Brant, Henry
Henry Brant
Composer
Accrued Impressive Body off Work
“Surprisingly Delicate and Distinct”
Honor Capped Seven-Decade Career
American composer Henry Brant won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his spatial-music composition Ice Field. Brant is a twentieth-century pioneer of spatial music, a form of live music in which various instruments are positioned on the stage and at times even throughout a concert hall to achieve a desired effect. Some of Brant’s works have debuted out of doors, in parks and plazas. “An ingenious contrapuntist, Brant calculates just what music will fit where,” remarked Los Angeles Times music writer Mark Swed, “and the effect is invariably exhilarating.”
Brant was 88 years old when he won the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and he is the second-oldest living composer of spatial music in the United States after Elliott Carter. His former contemporaries in spatial music, such as Charles Ives, had passed away years before, and as Brant remarked in an interview with Josef Woodard of the Los Angeles Times, “I have the comfort of knowing that I have no rivals.”
Brant is Canadian by birth, born in 1913, in Montreal, Quebec. He studied at the Conservatory of that city’s McGill University for three years, until 1929, when he moved to New York City with his family. Just 16 years
For the Record…
Born in 1913 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; son of Saul and Bertha (Dreyfuss) Brant; married Katu Wilkovska, 1989; children: Piri, Joquin, Linus.Education: Studied at the McGill University Conservatory, 1926-29, and at the Juilliard School, 1930-34.
Composed and conducted music for documentary films made by Office of War Information, U.S. State Department, Department of Agriculture, 1940-47; composed and conducted music for various radio network program series for NBC, CBS, ABC, 1942-46; taught at Columbia University’s department of music, 1943-53; faculty member, Juilliard School of Music, 1947-55; faculty member, Bennington College, Bennington, VT, 1957-80.
Awards: Prix Italia, 1955; Alice M. Ditson Award, 1962, 1964; ASCAP/Nissim Award, 1985; Guggenheim fellow, 1946, 1955; grants received from Institute of Arts and Letters, 1955, New York State Council for Arts, 1974, National Endowment for the Arts, 1976, Koussevitzky Foundation, 1996; Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ice Field, 2002.
Member: American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Addresses: Office —1607 Chino St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101-4757.
old, he began writing experimental music around this time. It was the height of the Great Depression, how-ever, and both demand and cultural stipends for such avant-garde artistic efforts were minimal at best. He spent four years at the Juilliard School, during which time he wrote his first large ensemble work, Angels and Devils, a 1931 concerto for ten flutists.
During World War II Brant found work as a composer and conductor for documentary films made by the U.S. Office of War Information and the Department of Agriculture. He also wrote for various radio network series of classical music, and he taught at Columbia University until 1953. He also taught at Juilliard, and from 1957 to 1980 he was on the faculty of Vermont’s Bennington College. It was his work for film and radio, however, that he believed ignited his creative spark. “I’ve had advantages which few composers have had in the 20th century, because of the commercial work I’ve done,” he told Woodard in the Los Angeles Times. “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.”
Accrued Impressive Body off Work
Brant began composing in earnest in the 1950s, and his 1953 work Antiphony 1, which premiered at a performance hall in New York City with five groups of musicians, marked the first instance when he was finally able to achieve what he considered a threedimensional sound. In 1955 he became the first American composer to win the Prix Italia. Works such as the 1956 spatial opera Grand Universal Circus, Concerto with Lights from 1961, and Total Antiphony in 83 Parts, a 1963 work, followed. One Brant work, a 1970 piece titled Kingdom Come, features an orchestra on stage playing dissonant music, but also a noise orchestra in the balcony, replete with buzzers, whistles, and air compressors.
