Henry Brant

Born: 15 September 1913, Montreal (Canada)
Died: 26 April 2008, Santa Barbara, CA (USA)

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Music

• Angels and Devils (1931)
• Origins (1952)
• Antiphony I (1953)
• The Grand Universal Circus (1956)
• In Praise of Learning (1958)
• Voyage Four (1963)
• Orbits (1979)
• Meteor Farm (1982)
• Litany of Tides (1983)
• Western Springs (1983)
• Fire in the Amstel (1984)
• Desert Forests (1985)
• Northern Lights Over the Twin Cities (1986)
• Invisible Rivers (1987)
• Ghost Nets (1988)
• Millennium 2 (1988)
• Flight Over a Global Map (1989)
• Rainforest (1989)
• Rosewood (1989)
• Prisons of the Mind (1990)
• Pathways to Security (1991)
• Skull & Bones (1991)
• 500: Hidden Hemisphere (1992)
• Trajectory (1994)
• A Concord Symphony (orchestration of Ives’s "Concord Sonata") (1994)
• Dormant Craters (1995)
• Plowshares and Swords (1996)

Biography

Born in Montreal in 1913 of American parents, Brant began composing 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 experimental works for the concert hall. From 1947 to 1955 he taught orchestration and conducted ensembles at the Juilliard School and Columbia University, and from 1957 to 1980 he taught composition at Bennington College. Since 1981, Brant has made his home in Santa Barbara. In 1950, Brant began to write "spatial" music, in which the positioning of performers throughout the hall, as well as on stage, is an essential factor in the composing scheme. His catalogue now comprises over 70 such works, each for a different instrumentation and each requiring a different spatial deployment. His works are also characterized by unusual combinations of instruments, extremely large forces, and co-existent musical styles (e.g., Meteor Farm (1982) is a multicultural work for expanded orchestra, two choirs, jazz band, gamelan ensemble, African drummers/singers and South Indian soloists, each performing its traditional music). Among Brant’s many awards and honors are two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Prix Italia, which he was the first American composer to win. In explaining his compositional techniques, Brant wrote that he had "come to feel that single-style musici [...] could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit." He regards space as music’s "fourth dimension," supplementing pitch, time measurement, and timbre. Although he has continued to experiment with new combinations of acoustic timbres, Brant has not used electronic materials or permitted amplification of his music.

(Sources: Kathy Wilkowski; The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music)

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Links

• http://www.jaffe.com/brant.html