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Henry Brant, 94; Daring, Prize-Winning Composer By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 30, 2008 Henry Brant won the Pulitzer Prize for "Ice Field," one of his spatial music compositions, in 2002. (By Mike Eliason -- Associated Press) Henry Brant, 94, a Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composer best known for audacious works of spatial music, in which performers were dispersed around a concert hall -- even an entire city -- died April 26 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. The family declined to provide the cause of death. In a seven-decade career, Mr. Brant created hundreds of musical works for radio, film, ballet and jazz groups, as well as the concert hall. He won the Pulitzer for "Ice Field," a 20-minute organ concerto that the San Francisco Symphony premiered in December 2001. With Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, "Ice Field" featured strings and pianos on stage, while woodwinds, brass and percussion (including bass steel drums) sat among the balconies and terraces. The composer, at the organ, kept hitting the lowest notes to simulate an earthquake. Mr. Brant was regarded as an iconoclast, sometimes as a crank, sometimes both simultaneously. Writing of "Ice Field," critic Bernard Holland in the New York Times said the performance "lies somewhere between precision planning and controlled chaos, a mixture of smart bombs and dumb ones." Composers since the Renaissance and early Baroque periods had experimented with a spatial approach, but the music remained fairly homogenous. Mr. Brant's significance was his ability to unite disparate styles of music -- classical, Indian, Javanese, jazz, burlesque and others -- without them obscuring one another, said composer Charles Amirkhanian. Mr. Brant's "Windjammer 1969," which required the musicians to keep moving, was seen as fresh and provocative. New York Times music critic Theodore Strongin wrote, "The fascination -- and the fun -- in 'Windjammer' came from listening for the shifting values and changing relationships as the sounds moved in space." The works became increasingly eccentric. Mr. Brant's 1984 work "Fire in the Amstel" used four barges to carry flutists, jazz drummers and brass through the canals of Amsterdam as cathedral carillons rang along the way. The composer helped inaugurate I.M. Pei's Dallas symphony hall in 1990 with "Prisons of the Mind," a piece featuring 314 musicians scattered about the hall. The piece paid tribute to the architect's acoustical skill. Some reviewers found spatial music gimmicky, but Mr. Brant defended his method as a vital form of communication. "By 1950," he said, "I had come to feel that single style music, no matter how experimental or full of variety, could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit." Spatial music, he added, spoke "more expressively of the human predicament." Henry Dreyfuss Brant was born Sept. 15, 1913, in Montreal, where his father, Saul, headed the violin department at McGill University's music conservatory. Mr. Brant formalized his study of music theory under Leopold Mannes at what became the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His private teachers included George Antheil, who was pivotal in freeing Mr. Brant's mind from traditional uses of instruments. It was a success, and Mr. Brant's unorthodox compositions included kitchen utensils and tin whistles, the latter for a 1938 tribute to the Marx Brothers. One of his later works, "Orbits" (1979), called for 80 trombones and an organ. Still another, "Kingdom Come" (1970), featured two orchestras, one on stage playing dissonant sounds, while a second in the balcony used buzzers, whistles and air compressors. Mr. Brant worked in academia for much of his life and taught music at Bennington College in Vermont from 1957 to 1980. He also contributed to the orchestration of several Depression Era documentaries ("The Plow That Broke the Plains," "The River" and "The City"), wrote incidental music on radio broadcasts in the 1940s and helped orchestrate music for Hollywood films, including "Cleopatra" (1963) and "Good Morning, Vietnam" (1987). He told the Los Angeles Times he found those commercial assignments liberating. "I've had advantages which few composers have had in the 20th century, because of the commercial work I've done," he said. "In films, all they said was 'our budget is such. You can have this much for music.' They don't tell you what the instruments are to be or what they shouldn't be." Mr. Brant's most important early venture into full spatial sound was "Antiphony I" (1953), which was performed at Carnegie Hall and featured five parts of the orchestras positioned throughout the auditorium. Two years later, his cantata for orchestra and 100 voices, "December" (1955), became the first piece by an American to win the Prix Italia, a prestigious international competition sponsored by Italian radio and television. He spent 60 years sporadically writing an orchestration textbook, "Textures and Timbres," scheduled for publication this year. His first two marriages, to Maxine Picard and Patricia Gorman, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 19 years, Kathy Wilkowski of Santa Barbara; three children from his second marriage, Piri Friedman of Portland, Ore., Joquin Ives Brant of Escazu, Costa Rica, and Linus Corragio of Manhattan, N.Y.; a brother; and four grandchildren. Of Mr. Brant's major contemporaries, only composer Elliott Carter, born in 1908, survives. After winning the Pulitzer, Mr. Brant told the San Francisco Chronicle, "The main thing is for a composer to stick around as long as possible and keep working -- otherwise you miss things like this."

