Henry Brant

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• Henry Brant (1913-2008)
  
  
• Wiki
  
  
• web page
  
  
• Other Minds: Charles Amirkhanian Interviews Henry Brant
  
  
• An interview with Henry Brant by Alan Baker, American Public Media, June 2002
  
  
• Henry Brant collection
  
  
• Daniel Wolf on Henry Brant
  
  

I really liked what I heard.

Edited April 30, 2008 by 7/4

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Fringe Beat

Henry Brant

Early in his life as a Santa Barbaran, Brant’s music showed up locally, including a presentation of the memorable “Rainforest” that took place at (and around) the Lobero. He has since presented music elsewhere, globally, including his 2001, Pulitzer-winning Ice Field with the San Francisco Symphony. Another obstacle for Brant’s work is that stereo recordings don’t do justice to his multi-vantage-point music. Thus he’s had little interest in pursuing documentation of his music. Lately, though, Brant’s discography has grown dramatically, thanks to a recording series on Innova (the St. Paul-based label arm of the American Composers Forum).

Two recent volumes in the “Henry Brant Collection” offer an informative mini-survey on the now-huge Brant catalogue of works, from the whimsical to the sublime. Volume 8 showcases shorter pieces, some dating from the ’30s, with a focus on Brant’s witty — and sometimes goofy — side, including Whoopee in D, “Revenge Before Breakfast,” and some jazz-based pieces. On Volume 9, we hear a few more decidedly abstract pieces — “Dormant Craters,” “Ceremony,” and “Homeless People.” In these, we’re admittedly getting a stripped-down version of the real, spatial thing, but still, the rigor of his creative voice is intact — and captured for posterity.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

By Josef Woodard

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this little tidbit from the NYTimes:

Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: February 22, 2008

Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y.

- snip -

Attilio Joseph Macero was born and raised in Glens Falls, N.Y. He served in the Navy, then moved to New York in 1948 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the composer Henry Brant.

- snip -

Edited April 28, 2008 by 7/4

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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

Edited April 29, 2008 by 7/4

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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.

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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

[rostasi]

"His orchestration textbook, "Textures and Timbres," begun in the 1940s and completed last year, is due to be published this year."

I'm really looking forward to this!

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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.

Edited April 30, 2008 by 7/4

[Chuck Nessa]

All I recall was a '70s lp on Desto (I think). Seemed interesting enough but not enough to go on a quest. Please tell me more.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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Henry Brant, 94; experimental composer on grand scale

PULITZER WINNER: Henry Brant acknowledges applause after a performance

in Los Angeles. He liked to use large numbers of musicians scattered in clusters

around performance areas, whether it was a concert hall, a reflecting pool or

even a river. He also worked as a conductor during the 1930s and '40s and

orchestrated film scores for Virgil Thomson and Alex North.

By Mark Swed, Times Music Critic

May 1, 2008

Henry Brant -- an American maverick composer who added the dimension of space to music by placing musicians in nooks and crannies of concert halls, on boats floating down the Amstel River in Amsterdam or arrayed throughout sports arenas -- has died. He was 94.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer died Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara, according to associates.

Brant's pieces were always events tailor-made for specific sites. A typical example was "500: Hidden Hemisphere," commissioned in 1992 by Lincoln Center in New York in honor of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World. Brant positioned military and civilian marching bands as well as a steel-drum band around the campus' reflecting pool. The composer, a small man never seen without a baseball cap or visor, was dressed in his usual color-coordinated athletic garb, this time blinding yellow.

Much of the music of America's past, its dances and marches and dirges, was played simultaneously. But Brant's ingenious use of the location and carefully engineered counterpoint allowed the ear to accommodate the various musical strands. Music not meant to get along did.

Brant often thought big. In 1984, he turned central Amsterdam into a concert venue with "Fire on the Amstel." He needed four boats to carry 100 flutists for a piece that also incorporated multiples of jazz drummers, church carillons, brass bands and street organs. "Orbits," a 1979 work for 80 trombones, at one point has an 80-note chord, half the pitches part of the standard 12-note scale, the other half microtones (pitches that would fall between the cracks of a piano keyboard).

In "Ice Field," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer in 2002, he placed sections of the San Francisco Symphony all over Davies Symphony Hall. The full brass section became a jazz big band. Woodwinds squealed as high as they could from the balconies. Facing the audience were gongs, bass drums and steel drums. The oboes and bassoons buzzed in the choir loft. Brant, in concert dress but nevertheless sporting a poker player's visor, improvised on the hall's large pipe organ.

All of this gave him the reputation of a kook, even with the Pulitzer. The prize came late in his career. At 88, he was the oldest composer to have won it. But he said in an interview that the most it did for him was to persuade a few more presenters to say, "Well, let's look at this minor screwball music."

Nonetheless, Brant was a major figure in American music. He was a noted educator and orchestrator with a varied career that included jazz, conducting and film work. Beginning with "Antiphony 1" in 1953, he was a pioneer of spatial music, and from then on he wrote more than 100 works in which the layout of the performers determined the nature of the music. All music is spatial, he said, because all music must emanate from somewhere. But he was the first composer to devote a career to exploring the expressivity of space.

