I’m feeling a little spacey today, so I suppose it’s only appropriate to remember Henry Brant.
Brant, who died in 2008 at the age of 94, was best known for his experiments with spatial music, in which performers are located not only on stage but also at carefully worked-out positions throughout the hall. The bodies of musicians are frequently distinguished through the playing of music of different characters.
Brant’s “Ice Field” was inspired by an episode from his boyhood when, as a 12 year-old in 1926, he found himself aboard a ship passing cautiously through a field of icebergs in the North Atlantic. Its performance calls for strings, two pianos, two harps and timpani on stage, oboes and bassoons in the organ loft, brass and jazz drummer in the first-tier seats, piccolos and clarinets at one end of the second tier, with pitched percussion at the other end, and additional percussion to the side of the audience on the main floor.
Brant played the organ at the work’s first performance at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, under Michael Tilson Thomas. The piece was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2001.
By coincidence, Tilson Thomas and organist Cameron Carpenter will be reviving the work at Davies Symphony Hall later this week.
http://www.sfsymphony.org/About-Us/Press-Room/Press-Releases/MTT-Carpenter-September-18-21.aspx
Interestingly, Brant also worked as an orchestrator for Hollywood film scores. In particular, his distinctive timbres, frequently bright and shrill, color a number of the classic scores of Alex North. He also worked as an orchestrator on Virgil Thomson’s “The Plow that Broke the Plains” and Aaron Copland’s “The City.”
Here is Brant discussing his concept of spatial music:
And a beautiful spatial work – though on a comparatively modest scale – “On the Nature of Things” (1956), after Lucretius, for some reason posted here in two parts:
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyglGX8fPmE
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dueRnnn4Bo
Happy 101st birthday to the Canadian-born American composer Henry Brant!