April 30, 2008 Henry Brant, Avant-Garde Composer, Dies at 94 By ALLAN KOZINN, NYT Henry Brant in 1995. Henry Brant, an adventurous American composer best known for his spatial music, in which the placement of performers on the stage and at carefully specified places around a concert hall is a crucial element, died on Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 94. The composer Neely Bruce, a friend of Mr. Brant’s, announced the death. Mr. Brant’s “Ice Field” (2001), which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2002, was inspired by his experience, as a 12-year-old in 1926, of crossing the Atlantic by ship, which navigated carefully through a large field of icebergs in the North Atlantic. The work, first performed by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in Dec. 2001, was in many ways typical of Mr. Brant’s spatial techniques. The strings, two pianos, two harps and timpani were on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall. Oboes and bassoons were in an organ loft. The brass and a jazz drummer were in the first-tier seats, and piccolos and clarinets were at one end of the second tier with pitched percussion at the other end and other percussion instruments to the side of the audience on the main floor. Mr. Brant played organ in the first performances. Mr. Brant was already an established composer of sometimes experimental, sometimes conventional music when he began to consider space an important compositional element. In the early 1950s, he began to find that as his music became more texturally complex, the details of the individual lines within a work became more difficult to hear. Inspired partly by the music of Charles Ives, who sometimes juxtaposed multiple ensembles playing different music, and partly by a work for five jazz orchestras by Teo Macero, one of his composition students who later became an important jazz producer and arranger, Mr. Brant began using space as a compositional element. He sometimes called it the fourth dimension, along with pitch, timbre and duration. His own first spatial work, “Antiphony I” (1952-3), was composed for five widely spaced orchestras, each with its own conductor. Simply distributing the musicians around a concert space was not the end of Mr. Brant’s experiment. Taking advantage of the new clarity that his expansive placements provided, he also gave each of the widely spaced ensembles music of a different character. In “Hieroglyphics 3” (1958), for example, a lachrymose solo viola is set against a timpani rumble or sometimes an eerie mezzo-soprano line; and tactile, delicately plucked sounds from a harp contrast with brisk, staccato organ figures. Other works bring together angular, contemporary writing, ear-catching melody, arresting jazz rhythms and world music. Henry Brant was born on Sept. 15, 1913, in Montreal, to American parents. His father, a professional violinist, encouraged his early interest in composition. When he was 9, he wrote for an ensemble of his own invented instruments. At 12, he wrote a string quartet. Mr. Brant pursued his formal studies at the McGill Conservatorium in Montreal, and in 1929 he moved to New York to study at the Institute of Musical Art (which became the Juilliard School) and the Juilliard Graduate School. He studied privately with George Antheil and Wallingford Riegger. Early in his composing career, Mr. Brant supported himself by conducting radio orchestras, arranging music for ballet companies and jazz ensembles and orchestrating Hollywood film scores. He also taught composition at Columbia University from 1945 to 1952; at Juilliard from 1947 to 1954; and at Bennington College, from 1957 to 1980. Mr. Brant moved the Santa Barbara in 1981. Last year he completed “Textures and Timbres,” a textbook on orchestration that he began in the 1940s. He is survived by his wife, Kathy Wilkowski; a daughter, Piri Kaethe Friedman of Portland, Ore.; two sons, Joquin Linus Brant of Esczu, Costa Rica, and the sculptor Linus Coraggio, of Manhattan; and a brother, Bertram Brant, of Dayton, Ohio.

Kyle Gann - In Dispraise of Efficiency: Feldman .

Happy Birthday! .

I love this recording, I know Angels and Devils (flute orchestra)from the previous release on CRI. Henry Brant: Music for Massed Flutes This and a few live concerts are all I know, I think it's amazing that he won a Pulitzer. I'd really like to check out that nine volume series on Innova someday.

They're stunning! My guitar buying days are over for now, but boy I wish I had the cash for a real nice arch top like a Sadowsky.