Henry Brant was born Sept. 15, 1913, in Montreal to American parents. His father was a violinist who had studied with Joseph Joachim.

Brant had an early musical education and was naturally drawn to the offbeat, designing instruments out of plumbing pipes and cigar boxes.

At the suggestion of Henry Cowell -- the experimental West Coast composer who was the first to play the strings inside the piano -- Brant's father moved the family to New York in 1929 to widen his son's musical education.

Brant attended the Juilliard School and studied privately with Aaron Copland and George Antheil.

In New York, Brant led a double, and sometimes triple, musical life. He wrote the furthest-out music he could come up with -- contrapuntally complex, wildly dissonant and unconventional in form -- but he also became more deeply involved in jazz and popular music and found work during the Depression and World War II conducting on radio and orchestrating for films. Virgil Thomson brought him in to orchestrate his scores for the Pare Lorentz documentaries "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River."

After the war, Brant taught at Juilliard, Columbia University and Bennington College in Vermont. He continued film work on the side and orchestrated several notable Alex North scores, such as those for John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Cleopatra." However, Brant's name never appeared in the credits.

His breakthrough was in the early 1950s when, all about the same time, he heard Berlioz's "Requiem" written for Les Invalides in Paris, the Baroque music of Gabrielli intended for St. Mark's in Venice and Charles Ives' antiphonal "The Unanswered Question." Brant had found his music growing so contrapuntally complex that the result was a mess. These various scores persuaded him that all he needed was a little physical distance between the players.

Spatial music offered another important advantage to someone as eclectic as Brant. By strategic placement of different sorts of ensembles, he found that he could coax the ear to accept more than one sort of music at a time.

In 1981, Brant gave up academic life and devoted himself full time to spatial music, although he continued to take on occasional orchestral projects on the side, such as orchestrating Ives' "Concord" Sonata, turning it into a symphony, and finishing Schubert's B-minor Symphony.

His scale kept getting bigger and his combinations more brazen. "Meteor Farm," from 1982, is scored for two sopranos, three South Indian performers, two choruses, West African chorus, jazz band, gamelan and two percussion ensembles.

In 1986, Brant filled a St. Paul, Minn., sports arena with a choir, an orchestra, a jazz band, a wind ensemble, a percussion ensemble, five pianos, a bagpipe band and five solo singers for "Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities."

Brant wrote small pieces too, separating as few as three players in three corners of a concert hall. But he always worked the same way, changing the character of whatever venue he worked in by putting musicians where they had never been before. His first task whenever he arrived somewhere to create a piece was to make friends with the fire marshals.

An indifference to recording -- the whole point of his music being its geographical character -- is probably what kept Brant's name from being more widely known. It is missing from recent encyclopedic American music histories.

But the city of Boston sponsored a "Henry Brant Week" in 1983, which was followed by a week of 10 all-Brant concerts in Amsterdam the next year. In 1994, a seven-hour Brant marathon was held in Groningen, the Netherlands. His archive was acquired by the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in 1998, the same year he received an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan University.

Brant, though, was ignored closer to home, where he was a resident of Santa Barbara for the last 27 years and an active composer until the end. His work was rarely produced in Southern California.

A small work, "Tremors," for 16 instrumentalists and four singers, was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute and performed at the Getty and Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004, but that was a rare occasion.

Brant is survived by his second wife, Kathy Wilkowski; a brother, Bertram Brant; his children, Piri Kaethe Friedman, Joquin Ives Brant and Linus Corragio; and four grandchildren.

Funeral services are private, but a public memorial is being planned.

[Chuck Nessa]

I really hate the term "experimental music" unless the composer/performer says as much. If it is music, they "are doing it".

[7/4]

I don't think he was experimenting.

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[Chuck Nessa]

I do like his cap.

[7/4]

from Kyle Gann's blog: By Prent Rodgers on May 1, 2008 2:02 PM

I had the privilege of being in Mr. Brant's conducting and orchestration classes at Bennington College in the early 1970's. He was a magnificent teacher. I remember two primary things:

1. Conduct with a large white wand so everyone in the orchestra can see you beat the tempo. Our first class activity was to cut dowels into 12-18" pieces and paint them white.
   
2. Music sounds good only if the orchestration is good, and good orchestration follows a simple model: It takes 2-4 string instruments to equal to volume (not loudness) of a woodwind. It takes 2 woodwinds to match a brass instrument. Ensembles that consist of these ratios can make good sounding music, and those that don't keep the ratios sound bad. I can't think of anything else that I learned in college that held up so well as those two pieces of information.

Edited May 2, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

Daniel Wolf on...

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[7/4]

In honor of Henry Brant's centenary, innova would like to share a wealth of live unpublished recordings of his work to supplement the ongoing CD series, The Henry Brant Collection: http://www.innova.mu/artist/henry-brant

https://soundcloud.com/innovadotmu/sets/henry-brant-centenary

[7/4]

Henry Brant: Orbits, Hieroglyphics 3, Western Springs
- Henry Brant · Bay Bones Trombone Choir and others

Henry Brant: Music For Massed Flutes