Henry Brant Born: September 15, 1913 - Montreal, Quebec, Canada Died: April 26, 2008 - Santa Barbara, California, USA Henry (Dreyfus or Dreyfuss) Brant was a Canadian-born American composer, conductor, and pianist. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques. Brant was born in Montreal of American parents in 1913. The son of Saul Brant, Henry began composing at the age of 8. He was enrolled from 1926 to 1929 at Montreal's McGill Conservatorium before permanently moving to the USA and studying composition with Rubin Goldmark, George Antheil, Aaron Copland, and Wallingford Riegger in New York, privately and at the Institute of Musical Art and the Juilliard Graduate School (1929-1934). Henry played violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion at a professional level, and was fluent with the playing techniques for all of the standard orchestral instruments. On a recording of Macinations, he plays timpani, chimes, xylophone, glockenspiel, organ, E-flat flute, ceramic flute, double ocarina, double flageolet, and harp. As a teenager, he was the youngest composer included in Henry Cowell's landmark book American Composers on American Music, demonstrating an early identification with the American experimental musical tradition. Brant was represented in Cowell's anthology by an essay on oblique harmony, an idea which presaged some techniques used in his mature spatial works. Brant then went into commercial music, conducting and arranging for radio, ballet, jazz groups, and film, and later orchestrating Hollywood film scores including The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936). The stylistic diversity of these professional experiences would also eventually contribute to stylistic polyphony of his mature works. In the mid 1950’s Brant felt that “single-style music…could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” In pursuit of an optimal framework for the presentation of a music which embraced such a simultaneity of musical textures and styles, Brant made a series of experiments and compositions exploring the potential for the physical position of sounds in space to be used as an essential compositional element. As a prolific composer and an audacious and inventive creator, Brant became an important figure in contemporary music in the USA. He was fascinated by esoteric instruments and the possibilities of antiphonal composition, for spatially separated groups of instruments. Brant's work also employed controlled improvisation and, beginning in the 1980’s, world music instruments. He also frequently called for unusually large forces (eg 80 trombones, 75 guitars). His earliest spatial work was Antiphony I (1953). The practice of placing the players throughout the venue dominated his work from that point. His own performance notes for An American Requiem for wind symphony illustrate this: ". . . performances must not be attempted with all the instruments placed on stage, or all together in any single area". The notes contain explicit instructions on placement of players in aisles, balconies, and elsewhere around the hall. In addition to his works for the concert hall, Brant was active as an orchestrator for many Hollywood productions including the Elizabeth Taylor movie Cleopatra (1963), one of many collaborations with composer Alex North. Brant helped with the orchestration of North's score for 2001. Due to North's stress-induced muscle spasms, Brant had to conduct the recording session for the film score, which was eventually discarded by the director, Stanley Kubrick. Among the later film scores Brant orchestrated were Carny; and Good Morning, Vietnam. Henry Brant also worked as orchestrator for composers Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, George Antheil, Douglas Moore, and Gordon Parks. Brant's work as an orchestrator was not limited to film and stage. His long-term affinity for the music of Charles Ives - whose The Unanswered Question was an acknowledged inspiration for Brant's spatial music - was ultimately found in the premier of Brant's arrangement of Charles Ives' Second Piano Sonata, Concord, Mass 1840-60 as A Concord Symphony. He conducted its world premiere at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa, on June 16, 1995. [It was recorded, as shown below.] Among other Brant works performed in Canada have been Ice Field (performed by Esprit Orchestra); and Ghosts and Gargoyles for solo flute and flute choir (premiered Toronto on May 26, 2002). His music was heard often at new music festivals in the USA and Europe. He received numerous commissions from Columbia University, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Composers Forum (New York City), the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. Brant taught at Columbia University (1945-1952), the Juilliard School (1947-1954), and Bennington College in Vermont (1957-1980). See my interview with Vivian Fine Brant stated, "Every new work of mine ... requires a differently constituted ensemble of instruments and/or voices. It is planned for a different occasion, has a different length, and is designed for a different space, auditorium, and audience capacity" (Strings, January 1, 2008). Describing Brant's