Brant worked in a genre the proponents of which included composers Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Harry Partch, all avant-garde spatial music pioneers. A conductor familiar with Brant’s work, Michael Tilson Thomas of the San Francisco Symphony, called him “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 told San Francisco Chronicle writer Joshua Kosman. “There’s very little left to chance.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Brant continued to compose and conduct his works for orchestras and various other combinations of instruments. A Spatial Piano Concerto was written in 1976, and Orbits, published three years later, featured 80 trombones and one organ. A 1984 work titled Fire in the Amstel, referring to the main river of the Dutch city of Amsterdam, featured a floating symphony on the city’s network of canals. Four barges carried dozens of flutists, jazz drummers, brass bands, and even a church carillon. In 1982 Brant used a brass band, a Javanese Gamelan ensemble, the Wesleyan University orchestra, and a host of singers and other performers in Meteor Shower, his tribute to the university’s world-music program. “The title seems more evocative than explicative,” wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times, “although the mostly wordless singers do wind up intoning that phrase over and over toward the end, circling around the reiterated note of C. This final section made a fine, proclamatory climax to this 70-minute-long fresco.”
A large roster of performers was also necessary for Northern Lights over the Twin Cities, a Brant piece that debuted in a sports arena in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1986. It boasted two choirs, an orchestra, a jazz band, large wind and percussion ensembles, five pianos, a quintet of vocalists, and a bagpipe band. In 1990 he helped inaugurate a new Dallas Symphony Hall with Prisons of the Mind, a work written for 314 musicians, each of whom were carefully scattered throughout the I.M. Pei-designed hall to showcase its superb acoustics.
“Surprisingly Delicate and Distinct”
Brant’s 500: Hidden Hemisphere, dating from 1992, was an hour-long outdoor work with three concert bands and a steel-drum ensemble that played at one another from across the reflecting pool of New York’s Lincoln Center. The plaza of this Manhattan arts center hosted another Brant premiere in 1995 with Dormant Craters. Jazz drummers, a steel drum group, Wesleyan University’s Pandemonium percussion ensemble, and various other performers wielding tin pots and even power saws took the stage for this piece. “Given the size of the assembled forces, the music was often surprisingly delicate and distinct,” noted Anthony Tommasini, a New York Times critic. Various unplanned sounds of the city—the braking of trucks, or helicopters above—“seemed not intrusions, but part of the ambiance,” Tommasini remarked.
Glossary, a 2000 chamber work from Brant, had its premiere in Los Angeles in December of 2001. It includes a mezzo-soprano delivering lyrics consisting of computer terms and acronyms, and a dozen other performers surround the audience as well. Swed reviewed it in a Los Angeles Times article: “Brant conducted in his way, which was cueing performers by making gestures that mimicked the playing of invisible instruments” during its 25-minute duration, which Swed termed “wonderfully well performed and an utter de-light.”
Ice Field Debuted in Bay Area
Brant conducts his own works, and his performance attire is always colorful; he usually favors a track suit with a matching visor. Since the early 1980s he has been a resident of Santa Barbara, California. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Ice Field was commissioned by Other Minds, a San Francisco new music group. This 20-minute organ concerto had its premiere in December of 2001 in a San Francisco Symphony engagement. Members of the San Francisco Symphony played string instruments and pianos on stage, while a side terrace of Davies Hall was host to a section of oboes and bassoons. Percussion players were ensconced in the orchestra boxes, and a large brass ensemble played in the first tier. As Swed explained in the Los Angeles Times, “the piece asks each group of instruments to play in a distinctive style—brash and jazzy or dark and melancholic. Some groups are on their own; some are controlled by one of two conductors the piece requires. At one end of the second tier, three piccolos and three clarinets make chaotic back-ground noise that doesn’t connect with anything—Brant said it represents everyday life.”
The composer, meanwhile, took center stage playing the organ himself for Ice Field. Swed asserted that “Brant’s contribution to the performance was the most distinctive of all. He set loose the organ’s tallest pipe, creating near earthquake-strength vibrations. The result is an antidote to concert-hall claustrophobia, a feeling that space can expand to include whatever we need to fit in it.” Swed concluded that Ice Field leaves the listener with a sense of gratification. “You feel not that you have been given a respite from fractious modern society (which is what some listeners have come to expect from classical music), but that you are now better prepared to deal with it,” asserted Swed.
