Henry Brant, 94, 'Spatial' Composer and Impresario
Henry Brant, who died Saturday at 94, was a composer known for his use of "spatial" music utilizing large ensembles of musicians stationed at some distance from one another playing in ways that some critics likened to salvos.
In a prolific career that spanned seven decades, Brant composed music 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.
Brant often composed for instrumental family groups of a single timbre. His composition "Orbits" (1979) was scored for 80 trombones and an organ, and "Rosewood" required an orchestra of 100 classical guitars. His oratorio "Wind, Water, Clouds & Fire" was premiered in Milwaukee in 2004 featuring three women's choruses, a children's choir, woodwinds, six trumpets, percussion, harp, piano, and 10 violins. Brant accompanied on the organ.
"It does not build to climaxes or even go anywhere in particular," wrote the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's music critic, who witnessed the performance in a cathedral. "It's just all around you, a high-pitched, ringing music of the spheres."
Other works were even more ambitious, such as "Bran(d)t aan de Amstel" ("Fire on the Amstel"), a 1984 spectacle that used most of Amsterdam with barge-loads of flutists, jazz bands, choruses, and the carillons of the four biggest churches in the city.
Although he was more oriented toward a circus-like atmosphere than most, Brant's spatial composition was part of a larger tradition. Other 20th century practitioners included Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Harry Partch. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2002, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, Brant remarked, "I have the comfort of knowing that I have no rivals."
Brant grew up in Montreal, where his father was head of the violin faculty at McGill University. The family moved to New York in 1929, and Brant enrolled at 15 at The Juilliard School. He studied piano and composition and worked with George Antheil and Aaron Copland, among others. He had composed from age 8, and one of his earliest recorded pieces, "2 Conclusions," was written, he later said, to annoy his piano teacher. Another early piece, "Music for a Five and Dime Store" (1932) was scored for violin, piano, kitchen utensils, and alarm clocks.
He later taught at Columbia University and Juilliard, and was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1957 to 1980.
He provided music for documentaries, including "The Plow That Broke the Plains" for the Department of Agriculture. He later found work in Hollywood films, including orchestration for "Cleopatra" (1963) and "Good Morning Vietnam" (1987).
His first foray into spatial music came in 1953, when he scored "Antiphony I" for five groups of musicians sorted into traditional orchestral sections and dispersed around concert hall. Encouraged by such encomiums as winning the Prix Italia in 1955, his style grew to impressive heights of wackiness. "Kingdom Come" (1970) featured an onstage orchestra playing dissonant music and another in the balcony playing whistles, buzzers, and air compressors. Other pieces included groups of 25 flutists on moving barges, steel drum bands dueling with the sounds of power saws, and a solo soprano singer "located anywhere at a distance from the stage." Brant's scores sometimes looked more like diagrams of football plays than traditional music.
His Pulitzer Prize-winning piece, "Ice Field," was a 20-minute organ concerto featuring the string section of the San Francisco Symphony and pianos playing on stage while ensembles of percussion players, brass, and piccolos and clarinets were stationed around the concert hall. The composer, dressed in sweats and a poker hat, played an organ with its tallest pipe loosed to create earthquake-like vibrations.
"Brant says it represents everyday life," reported a critic for the San Francisco Chronicle at the piece's premiere in 2001. The review added, "You feel not that you have been given a respite from fractious modern society ... but that you are now better prepared to deal with it."
Informed that he had won the Pulitzer, Brant said, "The main thing is for a composer to stick around as long as possible and keep working. Otherwise you miss things like this."
Henry Dreyfuss Brant
Born September 15, 1913, in Montreal; died April 26 at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. Survivors include his wife, Kathy Wilkowski, and three children.
