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.
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. Despite the area's cultural limitations, she studied piano, performed in church choirs and school bands, and took up the flute at age 16. After a year at University of Southern Mississippi, she transferred to College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (BM, 1975), studying with Robert Cavally. She subsequently moved to New York, finding work as a union usher at Lincoln Center—a three-year experience she considers foundational to her education—and was accepted into The Juilliard School a year later.
After studying under Samuel Baron and earning a degree in flute performance at Juilliard (MM, 1977), Brown established herself in New York's freelance performance community. She subbed at the Metropolitan Opera and New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and toured with groups such as Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and Philharmonia Virtuosi, gaining notice in the New York Times and other publications for her technique and musicianship. 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.
While on an orchestra tour of Japan during this period, Brown discovered the shakuhachi, an ancient Japanese bamboo flute whose varied, subtle tones she has likened to the private music in her head. The instrument evokes nature and was traditionally played by mendicant Zen monks as a mode of meditation. 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. In subsequent years, Brown learned the theremin—after seeing a documentary on the life of Leon Theremin in the mid-1990s—and the đàn bầu (Vietnamese monochord), traveling to Vietnam to study in 2000. She has incorporated all three instruments into her composing.
Composing
Brown's experience as a performer has shaped the way she composes. She gravitates toward instruments with distinctive, weightless timbres and the capacity for subtle inflections and wavering pitches, which glide in and out to blur or dissolve seemingly "normal" melodies and harmonies. As a result, her sound is often characterized as otherworldly, dreamlike and hallucinatory, whimsical, and sometimes, melancholy. Some writers compare her musical language to memory, with glimmers of thought emerging through microtonal expression, subtle textures, and unexpected recognizable sounds and musical references. Composer and critic Kyle Gann calls her approach a "smooth, introverted surrealism," blending stream-of-conscious non-sequiturs, strange conceits and quotations (of Classical, standards and folk music) into elegant wholes that draw listeners into complicity rather than provoking them. The American Record Guide writes that Brown combines "avant-garde gestures with open-hearted songfulness."