Earle Brown is Jackson Pollock in sound: random, scattered, shocking, surprising, messy, anarchic, free, expressive and abstract.
It is now known that during the cold war the CIA secretly promoted Pollock's 'abstract expressionist' art worldwide as part of a covert cultural offensive against the Soviet Union - Pollock's outrageous random paint slashes and scattered dots being seen as representations of the total personal freedom only to be found in the west.
Brown's musical compositions were directly influenced by Pollock and the composer, who died in 2002, was so concerned with personal freedom that he often hesitated to impose a musical score on the musicians playing his works.
Last week at London's Purcell Room there was a chance to hear Brown's Event-Synergy 11, a suitably anarchic signature work by one of the fathers of American musical experimentation. Brown's piece was performed by Lontano, an established group that champions the work of radical names in contemporary music.
The musical director and conductor of Lontano is the flamboyant Cuban-born, American-raised and London-based Odaline de la Martinez, the first woman to conduct a BBC Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
In her dark, well-tailored man's suit and sporting a brightly bleached fringe at the front of her short, black hair, Martinez exuded a zestful confidence. Event-Synergy 11 is a dialogue between two groups of musicians, each with their own conductor. On one side of the stage stood Martinez with her trusty band of string players - violins, viola, cello - and on the other side was American composer Daniel Asia conducting the wind section - bassoon, flute, oboe, horn and clarinet.
Three of Asia's works had made up the first part of the evening. Asia's work is widely performed and admired in the US and this concert was an opportunity for a London audience to listen to a composer still little known on their side of the Atlantic.