Albert Hofmann, 102; Chemist Discovered LSD By Adam Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 30, 2008; B07 Albert Hofmann, 102, a Swiss chemist and accidental father of LSD who came to view the much-vilified and abused hallucinogen he discovered in 1938 as his "problem child," died April 29 at his home in Burg, a village near Basel, Switzerland, after a heart attack. His death was confirmed by Rick Doblin, the Boston-based founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company developing LSD and other psychedelics for prescription medicines. Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), thousands of times stronger than mescaline, can give its user an experience often described as psychedelic -- a kaleidoscopic twirling of the mind pulsating with color and movement. After its discovery, LSD was viewed as a wonder drug with the potential to treat problems including schizophrenia and alcoholism. For the latter, some held the theory that chronic drinkers quit only after experiencing the hallucinations of delirium tremens. LSD attracted many prominent advocates. They included Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World," and psychologist Timothy Leary, who saw the drug as a potent way for people to live up to his 1960s counterculture motto: "Turn on, tune in, drop out." The CIA was also widely reported to have used LSD in experiments on unwitting subjects. This, and greater recreational use that caused some fatal overdoses, led to the widespread condemnation of the drug and, by the early 1970s, its criminalization. As a result, research permission and funding from state and federal agencies was terminated. In Dr. Hofmann's opinion, outlawing LSD made its use even more attractive to young people and diminished any safeguards. He spoke of many hippies stopping by his home on the way to their spiritual quest in Orient, hoping to score from his "secret stash." Dr. Hofmann came across LSD while working on medicinal uses of a fungus to act as a circulatory heart-lung stimulant. His first LSD "trip" occurred in 1943, a troubling experience that led him to write in his journal, "A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul." Dr. Hofmann remained wary of LSD's recreational uses as well as its portrayal in the media. "I was not surprised that it became a ritual drug in the youth anti-establishment movement, but I was shocked by irresponsible use that resulted in mental catastrophes," he told Playboy magazine in 2006. "That's what gave the health authorities a pretext for totally prohibiting its production, possession and use." Albert Hofmann, the son of a toolmaker, was born Jan. 11, 1906, in Baden, Switzerland. He was the oldest of four children, and after his father fell seriously ill, he was forced as a teenager to seek a commercial apprenticeship to support the family. While learning a trade, he continued his private schooling with financial help from his godfather. In 1930, he received a doctorate from the University of Zurich, where he studied the chemistry of plants and animals, and joined the pharmaceutical-chemical firm Sandoz (now Novartis) in Basel. Among his early accomplishments was the synthesis of an alkaloid that prompted uterine contractions in order to stop postpartum bleeding. In 1938, he was exploring a circulatory heart-lung stimulant when he happened on LSD-25 while conducting purification and crystallization experiments on the fungus ergot, which grows on rye. Ergot had been long used to induce childbirth. Lysergic acid is an active part of therapeutically essential ergot alkaloids, and Dr. Hofmann began combining it with other molecules for his research. At the time, LSD showed little effect on lab animals besides some agitation. It was shelved for five years until he, on a hunch, repeated the experiment to help him with another medical study. Having unknowingly absorbed some of the compound, he experienced a dizzying sensation that also made him restless. He wrote in a journal about this first known encounter: "At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. "In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away." Three days later, April 19, he bicycled home after consuming 250 micrograms of LSD in a now-famous "trip" that has become known as Bicycle Day. The route he took home was later named in his honor. That time, he said, he felt some of the darker symptoms of the drug: a feeling of impending death, of possession by the devil, of feeling violently threatened by family and neighbors. Above all, he wrote, "I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane." As he continued to study the drug, Dr. Hofmann struck a correspondence with German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline. At Dr. Hofmann's home in 1951, the scientist administered .05 of a milligram of LSD to Junger and himself as they were surrounded by violet roses, Japanese incense and a Mozart concerto for flute and harp. "Ernst Junger enjoyed the color display of oriental images," he later wrote. "I was on a trip among Berber tribes in North Africa, saw colored caravans and lush oases." Further controlled experimentation by University of Zurich scientists on humans subjects -- some with psychiatric problems -- showed a similar calming reaction. This led Sandoz to manufacture LSD under the trade name Delysid by the late 1940s. It entered the U.S. market and, during the next two decades, LSD was intensely researched as a drug to treat all manner of emotional and addictive disorders. Humphry F. Osmond, a British-born psychiatrist, introduced the word "psychedelic" to describe the effects of both mescaline and LSD while corresponding with Huxley in 1956. Dr. Hofmann later wrote in a 1980 book, "LSD, My Problem Child," that LSD brought him the "same happiness and gratification that any pharmaceutical chemist would feel on learning that a substance he or she produced might possibly develop into a valuable medicament." But he said he was increasingly disturbed by a "huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. . . . The more [LSD's] use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm." He described meeting Leary in September 1971 at the railway station snack bar in Lausanne; Leary was living in Switzerland. He said they had a cordial but strong exchange of words in which Dr. Hofmann criticized Leary's self-promotion and his "propagation of LSD use" among impressionable young people. According to Dr. Hofmann, Leary replied that American teenagers "with regard to information and life experience, were comparable to adult Europeans. . . . For that reason, he deemed the LSD experience significant, useful, and enriching, even for people still very young in years." Dr. Hofmann headed the research department for natural medicines at Sandoz before retiring in 1971. At the company in the 1950s and 1960s, he discovered and named many of the active hallucinogenic ingredients in Mexican "magic mushrooms," including psilocybin and psilocin. He was credited with important developments in medications for geriatric and gynecological uses as well as drugs to control blood-pressure. He was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee and a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. He was a prolific writer of scientific articles and the author of several books, many of which tried to bind the scientific with the spiritual. In particular, he denounced the demonization of LSD after hippies and societal dropouts seemed to have monopolized the media's focus. In his 1989 book "Insight Outlook," he wrote that LSD taken by "mentally stable persons in the right set and setting" was suited to the Western world, which he saw rife with "materialism, estrangement from nature, . . . [and] the missing of a sense-making philosophical fundamentalness of life." His 100th birthday was celebrated in Basel as a referendum on his greatest discovery. He attended the conference, called "LSD: Problem Child and Wonder Drug," and told one reporter that it was his daily diet of a raw egg that kept him spry, not, as many LSD enthusiasts suspected, his long-ago experiments. His wife of more than 70 years, Anita Hofmann, died in December. One son died years earlier. Survivors include three children.

