Earle Brown’s involvement with the fine arts led him to reject previously fixed ideas of musical form and supposedly sacrosanct rules of composition in the early 1950s. His graphic notations, which are primarily oriented toward Jackson Pollock’s painting procedures, guarantee the opening of time and space which leads to the liberation of the sound and the expansion of the meaning of form. “[…] mobility of the sound elements within the work and the graphic provocation of an intense collaboration throughout the composer-notation-performance process – were for me the most fascinating new possibility for ‘sound objects’ as they had been for sculpture and painting.” (Earle Brown)

Christian Wolff was once the baby of the New York School, only 19 when he cast his lot with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown; in 2008, he is the last man standing. Solo piano music is central to Wolff's output, and on Neos' Christian Wolff: Piano Pieces, German pianist Sabine Liebner performs a nice cross section of his efforts in this medium from 1969 to 2006. It takes a pianist with some amount of insight to realize Wolff's compositions, all to some degree open ended, and he does not spell out all of the details.

This complete recording of the piano works of the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya demonstrates her individuality and strict stylistic continuity. From simple building blocks of sound she cultivates clear but complex structures.

Études australes is one of several large works Cage wrote during the 1970s by laying starmaps over manuscript paper and using the placement of the stars to determine the pitches. Cage used the I Ching to determine some of the other musical parameters but left the dynamic levels, attacks, and tempos to the discretion of the performer, and this has led to extraordinary diversity in the lengths of performances. The original recording by Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote the piece, lasts 169 minutes, Steffen Schleiermacher's version is 203 minutes, and the fastest, at 112 minutes, is by Claudio Crismani. That gives some perspective to the monumentality of this 2011 version by Sabine Liebner, which clocks in at 260 minutes.

Few atonal piano compositions are so amenable to generate new meaningful, extremely sombre soundscapes as ‘ Triadic Memories’, according to different modalities of execution some would call rendition. This one execution, excruciatingly slow, generates aural hallucinations in the guise of rational insights. Beware of the illusion of order, this Feldman classic piece proves that that is way more harmful, as in pathetically alienating, than the illusion of depth..

Morton Feldman's late period was characterized by works dedicated to friends, his "For …" pieces. One of the best-known and most frequently performed is the piano piece For Bunita Marcus, who was a composition student of his. The work consists of single notes and short patterns of notes spatially notated, without precise rhythmic values. The effect is of a very leisurely improvisation, using a limited number of pitches, played in apparently random manner over the whole expanse of the keyboard. Listeners expecting a structured musical experience governed by conventional musical logic would probably find the piece infuriatingly scattered and pointless.