The New York School refers to an informal group of four American composers who gained international recognition in the 1950s: John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. Cage was the senior figure in this group and held a reputation for his avant-garde activities before the others matured, and his influence was acknowledged by the other three.
The composers of the New York School were united by an interest in indeterminacy, a compositional practice where aspects of the piece are not fixed by the composer, allowing for variability in performance. However, they each addressed this concept differently and even differed on its precise definition. This led to significant differences in their aesthetics and techniques, which ultimately separated them over time
Key distinctions within the group include:
Cage and Brown: The Rules of Freedom
Brown noted significant differences between himself and Cage. While Cage’s music was motivated by chance procedures, Brown’s open form relies on the performer’s or conductor’s conscious choice. Brown saw Cage as being more interested in experimental psychological and sociological works, experimenting with people’s minds. In contrast, Brown’s work was primarily concerned with modifications of the way music is composed, performed, and conducted from an aesthetic point of view.
Brown, coming from a jazz background, incorporated flexibility and improvisation into his work, which was natural to him. Cage, however, had no connection with jazz and did not like improvisation. Brown also felt that in his indeterminate situations, the performer’s “self can enter in,” whereas he felt there was “no real freedom” in Cage’s approach because Cage set up programs activated by chance, which still defined the potential outcome.
Brown and Feldman: Quiet vs. Gesture
Feldman’s music was characterized by its quiet, gentle, slow-moving, and beautiful qualities, which were completely different from Brown’s style at the time, which involved broader gestures, and intricate, weblike results. Feldman was not interested in chance composition or Zen, while Brown had an interest in Zen philosophy (though he stated it never influenced his music).
New York School – Shared Ground
Despite their differences, the New York School composers were good friends who shared a sense of “aesthetic unrest” and a feeling that they were doing something new and necessary that nobody else was doing, working on different but compatible tracks. They shared the idea, influenced by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, that in their “sound worlds,” anything could follow anything, challenging traditional concepts of continuity, rhetoric, and time.. Brown and Cage even worked together daily for over six months in late 1952 into 1953 on the Project for Music on Magnetic Tape. (Browns Octet I and Cage’s Williams Mix resulted from this work).
Ties to Abstract Expressionism
A crucial context for understanding the New York School, and Brown in particular, is their close connection with American and New York-based Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors. Artists such as Alexander Calder, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg were significant figures in this parallel art movement. The very notion of a “New York school” of composition is related to, and possibly arose from, this school of artists.
Brown was profoundly influenced by the immediacy, spontaneity, and “now-ness” of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly the “improvisational” techniques of Jackson Pollock and the mobility of Alexander Calder’s sculptures. This influence was key to his development of graphic notation and open form. He wanted to bring the spontaneous gesture into music.
Feldman was influenced by painter Philip Guston. Cage was influenced by Marcel Duchamp.
The composers and artists spent considerable time together, meeting at places like the Cedar Tavern, creating a dynamic and transformative artistic environment. Brown felt they were the “sonic extension of potentials” inherited from figures like Joyce or Stein and connected to earlier American composers like Ives and Varèse.
Not Just “Cage and Friends”
Historically, the members of the New York School, especially Brown, Feldman, and Wolff, have often been misrepresented as simply laboring in Cage’s shadow.. However, as Keith Potter noted in Earle Brown in Context (The Musical Times , Dec., 1986, Vol. 127, No. 1726 (Dec., 1986), pp. 679+681-683), the term “indeterminacy” tends to obscure the real differences in their aesthetics and techniques. Brown himself argued that musicologically, lumping them together is a “huge mistake” that stems from “gross inattention”; he maintained that if people paid close attention to his work, Cage’s, and Feldman’s in detail, they would see significant differences.
Initially, the group felt somewhat isolated, and their radical approaches were not widely accepted in the standard academic music world; many thought Cage was “off his rocker”. Over time, while they became recognized figures, critics sometimes still failed to appreciate the distinctiveness of their individual contributions, a situation that Brown felt was gradually being sorted out with closer examination. The New York School, particularly through figures like Brown, represented a significant challenge to traditional composition by introducing performer agency and embracing influences from contemporary art, literature, and jazz, expanding the potential palette of musical expression.
Want to explore their work?
Start with John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis, Earle Brown’s December 1952, or Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. Or dive into performances where they’re played side by side — chaos, beauty, and everything in between.