So he's saying the necks fucked and can't be fixed? WTF... I think he's just explaining how screwed up the nut is. They expect a new shipment on 5/9, so I should be getting the replacement about a week after that. In that case, they should just replace the neck or the nut! Maybe they just don't have a neck to swap.

Inflatable pig lost after Roger Waters' Coachella set Tue Apr 29, 6:12 PM ET Have you seen this pig? It's huge, inflatable, features the word "Obama" and it has lost its way in the California desert. Organizers for the Coachella music festival announced that the gigantic blowup swine, released into the night sky during Roger Waters' headlining set Sunday, was still out there — and they want it back. The festival is offering a $10,000 reward plus four Coachella tickets for life for the safe return of the pig, according to spokeswoman Marcee Rondan. As tall as a two-story house and as wide as two school buses, the pig was led from lines held on the ground Sunday as Waters played a version of Pink Floyd's "Pigs" from the 1977 album "Animals." Then it just floated away. "It wasn't really supposed to happen that way. I don't have the details," Rondan told The Associated Press. As for safety concerns, Rondan speculated, "Because it's inflatable, as it loses air it becomes less and less dangerous." She did not know how much it weighed. As of Tuesday, Rondan said, the festival had not been able to contact Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and songwriting mastermind behind albums such as "Animals" and "The Dark Side of the Moon." The pig displays the words "Don't be led to the slaughter" and a cartoon of Uncle Sam holding two bloody cleavers. The other side reads "Fear builds walls" and the underside reads "Obama" with a checked ballot box for U.S. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Waters, who told the crowd "that's my pig" as it drifted off into the night, closed out the three-day festival. Pink Floyd shows have used blowup pigs throughout the years. Rondan called Sunday's "the same prototype" as past pigs. "People are putting search teams together to find this pig," Rondan said. "But it may float in the night sky, never to be seen again."

An inflatable pig with environmental message floats above the Live Earth New York concert during Pink Floyd member Roger Water's set in East Rutherford, New Jersey in this file photo from July 7, 2007. (Mike Segar/Reuters) A giant inflatable pig scrawled with the words 'Don't Be Led To the Slaughter' floats over the crowd during Roger Waters' headlining set on the third day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., Sunday, April 27, 2008. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