particular brand of new music, American Record Guide said, "Brant's music is rooted in iconoclastic notions of what music is" (American Record Guide, January-February 1997). Brant continued composing well into his 90s. From 1981, he made his home in Santa Barbara, California where he died on April 26, 2008 at the age of 94. Beginning with the 1953 score Rural Antiphonies (predating Stockhausen's Gruppen of 1955-57), Brant developed the concept of spatial music, in which the location of instruments and/or voices in physical space is a significant compositional element. He identified the origins of the concept in the antiphonal music of the late renaissance and early baroque, in the antiphonal use of four brass ensembles placed in the corners of the stage in the Requiem of Hector Berlioz and, most importantly, in works of Charles Ives, in particular The Unanswered Question. Brant was America’s foremost composer of acoustic spatial music. The planned positioning of performers throughout the hall, as well as on stage, was an essential factor in his composing scheme and a point of departure for a radically expanded range and intensity of musical expression. His mastery of spatial composing technique enabled him to write textures of unprecedented polyphonic and/or polystylistic complexity while providing maximum resonance in the hall and increased clarity of musical detail for the listener. His catalogue comprises over 100 spatial works. In keeping with Brant’s belief that music can be as complex and contradictory as everyday life, his larger works often employ multiple, contrasting performing forces, as in Meteor Farm (1982) for symphony orchestra, large jazz band, two choruses, West African drum ensemble and chorus, South Indian soloists, large Javanese Gamelan ensemble, percussion orchestra and two Western solo sopranos. Brant’s spatial experiments convinced him that space exerts specific influences on harmony, polyphony, texture and timbre. He regarded space as music’s “fourth dimension,” (after pitch, time and timbre). Brant experimented with new combinations of acoustic timbres, even creating entire works for instrumental family groups of a single timbre: Orbits for 80 trombones, organ and sopranino voice [LP jacket shown below], Ghosts & Gargoyles for 9 flutes, and others for multiple trumpets and guitars. This predilection for ensembles of a single tone quality dates from Angels and Devils (1932) for an ensemble of 11 flutes. With the exception of pieces composed for recorded media (in which he used over-dubbing or acoustical sound sources), Brant did not use electronic materials or permit amplification in his music. See my interviews with Garhard Samuel, and Michael Tilson Thomas Brant is perhaps best known for his compositions Verticals Ascending (conceptually based on the architecture of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles) and HorizontalsExtending. A "spatial opera", The Grand Universal Circus (Libretto: Patricia Gorman Brant) was premiered in 1956. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Brant was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ice Field: Spatial Narrative (2001) for Large and Small Orchestral Groups, commissioned by Other Minds and premiered by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas [CD shown above]. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and in 1955 was the first American composer to win the Prix Italia. Among other honors are Ford Foundation, Fromm Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Koussevitzky awards and the American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction. The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel has acquired Brant’s complete archive of original manuscripts including over 300 works (1998). In conjunction with Brant’s 85th birthday concert, Wesleyan University conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts (1998). In addition to composing, he played the violin, flute, tin whistle, percussion, piano, and organ and frequently included soloistic parts in his large works for himself to play. Later premieres included Wind, Water, Clouds & Fire, for 4 choirs and instrumentalists, commissioned by Present Music and premiered on November 19, 2004 at The Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Tremors, for 4 singers and 16 instrumentalists, commissioned by the Getty Research Institute, premiered on June 4, 2004, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Tremors was repeated in a Green Umbrella concert at LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 1, 2004. Ghosts & Gargoyles, a concerto for flute solo with flute orchestra, for New Music Concerts, Toronto had its premiere on May 26, 2002. Brant's handbook for orchestration, Textures and Timbres, was published posthumously. ==  The text of the biography in this box is mostly taken and edited (amazingly) from the Bach Cantatas website!  Photos are from other sources.   ==  Many of Bant’s works have been (and continue to be) issued on commercial recordings.  The illustrations used on this webpage are mostly the older LPs.   ==  Names which are links in this box and below refer to my interviews elsewhere on my website.  BD

