Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of open form, a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since — notably the downtown New York scene

Downtown music

Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music. The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono—one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon—opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street to be used...

 of the 1980s (see John Zorn

John Zorn

John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...

) and generations of younger composers.

Among his most famous works are December 1952 with its use of a 'radical' (entirely graphic) score, the open form pieces Available Forms I & II, Centering, and Cross Sections and Color Fields.
Brown first devoted himself to playing jazz.