Carl Fisher Bio Henry Brant, America’s pioneer explorer and practitioner of 20th Century spatial music, was born in Montreal in 1913 of American parents and began to compose at the age of eight. In 1929 he moved to New York where for the next 20 years he composed and conducted for radio, films, ballet and jazz groups, at the same time composing experimentally for the concert hall. From 1947 to 1955 he taught orchestration and conducted ensembles at Juilliard School and Columbia University. At Bennington College, from 1957 to 1980, he taught composition; and every year he presented premieres of orchestral and choral works by living composers. Since 1981 Brant has made his home in Santa Barbara, California. In 1950 Brant began to write spatial music in which the planned positioning of the performers throughout the hall, as well as on stage, is an essential factor in the composing scheme. This procedure, which limits and defines the contrasted music assigned to each performing group, takes as its point of departure the ideas of Charles Ives. Brant’s principal works since 1950 are all spatial; his catalogue now comprises nearly 100 such works, each for a different instrumentation, each requiring a different spatial deployment in the hall, and with maximum distances between groups prescribed in every case. All of Brant’s spatial works have been commissioned. Brant’s spatial music has been widely performed and recorded in the U.S. and Europe, and his long career has been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Prix Italia (which he was the first American composer to win), the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction, election to the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, and Mayor Kevin White’s official proclamation making March 7-11, 1983 a Henry Brant Week in Boston. In June 1984, the Holland Festival presented a special week of 10 all-Brant retrospective concerts. Brant received an ASCAP/NISSIM Award in 1985, A Fromm Foundation grant in 1989, and a Koussevitzky Foundation award in 1995. In May 1998, The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel acquired Brant's complete archive of original manuscripts including over 300 of his works. Brant received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Wesleyan University in September 1998. In recent years Brant’s spatial music has explored wider areas and larger performing forces: Orbits (1979) for 80 trombones and organ; Meteor Farm (1982), a multicultural work for expanded orchestra, two choirs, jazz band, gamelan ensemble, African drummers/singers and South Indian soloists (each group retaining unaltered its traditional music); Western Springs (1983) for two orchestras, two choruses and two jazz bands; and Fire on the Amstel (1984) for four boatloads of 25 flutes each, four jazz drummers, four church carillons, three brass bands and four street organs—a three-hour aquatic procession through the canals in the center of Amsterdam. These and many subsequent large works deal with environmental subjects, as does Desert Forests (1985) for multiple orchestral groups; and Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities (1986), which deployed two choirs, orchestra, jazz band, large wind ensemble, large percussion ensemble, five pianos, bagpipe band and five solo singers throughout a sports arena in St. Paul, Minnesota. Brant’s expanded Millennium 2 (1988) calls for a 35-piece brass orchestra, jazz combo, percussion ensemble, gospel choir, gamelan ensemble, bluegrass group, boy’s choir, three pianos, organ and ten vocal soloists. In October 1994, Cultuurcentrum De Oosterpoort in Groningen, Holland, presented Brant in Nederland, a 7-hour “marathon” of all-Brant concerts, comprising 22 works both spatial and non-spatial composed over a 60-year span including: Angels and Devils (1931), Origins (1952), Orbits (1979), Litany of Tides (1983), and the premiere of Trajectory (1994). The last-named presents acoustic, spatial, independent music for concert/theatrical performance simultaneous with an abstract silent film. All the concerts were broadcast live by VPRO Radio. Also in 1994 Henry Brant completed A Concord Symphony, his orchestration of Ives’s Concord Sonata, a project begun in 1958. He conducted its premiere in Ottawa in June 1995. Dormant Craters (1995) for percussion orchestra was conducted by Brant at an outdoor premiere in Lincoln Center, New York in August 1995. Brant’s Plowshares and Swords (1995), for orchestra spatially deployed throughout Carnegie Hall, and with a separate part for each player, received its premiere in February 1996. At the same concert, Brant conducted A Concord Symphony in its American premiere. A 1997 spatial work, Festive Eighty, commissioned by the Goldman Memorial Band of New York, had its first performance in Central Park in July 1997. Brant shared the conducting with the Band’s music director, Gene Young. In Vienna’s Musikverein, Dennis Russell Davies conducted the Vienna Radio Orchestra in the premiere of Brant’s completion of Schubert’s B minor Symphony on October 14, 1997, and the first European hearing of the Ives-Brant A Concord Symphony, on October 21. Brant himself conducted the October 1997 concert of the die reihe ensemble in Vienna, presenting his Homage to Ives (1975) and The Glass Pyramid (1980). In November 1997 the San Francisco Other Minds Festival programmed Brant’s Homeless People. This 1993 work, a premiere, placed members of a string quartet in the four corners of the hall, with Brant on stage playing directly on the piano strings, and an accordionist stationed in the center of the hall. Brant’s 1998 activities included two premieres. Four Traumatics (1942) was performed by pianist Neely Bruce of Wesleyan University at an all-Brant’s concert honoring the composer on his 85th birthday. And Common Interests (1998) an instant music composition for the OPUS415 Marathon in San Francisco, mobilized eight ensembles into the concert’s grand finale. In 1999 Brant completed Mergers, a symphonic narrative for five orchestral groups, organ and two singers, requiring five conductors. Also in 1999 the large-scale, multicultural work, Meteor Farm (1982) received its European premiere at Dartington Hall, England. Prophets (2000) for four cantors and a shofar player received its premiere at the Uilenberger Synagogue in Amsterdam in April 2000. Glossary (2000), a Continental Harmony commission in celebration of the new millennium, was premiered in Santa Cruz, California on May 13, 2000. Glossary is scored for voice and twelve instruments (its text, by Henry Brant, is a glossary of computer terminology.) Brant won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work, Ice Field—Spatial Narratives for Large and Small Orchestral Groups, commissioned for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony by “Other Minds” (a San Francisco-based organization devoted to promoting the music of innovative composers), with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Multi-Arts Production Fund. The world premiere took place on December 12, 2001 in Davies Hall, home of the San Francisco Symphony. The size of the orchestra called for is large but fairly conventional. However, two conductors are called for to coordinate the instrumental forces, which are arrayed on the stage and at specific places throughout the hall. The work also calls for a large pipe organ with a 32 foot stop (and preferably a 64 foot stop as well). The organ part, which is intended to be improvised, was performed by the composer at the premiere. As with most of Henry Brant’s large works for orchestra, Ice Field was tailored to the expressive spatial possibilities of the space where the work would be first performed, Davies Symphony Hall. But experience has taught that it will work well in any suitably large concert venue. The work’s title is related to an experience Brant had in 1926, when he was just twelve years old, on a transatlantic voyage to Europe with his family. The ship spent one whole day passing through a field of icebergs. Says Brant: "I claim that the memory of that experience is reflected in Ice Field, but it’s only a title. I was thinking about this when I started to write it, but the idea of trying to depict an iceberg in sound is something I wouldn’t want to attempt." The following is excerpted from The New Grove Dictionary of American Music: Brant’s early published music shows marked contrasts in style from work to work and a pronounced interest in unusual timbral combinations. Angels and Devils (1931, revised in 1956 and 1979) is a concerto for flute with ten members of the flute family. Brant has continued to explore timbre in such works as Origins (1952) a percussion symphony, and Orbits (1979), which requires 80 trombones in individual parts. A far-reaching innovation came in 1953 with the performance of Antiphony 1 for five widely separated orchestral groups positioned in the auditorium and on stage. This example of “spatial music” predated Stockhausen’s Gruppen by five years. Unlike Stockhausen, however, Brant followed and expanded Ives’s concepts of stylistic contrast and spatial separation. In Antiphony 1 and almost all of Brant’s subsequent spatial works each group is assigned music quite unrelated in timbre, texture, and style to that of other groups. Rhythmic coordination is maintained within each ensemble, often by conductors, but in order to allow for possible time lags in the hall, Brant has devised procedures to permit overall non-coordination within controlled limits. These and similar techniques are employed in The Grand Universal Circus (1956), which presents simultaneous contrasted musical and dramatic events throughout the entire theatre area, and Voyage Four (1963), a “total antiphony” in which musicians are located on the back and side walls and under the auditorium floor, as well as on stage. Brant wrote that in 1950 he had “come to feel that single-style music...could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” His use of space became central to his conception of a polystylistic music, and his experiments have convinced him that space exerts specific influences on harmony, polyphony, texture, and timbre. He regards space as music’s “fourth dimension,” (the other three being pitch, measurement of time, and timbre)...Although Brant continues to experiment with new combinations of acoustic timbres, he does not use electronic materials or permit amplification in his music.

