Henry Brant
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Henry Brant | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | April 26, 2008 Santa Barbara, California, United States | (aged 94)
Occupation(s) | Composer, orchestrator, instrumentalist |
Henry Dreyfuss Brant (September 15, 1913 – April 26, 2008) was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.
Biography
Brant was born in
As a 19-year-old, Brant was the youngest composer included in Henry Cowell's landmark book from 1933, American Composers on American Music; and Cowell realized that Brant had already demonstrated an early identification with the American experimental musical tradition. He was represented in Cowell's anthology by an essay on oblique harmony, an idea which presaged some of the techniques used in his mature spatial compositions.
Thereafter Brant composed, orchestrated, and conducted for radio, film, ballet, and jazz groups. The stylistic diversity of these early professional experiences would also eventually contribute to the manner of his mature output. Starting in the late 1940s, he taught at Columbia University, the Juilliard School and, for 24 years, Bennington College. His students included American composer Patsy Rogers.[1]
During the mid-1950s Brant came to the conclusion that (as he himself put it) "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 well as producing works for the concert hall, Brant worked as an orchestrator for many Hollywood productions, including the
From 1981, Brant made his home in Santa Barbara, California. There he died on April 26, 2008, at the age of 94.
Music
Beginning with the 1953 score Rural Antiphonies (predating Stockhausen's
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, 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. His experimentation was not always successful however. His 1972 piece Immortal Combat staged outside Lincoln Center was drowned out by traffic noise and a thunderstorm.[8] 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[citation needed].
He is perhaps best known for his compositions Verticals Ascending (conceptually based on the architecture of the
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,
Brant's handbook for orchestration, Textures and Timbres, was published posthumously.
Orchestra/chamber orchestra
- An Adventure
- Ballad (The Half Songs)
- Decision
- Dedication in Memory of a Great Man
- Downtown Suite
- Symphony in B-flat (The Nineteen-Thirties)
- Symphony No. 2 (Promised Land)
- Variations on a Canadian Theme
- Whoopee in D (1972)
- Whoopee in D major: (Overture for a Fine Orchestra)
Solo instrument with orchestra/chamber orchestra
- Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra
- Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra
- Fantasy and Caprice, for violin and orchestra
- Concerto for Alto Sax and Orchestra (1941)
- Concerto for Alto Saxophone Solo Or Trumpet Solo (1996)
String orchestra
- Saraband
- Two Choral Preludes
- Two Lyric Interludes
Band/wind ensemble
- Millennium I
- Signs and Alarms
- Street Music (Three Places in Montreal)
- Whoopee in D major
Solo instrument with band/wind ensemble
- Concerto for Alto Sax or Trumpet with Nine Instruments
- Concerto for Clarinet and Dance (Jazz) Orchestra
- Statesmen in Jazz: Three Portraits
Solo instrument with chamber ensemble
- Violin Concerto with Lights
Vocal quartet with chamber ensemble
- Four Skeleton Pieces
- The Scientific Creation of the World
Chamber music
With soloist
- Divinity, with solo harpsichord
- Feuerwerk, with solo female speaker
- Newsflash, with narrator
- Piri
Two instruments
- Ballad, for violin and piano
- Duo, for cello and piano
- Partita, for flute and piano
- Two Rush Hours in Manhattan, for violin and piano
Three instruments
- Ice Age, for clarinet, glockenspiel, and piano (1954)
- Imaginary Ballet, for piccolo, cello, and piano
- Music for a Five and Dime
- Strength through Joy in Dresden: Introduction and Coda to a Theater Piece
Four instruments
- Conversations in an Unknown Tongue
- Four Mountains in the Amstel
- Fourscore
- From Bach's Menagerie
- Funeral Music for the Mass Dead
- Galaxy I
- Handorgan Music (1933 Version)
- Handorgan Music (1984 Version)
- A Requiem in Summer
- Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann
Five to nine instruments
- All Souls Carnival
- American Commencement
- Aria with Thirty Variations
- Galaxy II
- Hieroglyphics II
- Kitchen Music
- The Marx Brothers
- A Requiem in Summer
- Stresses
Percussion ensemble
- Origins (Symphony for Percussion)
A cappella chorus
- December Madrigal
- Peace Music for U.N. Day
- The Three-Way Canon Blues
Two pianos
- Four Choral Preludes
- Toccata on "Wachet Auf"
Solo instrument
- The Big Haul, for cello
- Confusion in the Salon, for piano
- Country Tunes in Jazz, for piano
- Four Traumatics, for piano
- Mobiles 1, for flute
- Oases, for cello
- Two Conclusions, for piano
- Two Sarabandes, for keyboard instrument
Spatial works
- Orbits: A Spatial Symphonic Ritual (for 80 trombones, organ and sopranino voice) (1979)
- Autumn Hurricanes, A Spatial Cantata for Widely Separated Vocal and Instrumental Groups (1986)[12]
Orchestra/chamber orchestra
- Antiphony I
- Antiphony I (chamber version)
- Antiphony One[clarification needed]
- Curriculum ll: Spatial Tone Poem
- Desert Forests (2000)
- Ice Field
- On the Nature of Things (1956)
- Plowshares and Swords
- Prisons of the Mind
- Trinity of Spheres
Awards
A member of the
References
- ISBN 978-0-9617485-0-0.
- ^ "Alex North's Comments on 2001", Visual-Memory.co.UK.
- ^ "Henry Brant as composer and orchestrator for films", RenewableMusic.blogspot.com, Friday, July 03, 2009.
- ^ "The Greatest Symphony Ever (Re-)Written", ArtsJournal.com, September 12, 2007, by Kyle Gann.
- ^ Lewis, Uncle Dave. "Henry Brant. Biography.", AllMusic.com. Retrieved September 11, 2008.
- ^ a b Harley, Maria Anna. "An American in Space: Henry Brant's "spatial Music"". American Music 15.1 (1997): 70–92.
- ^ "Brant, Henry | Carl Fischer Music". www.carlfischer.com. Archived from the original on 2018-03-22. Retrieved 2018-03-21.
- ^ Media, American Public. "American Mavericks: If You Build it, they will come". musicmavericks.publicradio.org. Retrieved 2018-03-21.
- ^ "PDF", Juilliard.edu.
- ^ "Building music.", Getty Research Institute. Retrieved September 11, 2008.
- ^ "Henry Brant: Ice Field". Other Minds. Retrieved February 15, 2024.
- ^ "The Henry Brant Collection, Volume 5". www.innova.mu. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
External links
- Henry Brant's page at Carl Fischer
- Henry Brant's Home Page
- Henry Brant Tribute by Samara Rainey, WMJ Issue 3, Article 13
- OtherMinds.org: Charles Amirkhanian Interviews Henry Brant
- MusicMavericks.PublicRadio.org: An interview with Henry Brant by Alan Baker, Minnesota Public Radio, June 2002
- Art of the States: Henry Brant two works by the composer
- The Henry Brant Collection on innova
- San Francisco Chronicle obituary for Brant
- Obituary from the Washington Post