See my interviews with Vincent Persichetti, Hale Smith, Ross Lee Finney, Frederick L. Hemke, and John P. Paynter

BD:   Let me pursue this just a moment further.  Are you basically pleased with the recordings that have been put out of your music?

Brant:   Yes, but one thing that is important in all my music since 1950, is that I have utilized the entire hall as a source of sound.  I state that musicians have to be placed in certain parts of the hall.  On the first page of every such new piece, it says, “If you can’t do that, don’t play it.  Performances with everything together on a stage are not authorized.”  I’ve gone that far.  However, space is one thing that cannot be recorded.  I look upon space as one of the primary ingredients.  When we speak of primary ingredients, one of them is time, and that includes things like rhythm and meter.  Another is tone quality, such as the difference between a violin and a voice.  Then there’s pitch, and that is to say frequency.  You can’t have music of any kind without those three, and I say there’s a fourth which is equally important, and that is space, because even if you handle space conventionally, with the performers in one place and the audience in another, you’re using it, because without space there’s no place to put the musicians and no place to put the audience.  It’s as inescapable as the others, and for me it has to be recognized as a primary ingredient.  I even go so far as to think of it for myself as the fourth dimension in music.

BD:   You say without space, there’s no place for the audience and no place for the musicians.

Brant:   No!

BD:   Is there also no place for the music itself?

Brant:   Then there’s no sound.  There’s no place for the soundwaves to be generated or to travel.  There’s no sound without space, so this is something that can’t be recorded.  What comes out of the hi-fi speakers is not the arrangement of space as you heard it in the hall.  This can be managed, but only in a very cumbersome way, and it can’t be managed with a conventional hi-fi arrangement at all, except in one case.  I’ve written some pieces with this in mind, in which there’s an orchestra on the stage, and there’s another one in the back of a hall which is usually smaller.  That can be represented fairly well with stereo by recording each group separately in the empty hall, and then editing it in such a way that only one of them comes out of each speaker.  Engineers don’t usually like to do this, but it is possible.  Some of my recordings, such as Millennium Four [or called The Fourth Millennium (1967)] and Kingdom Come [LP jacket shown at right], were made in that way.  When you hear those, you take your two speakers and put them in the diagonally opposite corners of your room and sit in between.  Then you get a fair idea of the spatial arrangement that took place in the hall, but that’s the only case.  Now, that’s artificial.  There’s no reason for limiting a spatial arrangement to two sources only.  Some of my pieces have as many as a dozen.  Also, it doesn’t take into account vertical and horizontal uses of space, and other complexities.  So, that’s the first caution when you play my recordings.  Unless you have some hi-fi way of playing it, your listeners wouldn’t even be able to hear the space and the relationships in Kingdom Come and Millennium Four.

BD:   [With a bit of trepidation]  Do you disown your records?

Brant:   I don’t disown the records.  No, the records represent the piece, but they don’t show what happens in the hall.  But they do something else.  The editing holds together sounds that were meant to be apart, and the effect of physically separating sources of sound is to weaken or destroy their relationships.  In other words, they don’t affect each other.  This is especially significant in terms of harmony.  It’s not possible to make a chord between two groups of instruments that are 150 feet apart.  You’ll hear half the chord and the other half, but they won’t mix.

BD:   Even if you are directly in the center, being equidistant?

Brant:   That’s right.  You’ll hear them separately.  What happens in the case of editing is that they’re compelled to make head-on harmonic collisions, so that effects are produced which don’t exist in the original live performance of the music.  The compromise that I have to accept is a much more basic matter than what other composers have to accept, because this is a fundamental distortion to make harmony where there isn’t any.  Still, it’s better than nothing.  At least the recordings give some idea of the character of the musical material that I write, with such things as contrast.

BD:   Are you hoping that the recordings will be more of a catalyst for live performances?

Brant:   In a way!  It certainly is better than the state of affairs where recordings didn’t exist.  My composing career began in the 1930s, and nobody had a recording of anything then.  It’s true that people learned how to read a score a little better, but still, to get an idea of what a complicated piece sounded like was something that only a very few privileged and successful composers could manage to do.

BD:   Do you write your music specifically to be complicated, or is that just simply the way your music must be?