'I am not shy' Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez has endured poisonous rows on the new music scene and vilification in the press, yet he insists that disagreement is helpful Nicholas Wroe Saturday April 26, 2008 The Guardian Pierre Boulez might have made the familiar journey from enfant terrible to grand old man, but he has neither renounced his project nor found that popular opinion has come round to his way of thinking. His incendiary comments from the 50s and 60s - for instance, that contemporary classical music which does not follow Schoenberg's lead with sufficient rigour is "useless", and that "the most elegant solution for the problem of opera is to blow up the opera houses" - can still cause him problems. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the opera remark led to a dawn raid on his hotel room by Swiss police and the seizure of his passport - if only for a short time. Despite his apparent intransigence, however, it has become recognised over the decades that Boulez has been engaged in a much less narrow, even accessible, musical project than popularly assumed. As a conductor of his own and others' work, he has proved a revelatory conduit through which to view both contemporary and core repertoire music. His obsession with precision has been applauded for ridding Debussy of its habitual "impressionist cloudiness", while his revision of the traditional funereal tempi of Wagner's Parsifal has been seen as a force for undercutting the more offensive intimations of German nationalism. When rehearsing the Scharoun Ensemble, comprised of members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Boulez is an avuncular presence, coaxing and suggesting rather than imposing his vision of the work. "The effect is amazing," says viola player Micha Afkham. "We'd been working on a Webern concerto before he arrived and all the individual elements were very good. But when he took us, it was as if it were a different piece of music. It was so much more fluid. The individual contributions seemed the same, but the whole was completely transformed." There is an opportunity to witness Boulez as both conductor and composer in the next few weeks at the Barbican. He will conduct two London Symphony Orchestra programmes featuring work by Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky and a British premiere from the young German composer Matthias Pintscher. There is also a chance to hear Boulez as both young man and mature artist in the same work. He composed Notations, a dozen fragmentary piano sketches, in 1945 when he was just 20. Then, in the mid-70s, he was asked if he would mind the works being performed in a tribute broadcast to his former teacher Olivier Messiaen. "I was in Bayreuth conducting The Ring and had lost contact with those pieces. I found it difficult to compose in Bayreuth, but I could take the ideas in these tiny works and expand them for a large orchestra. In a funny way, the influence was Wagner. Not stylistically, but in the way there are scenes and motifs invented in the early 1850s that he didn't use until the late 1870s, by which time he makes completely different use of them." Thirty years into the project, Boulez - who reworks his music so much that his entire corpus has been described as a work in progress - has orchestrated only seven of the pieces. "Number eight is a little longer, and the ideas and possibilities a little richer. But I will get there. It is so interesting to compare your own ideas across time. They are like objets trouvés, but the object was mine. I hope to add some maturity and experience, but I still want to hear the young man who made them. You gain many things with age, but you lose a certain naivety. And I do like encountering the naivety of that young man I once was." Boulez was born in 1925 in Montbrison, 60 miles from Lyon. He showed an early aptitude for both maths and music, and says his first exposure to modern music came aged 13 when his piano teacher gave him Debussy and Ravel to study. "And also Honegger, who was the best-known figure in contemporary music at the time. It sounds tame now, but Ravel was still alive and Debussy had not been dead long. This is what modernity was, and I was fascinated by it." Despite his musical precocity, he was steered by his engineer father towards studying maths in Lyon after he left school. "It was wartime and things were very difficult. My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me it was the only solution for the rest of my life." In 1943, he moved to occupied Paris, to study at the Conservatoire. He attended early evening pre-curfew concerts of core repertoire and premieres of new work. "And that's how I came across Messiaen's music and learned he was a teacher with a reputation for being outside of the usual musical conventions." Boulez enrolled in Messiaen's now legendary harmony class - Messiaen recorded in his diary that "Boulez is a man who likes new music" - and was also taught by Honegger's wife, Andrée Vaurabourg, and René Liebowitz, who introduced him to the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, composers he would spend the rest of his career exploring. "But it was a problem getting hold of this music," he recalls. "Getting a score from Vienna could take months. Even after the war, communications in Europe were just broken." Liebowitz, who had contacts in Vienna, was the source of scores, but Boulez had little time for his teaching. "It was too pedantic and uninteresting, so after a few months I said goodbye. The contrast with Messiaen couldn't have been greater. He pushed your imagination and helped you think for yourself. That is what you want from a teacher. I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode, the teacher is the detonator." Boulez's detonation came with his second piano sonata, composed in 1947-48. The score was published in 1950, and by 1952, when it was performed at the Darmstadt music school by Messiaen's wife, Yvonne Loriod, it was one of the most eagerly anticipated musical events since the war. "Some works are more important than others. There are moments when you not only look for something new and worthwhile and interesting, but you actually find it. It's more than a great feeling: it's an important feeling." His reputation was sealed with the 1955 premiere of his work for chamber ensemble and voice, Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer Without a Master). It was conducted by Hans Rosbaud, who, with his Südwestfunk orchestra, devoted 50 rehearsals to its preparation, a meticulous approach that Boulez adopted for himself. It was because of Rosbaud's later ill health that Boulez's conducting career proper began. "Just as when Bruno Walter was sick they asked Bernstein to conduct, when Rosbaud became sick they asked me." Boulez had been an occasional conductor since the mid-40s, as music director of the Renaud-Barrault Theatre Company. "It was a very practical thing in that the theatre needed a conductor. I didn't realise until years later that I had been so influenced by theatre work. A director working with actors is not so different to a conductor working with soloists." He started out conducting only his contemporaries' works, but soon extended his repertoire to pieces from earlier in the 20th century. "I am for polemic, but not in a vacuum. There has to be a concrete outcome. I began to organise concerts so we could better discuss the work." From the beginning, even for small concerts, he insisted that the musicians were paid and there was time for rehearsal and study. "I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience." He regarded some of the earlier performances of even the Viennese school in the 40s as so poor - "although put on with the best intentions" - that they were "counter-propaganda" for the music. "I said if I ever conducted I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though some-times, despite everything, you still fail." His move into the mainstream repertoire came in 1966 with a production of Parsifal at Bayreuth directed by Wagner's grandson, Wieland. "The summer before, I had been at Darmstadt, so it was a big change. And people found my tempi controversial," he remembers. "But I hadn't set out to be quicker. It was the conjunction of the text and the music that persuaded me what speed to go." He says he doesn't enjoy controversy, "but if you feel something deeply, then you shouldn't fear polemic". He has endured poisonous rows on the new music scene and vilification in the mainstream press for the work of the computer music research centre IRCAM in Paris, which President Pompidou had asked him to set up in 1972. "But while the exchange of ideas can be rough, it is within your power to defend yourself, and answering criticism helps you to define yourself and your positions." Wieland Wagner died in the same year as the staging of Parsifal and Boulez thinks it likely that his career would have taken a different path if he had lived, as they had planned an extensive series of opera productions. Until then, Boulez had been a guest conductor with orchestras, but afterwards he took posts with the New York and Cleveland orchestras, as well as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with whom he will be reunited this summer at the Proms. "I think of my time in London very fondly. It was so interesting to attempt to find a new audience." His concerts at the Roundhouse are still talked about, and he was recently rather moved when Simon Rattle - whom he conducted as a 15-year-old percussionist in the National Youth Orchestra - said he remembered a Webern piece they performed and had used those memories in a Berlin Philharmonic performance of the same work. "It's not just touching, it is very instructive about how music education works." He cites a recent Rattle initiative in Berlin in which orchestra members attended schools where they introduced pupils to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. "The Rolling Stones still attract more people than concerts of Beethoven's ninth. But Rattle got these children dancing to Stravinsky and some of them will realise that rhythms used in 1913 are more interesting than Mick Jagger's rhythms today." He says little has changed in the music world since he started out, in that "20% are very interested in new things, 50% can be persuaded and 30% are in their coffins before their time. It is not a matter of good times or bad times. You always have to make an effort and you always need a strong personality to get things done. If you are timid and unadventurous, no matter how good your ideas, nothing happens. Me, I'm not a shy man. I am willing to have a go. Then it is for others to judge its worth." Inspirations Olivier Messiaen Arnold Schoenberg Alban Berg Anton Webern Arthur Honegger