Not every critic was receptive to Brant’s iconoclasm. The New York Times sent critic Bernard Holland to San Francisco for the Ice Field premiere, and Holland wrote that the composition and its performance “lies somewhere between precision planning and controlled chaos, a mixture of smart bombs and dumb ones. Things happen regularly but never in quite the same way at every performance. Mr. Brant’s organ chords and manic passagework seem to cue each new onslaught.”
Honor Capped Seven-Decade Career
Brant was surprised to be honored with the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music. “I never expected that the kind of music that I write would win a Pulitzer,” he told Los Angeles Times writer Diane Haithman. “It’s also an encouragement to me to continue along these general lines. I hope to write some very large works, for big choral groups, and big instrumental groups, with the addition of ensembles from other cultures.” In a less serious vein, he has also cited his longevity as a crucial factor. “The main thing is for a composer to stick around as long as possible and keep working,” he told Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle article, “otherwise you miss things like this.” That same year, Brant was invited to serve as composer-in-residence for the University of California Santa Barbara’s New Music Festival.
A short piece titled Prophets had its premiere in Brant’s hometown in the spring of 2002. Santa Barbara’s First Methodist Church and Congregation B’nai Brith hosted the ecumenical event, with Prophets drawing upon Old Testament texts in Hebrew for inspiration. Four cantors sang, “while the ceremonial Jewish horn called the shofar punctuated the incantations,” wrote Woodard in a Los Angeles Times review. The critic asserted that “the indecipherable mesh of parts conspired toward a uniquely meditative effect. True to the nature of many Brant works, it wasn’t the specifics, but the spirit, that counted.”
Selected compositions
Angels and Devils (flute solo, flute orchestra), 1931.
Origins (percussion orchestra and optional organ), 1952.
Antiphony I (five orchestra groups or chamber ensemble), 1953.
The Grand Universal Circus (eight solo voices, chorus, orchestra), 1956.
In Praise of Learning (16 sopranos, 16 percussionists), 1958.
Voyage Four (orchestra, organ, soprano), 1963.
An American Requiem (symphonic woodwinds, brasses, percussion, organ, church bells), 1973.
Millennium 1 (trumpets, glockenspiel, chimes, cymbal), 1978.
Orbits (80 trombones, organ, soprano), 1979.
Meteor Farm (orchestra, two choruses, two percussion groups, jazz orchestra, Javanese Gamelan orchestra, West African drumming ensemble, South Indian soloists, two Western solo sopranos), 1982.
Litany of Tides (solo violin, four sopranos, two orchestras), 1983.
Western Springs (two orchestras, two choruses, two jazz combos), 1983.
Fire in the Amstel (100 flutes, four jazz drummers, three choruses, four street organs, four church carillons, four concerto bands), 1984.
Desert Forests (large and small orchestra groups, improvising pianist), 1985.
Northern Lights over the Twin Cities (large chorus, small chorus, five solo singers, concert band, jazz ensemble, bagpipe group, chamber orchestra, five pianos, large percussion ensemble), 1986.
Ghost Nets (double bass, two chamber orchestras), 1988.
Millennium 2 (brass and percussion ensemble with optional high voice), 1988.
Flight Over a Global Map (50 trumpets), 1989.
Rainforest (four solo singers, string ensemble, piano, harp, percussion, woodwind quartet, brass trio), 1989.
Rosewood (guitar orchestra), 1989.
Prisons of the Mind (two orchestras, two concert bands, two brass sextets, two steel-drum ensembles), 1990.
Skull & Bones (chorus, orchestra, large jazz band, large flute ensemble, five solo voices), 1991.
