour Fields', 'Modules' and 'Time Spans' are fine examples of Brown returning to simpler material for larger forces. Shifting, monumental, orchestral blocks are set in motion here, with the emphasis on colour and harmonic density. 'Time Spans' - commissioned by the Kiel Rundfunk for the Munich Olympics in 1972 is growling, craggy, and beautifully austere piece, which includes two pianos within the orchestra. All of these pieces and the London Sinfonietta commission 'Centering' for violin and ensemble certainly deserve to be better known.

Despite the diversity of his output, it remains a 'difficult' language that Brown explored, as close to European high modernism as to the Americans. Some pieces from the 50's look far forward to 'New Complexity' - Music for Cello and Piano of 1955, for example. The music of the 90's was imbued with a warmth which would become increasingly present; a shade of lyricism was now intermingled with the typically quick gestures and timbral concerns of the earlier music. 'Tracking Pierrot', for small enemble, and 'Special Events' for Cello and Piano, all composed during this period consolidate various techniques and signature gestures with Open Form passages. Despite ill health from 1995 onwards, Brown participated in concert engagements in the United States, and in Europe, including Vienna, Leipzig, London, Bremen , Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, the Prague International Music Festival, and in an homage by Frankfurt's Ensemble Moderne.

As a conductor, Brown could transform himself into a powerhouse of energy moulding and sculpting a musical space from instrumental colours on the spot, even when offstage he was increasingly frail due to illness. He appreciated what musicians brought to a performance. If the rhythm, for example, remained open on the score, he would accept what was brought to it as an individual contribution. A musician's background, for Brown, was part of the performative event, as Feldman observed: "Brown's notation, in fact, is geared to counteract the discrepancy between the written page and the performance." Brown himself expressed it in general terms in conversation with record producer John Yaffe: " .I'm interested in activating more and more, the interaction between composers and performers, and making music a more collaborative world ." It is easy to forget how foreign improvisation was to classically trained musicians in 1951 when Brown started to experiment with moving in this direction. Performance was, for him, not just collaboration, but also a joie de vivre, a space for passion and, typically for this composer, humour. He received numerous awards, commissions and residencies including a Guggenheim award and an honorary doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory in 1970, The Brandeis Creative Arts Award, The John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the Letter of Distinction from the American Music Centre, among many others.

For the past 30 years, he has lived with his second wife Susan Sollins in their homes in Rye, New York and Manhattan, travelling frequently for international residencies at various institutions Including Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals, Basel and Freiburg Conservatories, and most recently in Autumn, 2001, with MusikFabrik which is based in Dusseldorf.

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