Brant:   My point of departure is Charles Ives, and to the extent that my music suggests procedures of Ives, I’m very pleased.  I look upon him as not only one of the important American composers, but the principal composer of the entire twentieth century.  I’m always pleased when somebody says Ives.  If somebody says any other composer, I’m not pleased, and this goes into another bias.  Ives did not invent spatial music, because that existed in the sixteenth century in the European cathedrals, especially in Venice.  Almost any composer employed by the Catholic church knew how to write spatial music.

BD:   The antiphonal pieces of Gabrielli?

Brant:   Yes!  Then it disappeared.  There wasn’t any spatial music during the time of Beethoven, for instance.  But Berlioz started a new kind of his own, which was not echo-space music, which was what the Venetians used.  It was something else.  In the Requiem, he has four brass bands in corners of the balcony, and they accumulate.  They don’t only play in succession.  What they accumulate is harmony.  They don’t accumulate counterpoint or contrasted material.  Against that, on the floor of the middle of the hall, he has other music

Te Deum and the Requiem.  What Ives did was something much more radical.

BD:   Before we come back to Ives, let me ask about something like an opera of Verdi, where he calls for an offstage band.  Is that not spatial music?

Brant:   In a way, yes.  It

Brant:   Those things, and my experiments in quarter-tone music will continue, and hopefully I’ll be able to encourage some instrument builders to make some models of the existing standard instruments with quarter tone possibilities.  That’s my approximate agenda, but also I hope to expand the circulation of ‘Instant Composition’ classes.  In a general way, the production of new works depends on many factors, so that I’m not inclined immediately to write more symphonic pieces or oratorios.  I hope to have some success in developing some new material, and in the meantime, I’m writing about what I’ve been able to find out myself.

BD:   I wish you lots of luck on all of this, and continued success with performances.

Brant:   Thank you!  I appreciate that.  I’ve enjoyed speaking to you.  In a general way, these things aren’t easy to talk about, because spatial ideas above all need the sound.  We haven’t had a single note of spatial music in the last hour, yet we’ve been able to discuss this.  You’ve made the format a very interesting one.

BD:   Oh good.  I’m glad you approve.  I look forward to putting your music on the air, and seeing what reaction we get.

Brant:   If you ever have the occasion to play a record or records in the course of ordinary programming, if you could provide a few sentences to the effect of the special kind of loss that my music undergoes in recordings, I would appreciate it.

BD:   Oh, sure!  Whenever we play any music, there’s always a live announcer, and if I schedule your music, it’ll be me.  I’ll be sure to spend a couple of minutes explaining the music, and your thoughts about the music, and the limitations of the recording.

Brant:   This will be very much appreciated, because as far as I know, this hasn’t happened.  My records are just played as any records, and so no one knows anything about it!  [Pauses a moment]  One question you did not ask me was how I came to write spatial music.

BD:   Do you want to discuss that a little bit?

Brant:   I think so, because it often comes up.  Until 1950, I hadn’t written any spatial music.  In fact, I really didn’t know anything about it.  I was an infant prodigy as a composer.  I wrote a string quartet when I was ten that was played publicly.  Writing always came easily to me, and so when I say my career began before 1930s, this explains it.  I started very early, and the only thing I knew in the first twenty years of my career was that I wanted to write in many styles.  I knew that even before I’d made the acquaintance of Ives.  I myself wanted to learn how to write in the different popular styles, as well as in the contemporary styles of the present, and in the styles of the past.  None of my teachers forced me to do this.  It was a program and discipline that I’ve imposed on myself.  The first thing that surprised me, when I heard the music of Ives, was the multiplicity of styles.  Before I’d heard The Unanswered Question, I wondered how he had you done it.  He did one style after the other in very close succession, and that was one answer to what to do with so many styles.  The only sense I had was not to stick to one style, because it might not be the one that was going to communicate best in the foreseeable future.  So, I first began to write music with a lot of styles, but in sequence, one after the other.  Then I liked Ives’s idea that music ought to have a lot in it.  His conception of a Maximal Music

© 1988 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded on the telephone on January 9, 1988.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following September, and again in 1998;  Copies of the unedited audio have been placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University, and in the Oral History of American Music archive at Yale University.  This transcription was made in 2021, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.