500: Hidden Hemisphere (three concert bands, Caribbean steel-drum ensemble), 1992.
A Concord Symphony (orchestration of Ives’s Concord Sonata), 1994.
Dormant Craters (16 percussion), 1995.
Plowshares and Swords (spatial announcements for 74 musicians), 1996.
Prophets (four cantors and shofar player), 2000.
Glossary (voice, 13 instrumentalists), 2000.
Crystal Antiphonies (symphony orchestra, wind ensemble), 2000.
Ice Field (large orchestra, organ), 2001.
Ghosts & Gargoyles (flute solo, flute orchestra), 2002.
Selected discography
Angels and Devils; Concerto for Flute Solo with Flute Orchestra, CRI, 1956.
(With others) Symphony no. 1/Concertato for orchestra/Epigraph, Desto, 1965.
Kingdom Come, for 2 Orchestras and Organ. Machinations, Desto, 1970.
Crossroads, for 4 Violins, Desto, 1972.
80 Trombones and 30 Basses, Composers Recordings, 1980.
Currents, Redwood, 1990.
Kingdom Come, for 2 Orchestras and Organ. Machinations, Phoenix, 1997.
Orbits/Hieroglyphics 3/Western Springs, CRI, 1999.
Sources
Books
Slonimsky, Nicolas, editor emeritus, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Centennial Edition, Schirmer, 2001.
Periodicals
American Record Guide, January-February 1997, p. 83.
Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2002, p. F2; April 9, 2002, p. A18; April 10, 2002, p. F1; April 23, 2002, p. F8; May 26, 2002, p. F7.
New York Times, March 8, 1984, p. C19; August 25, 1992, p. C14; August 15, 1995, p. C15; December 18, 2001, p. E5.
San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2002, p. A2.
Online
“Henry Brant,” Classical Composers Database, http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=brant (September 27, 2002).
“Henry Brant—Composer,” http://www.jaffe.com/brant.html (September 27, 2002).
—Carol Brennan
Brant, Henry
Brant, Henry
Brant, Henry remarkable and innovative American composer; b. Montreal (of American parents), Sept. 15, 1913. He received rudimentary instruction in music from his father, Saul Brant (1882–1934), a concert violinist, and began to compose when he was only 8. After studies at the McGill Conservatorium in Montreal (1926–29), he went to N.Y. and continued his training with Leopold Mannes at the Inst. of Musical Art (1929–34). He also received private instruction from Riegger and Antheil. He likewise studied conducting with Fritz Mahler. During the 1930s and 1940s, Brant was active as a composer and conductor for radio, films, ballet, and jazz groups in N.Y. while pursuing experimental composition for the concert hall. He taught orchestration and conducted ensembles at Columbia Univ. from 1945 to 1952 and at the Juilliard School of Music from 1947 to 1955. From 1957 to 1980 he taught composition at Bennington (Vt.) Coll., and then settled in Santa Barbara in 1981. In 1947 and 1956 he held Guggenheim fellowships. He was the first American composer to win the Prix Italia in 1955. In 1979 he was elected to membership in the American Academy and Inst. of Arts and Letters. He received grants from the Fromm (1989) and Koussevitzky (1995) foundations. In 1998 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Wesleyan Univ. His MSS were deposited at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel in 1998.
