Art & Creativity Quote by Earle Brown

Brown is praising Cage by framing chance not as a gimmick but as a cultural pivot: a moment when art stopped pretending it was sovereign over its materials. “Given” is the loaded word here. It implies whatever arrives before an artist’s will gets to tidy it up: ambient sound, accidental noise, the grain of paper, the quirks of performers, even the arbitrariness of a coin toss. Cage’s Music of Changes (1951) doesn’t just use chance procedures; it elevates them into method, making contingency the engine rather than the embarrassment.

The subtext is a quiet polemic against an older modernist fantasy: that control equals seriousness. Brown treats “inherited, functional concepts of control” like hand-me-down work clothes - useful, respectable, but ultimately constraining. “Functional” suggests an industrial mindset: art as a system engineered for predictable outcomes, with the composer as foreman. Cage, in this telling, is part of a wider postwar movement - across music, visual art, dance - that begins to see control as ideology, not neutral technique.

Brown’s phrasing (“to varying degrees”) is also strategic. He’s building a coalition: not everyone has to go full Cage to be part of the liberation. Coming from a composer associated with open form and the New York School, it’s also self-positioning: a claim that the future belongs to artists who redesign authorship itself, shifting the composer from commander to facilitator of events. The real provocation is that surrender can be a kind of rigor.