Composer Henry Brant (left) with Michael Tilson Thomas at the premiere of "Ice Field," which showed his gift for spatial effects. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony

a close up of that sucker...

Check this un out:G&L ASAT Bluesboy Spalted Maple

So he's saying the necks fucked and can't be fixed? WTF...

April 29, 2008 Lost: Roger Waters' Pig By REUTERS Filed at 5:16 p.m. ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Organizers of a major California music festival are offering a $10,000 reward and four festival tickets for life in exchange for ex-Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters' two-story inflatable pig, which was lost on Sunday night. Waters' signature pig was seen floating away during his closing set at the three-day Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival, held in the desert east of Los Angeles. The giant flying pig, part of Pink Floyd's stage show since their 1977 album "Animals" featuring the song "Pigs on the Wing," broke free from its tethers above the Coachella crowd and drifted off. It's not the first time Waters has lost his flying pig. Back in 1977, it floated away on the second day of a photo shoot at the Battersea Power Station in London and was later recovered and used for an album cover. Waters was a member of British rock band between 1965 and 1985. He and the band continued to use the pig as a stage prop even after he quit, and at Coachella Waters played classic Pink Floyd songs including "Mother," "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," "Have a Cigar" and "Dark Side of the Moon." Coachella was named one of the top three festivals in the country by music magazine Billboard. Last year, the festival attracted more than 186,000 music and art lovers, and grossed $16.2 million, according to the magazine. Anyone with information on the lost pig, should email lostpig@coachella.com.