Brant is a pioneer of spatial music, in which performing forces are placed at specified widely separated points in space on the stage, in the balconies, and in the aisles, with the object of making contrasted, high-impact textures clear and intelligible for the listener. An audacious explorer of sonic potentialities, he has introduced unusual acoustic timbres into large and small ensembles, and complete orchestral ensembles, each comprising only a single tone quality. His vocal writing frequently involves a notated form of scat singing, much expanded in its range of expression, and often deployed in complex polyphony. He also employs jazz and other popular genres simultaneously with classical materials, and utilizes intact original idioms from other cultures—African, Indian, and Indonesian—as well. In conducting his spatial music, he uses an appropriate body language, turning at 90, 135, and 180 angles to address his performers. He also gives cues by actually imitating the appearance of the entering instruments, miming the violin bow, a trombone slide, a piccolo, a drum, etc. by the movement of his body or by facial movements. Brant has expounded the rationale of spatial music in his article “Space as an Essential Aspect of Musical Composition” in B. Childs and E. Schwartz, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (N.Y., 1967; 2nd ed., rev., 1998). His experiments have convinced him that space exerts specific influences on harmony and polyphony and has come to view space as music’s inescapable fourth dimension, the other three being the familiar pitch, time-measurement, and tone-quality. His works exclude electronic materials and do not permit amplification. He finds that recordings do not adequately suggest the spatial resonances, definitions, and contrasts in his music, and thus are only fully intelligible when heard live.
Works
spatial:Antiphony I for 5 Orch. Groups or Chamber Ensemble (1953); December for Soprano, Tenor, Man and Woman Speakers, Choruses, Woodwinds, Brass, Percussion, and Organ (1954); Grand Universal Circus for 8 Solo Voices, Chorus, and Orch. (1956); On the Nature of Things for String Orch., Solo Winds, and Glockenspiel (1956); In Praise of Learning for 16 Sopranos and 16 Percussionists (1958); Mythical Beasts for Soprano or Mezzo-soprano and 16 Instruments (1958); The Children’s Hour for 6 Voices, Chorus, 2 Trumpets, 2 Trombones, Organ, and Percussion (1958); Atlantis for Mezzo-soprano, Speaker, Chorus, Orch., Band, and Percussion Group (1960); Headhunt for Trombone, Bass Clarinet, Bassoon, Cello, and Percussion (1962); The Fourth Millennium for 2 Trumpets, Horn, Euphonium, and Tuba (1963); Voyage Four for Orch., Organ, and Soprano (1963); Odyssey—Why Not? for Solo Flute, Flute Obbligato, and 4 Orch. Groups (1965); Windjammer for Horn, Piccolo, Oboe, Bass Clarinet, and Bassoon (1969); Kingdom Come for Orch., Circus Band, and Organ (1970); Immortal Combat for 2 Bands (1972); An American Requiem for 16 Woodwinds, 14 Brass, Percussion, Organ, Church Bells, and Optional Soprano (1973); Sixty for 3 Wind Ensembles (1973); Prevailing Winds for Wind Quintet (1974); Solomon’s Gardens for 7 Solo Voices, Chorus, 24 Hand-bells, and 3 Instruments (1974); A Plan of the Air for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass, Organ, Orch. Wind Groups, and Percussion (1975); Curriculum I for Baritone and 8 Instruments (1975) and II for Small Orch. Groups (1978); Homage to Ives for Baritone, Piano, and 3 Orch. Groups (1975); Spatial Concerto—Questions from Genesis for Piano, 8 Sopranos, 8 Altos, and Orch. (1976); Antiphonal Responses for 3 Solo Bassoons, Piano, Orch., and 8 Instruments Obbligati (1978); Trinity of Spheres for 3 Orch. Groups (1978); Orbits for 80 Trombones, Organ, and Soprano (1979); The Glass Pyramid for Unison