Good news! .

Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience LiveScience.com 2 hours, 3 minutes ago An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe - the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity - may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects . The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof. In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned. The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia. Prior studies suggested that absinthe had only trace levels of thujone. But critics claimed that absinthe made before it got banned in France in 1915 had much higher levels of thujone than modern absinthe produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted the ban on making absinthe. "Today it seems a substantial minority of consumers want these myths to be true, even if there is no empirical evidence that they are," said researcher Dirk Lachenmeier, a chemist with the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany. Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties. Laboratory tests found no other compound that could explain absinthe's effects. "All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism," Lachenmeier said. (Ethanol is a word for common drinking alcohol.) The scientists are set to detail their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

So MySpace goes the way of MP3.com. .

Happy Birthday Joe and mannnnnnny mo'!

Henry Brant dies - Pulitzer Prize composer Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Brant, best known as a pioneer in the use of spatial effects, died Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara. He was 94. Among the hundreds of works Mr. Brant composed over a long career was "Ice Field," a work for organ and orchestra commissioned by the Other Minds Festival for the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas led the world premiere in Davies Symphony Hall in December 2001, and the piece was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Music. "The main thing is for a composer to stick around as long as possible and keep working," Mr. Brant told an interviewer on winning the prize. "Otherwise you miss things like this." Like most of Mr. Brant's music, "Ice Field" owed its specific character to the physical placement of the instruments in the hall. Strings and pianos were on the stage, woodwinds, brass and percussion throughout the balconies, the composer himself improvising at the organ. The results were often as notable for the physical properties of a performance as for the musical rhetoric involved. Beginning in 1953 with "Antiphony I," Mr. Brant returned again and again to music that used widely spaced performing groups, often with contrasting meters and tonal qualities. "It's a sort of musical equivalent of Alexander Calder - the wonderfully exuberant wackiness of it all - and at the same time it's very well thought out," Thomas said when the Pulitzer Prize was announced. "There's very little left to chance." Another of Mr. Brant's enthusiasms was writing music for large groups of the same instrument. One of his best-known compositions, "Angels and Devils" (1931), is a concerto for three piccolos, five flutes and two alto flutes with orchestra. "Orbits" (1979) is scored for 80 trombones, and "Rosewood" - which had its local premiere in 1995 under the leadership of guitarist David Tanenbaum, who commissioned it - is a work for 100 classical guitars. Mr. Brant, a peppy, engaging presence, cut a distinctive figure at any performance with his standard uniform of a track suit and plastic eyeshade. He was born in Montreal in 1913 to American parents and moved to New York City at 16. He studied at the Juilliard School, where he later taught, as well as at Columbia University and Bennington College. He worked as a commercial arranger and as an orchestrator for ballet companies and jazz groups. His orchestration textbook, "Textures and Timbres," begun in the 1940s and completed last year, is due to be published this year. In addition to his own music, he orchestrated works by Charles Ives and Franz Schubert, and although much of his music is dependent on the physical setting of a live performance, the Innova label is in the middle of releasing a series of CDs devoted to his work. Mr. Brant is survived by his wife, Kathy Wilkowski, of Santa Barbara; daughter Piri Kaethe Friedman of Portland, Ore.; sons Joquin Ives Brant of Esczu, Costa Rica, and Linus Corragio of Manhattan; and four grandchildren. He is also survived by his brother, Bertram Brant of Dayton, Ohio.

Henry Brant (1913-2008) By Frank J. Oteri Published: April 28, 2008 http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5554 American composer Henry Brant, known for his pioneering development of spatial music, died in home in Santa Barbara, California, on Saturday April 26, 2008 with his wife and children at his bedside. He was 94. Henry Brant at Copland House, October 2002 Born in Montreal, Canada to American parents on September 15, 1913, Brant started composing at the age of eight. Trained at McGill University and later at Juilliard, Brant first started gaining notoriety for his music in the 1930s. A composer of hundreds of works, many featuring enormous and unique ensembles such as 80 trombones, Brant was one of the last surviving members of the original generation of early 20th century American maverick composers. In recent years, he has received numerous accolades for his work. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his orchestral work, Ice Field, and the American Composers Forum's innova label launched a series of CDs entitled The Henry Brant Collection devoted to his music. Nine CDs have been released as part of this series thus far. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters whose music is published by Carl Fischer (ASCAP), Henry Brant's other honors include two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Prix Italia (the first American to win this award), and the American Music Center's Letter of Distinction, which he was awarded in 1982. In October 2002, NewMusicBox filmed a conversation with Henry Brant at Copland House. Spaced Out with Henry Brant

Ah, I see. In that case I'll agree with him. It's more than a little obsessive/anal retentive/ fussy/whatever.

If you're referring to "view new posts" or "today's active topics", they're sorted by latest post of course - a specialized query and sort.