Strings, Horn, E-flat Clarinet, Chimes, 2 Pianos, English Horn, Bassoon, and Contra-bassoon (1980); Inside Track for Solo Piano, Sopranino Obbligato, 3 Small Ensembles, and Projected Images (1982); Meteor Farm for Orch., 2 Choruses, 2 Percussion Groups, Jazz Orch., Javanese Gamelan Orch., West African Drumming Ensemble, South Indian Soloists, and 2 Western Solo Sopranos (1982); Desert Forests for Large and Small Orch. Groups and Improvising Pianist (1983); Litany of Tides for Solo Violin, 4 Soprano Voices, and 2 Orchs. (1983); Bran(d)t aan de Amstel for 100 Flutes, 4 Jazz Drummers, 3 Choruses, 4 Street Organs, 4 Church Carillons, and 4 Concerto Bands (1984); Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes (1984); Western Springs for 2 Orchs., 2 Choruses, and 2 Jazz Combos (1984); Northern Lights over the Twin Cities for Large Chorus, Small Chorus, 5 Solo Singers, Concert Band, Jazz Ensemble, Bagpipe Group, Chamber Orch., 5 Pianos, and Large Percussion Ensemble (1985); Autumn Hurricanes for Men’s and Women’s Choruses, 3 Solo Singers, Woodwind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, Brass Ensemble, Percussion Ensemble, String Orch., and 4 Pianos (1986); Ghost Nets for Double Bass and 2 Chamber Orchs. (1988); Flight Over a Global Map for 50 Trumpets (1989); Rainforest for 4 Solo Singers, String Ensemble, Piano, Harp, Percussion, Woodwind Quartet, and Brass Trio (1989); Rosewood for Guitar Orch. (1989); Prisons of the Mind for 2 Orchs., 2 Concert Bands, 2 Brass Sextets, and 2 Steel-drum Ensembles (1990); Skull & Bones for Chorus, Orch., Large Jazz Band, Large Flute Ensemble, and 5 Solo Voices (1991); The Old Italians Dying for Narrator and 2 Orchs. (1991); 500: Hidden Hemisphere for 3 Concert Bands and Caribbean Steel-drum Ensemble (1992); Fourscore for 4 Quartets of Violin, Viola, Tenor Cello, and Cello (1993); Homeless People for Piano, String Quartet, and Accordion (1993); Seventy for 3 Concert Bands (1994); Dormant Craters for 16 Percussion (1995); Plowshares and Swords, total orch. environment (1995); Festive 80 for 26 Brass, 18 Woodwinds, and 4 Percussionists (1997); Mergers for Orch., Organ, Mezzo-soprano, and Baritone (1998). non-spatial:Angels and Devils for Flute Solo and Flute Orch. (1932); Partita for Flute and Piano (1932); Requiem in Summer for Woodwind Quintet (1934); Duo for Cello and Piano (1937); Hommage aux Frères Marx for Tin Whistle and Chamber Ensemble (1938; publ, as The Marx Brothers, 1996); Two Lyric Interludes for String Orch. (1938); Whoopee in D for 10 Instruments or Orch. (1938); Clarinet Concerto (1939); Concerto for Saxophone or Trumpet and 9 Instruments (1941); Fantasy & Caprice, violin concerto (1941); 2 syms.: No. 1 (1945) and No. 2, Promised Land (1947); Jazz Clarinet Concerto (1946); All Souls’ Carnival for Flute, Violin, Cello, Piano, and Accordion (1949); Street Music for Winds and Percussion (1949); Millennium I for 8 Trumpets, Chimes, and Glockenspiel (1950); Origins for Percussion Orch. and Optional Organ (1952); Signs and Alarms for 3 Woodwinds, 5 Brass, and 2 Percussion (1954); Ice Age for Ondes Martenot or Clarinet, Piano, and Percussion (1953); Conversations in an Unknown Tongue for Violin, Viola, Tenor Cello, and Cello (1958); Sky Forest for Accordion Quartet (1960); Concerto with Lights for Violin Solo, 10 Instruments, and 5 Musicians (1961); Feuerwerk—Words Over Fireworks for Solo Woman Speaker and 9 Instruments (1961); From Bach’s Menagerie for 4 Saxophones (1963); Consort for True Violins (1965); The Big Haul for Cello (1973); The Thunderbolt for Men’s Chorus and Percussion (1980). other: Orchestration of Ives’s Concord Sonata as A Concord Symphony (Ottawa, June 16, 1995); Completion of Schubert’s B minor Sym. (Vienna, Oct. 14, 1997).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire