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As a result of the diverse spatial experiments that span his working life, Henry Brant has given legs to the idea that spatial positioning is an unavoidable compositional decision, akin to rhythm or pitch. His profuse experiments give credence to the notion that space exerts specific influences on harmony, polyphony, texture and timbre. Initiated by Charles Ives, Brant has continued the American experimental use of space as a fourth compositional building block---joining pitch, rhythm and timbre in significance.

The son of a violinist, Brant began composing and performing with homemade instruments from the age of nine. He attended the McGill Conservatorium in Montreal, the Institute of Musical Art in New York, and the Juilliard Graduate School, and studied privately with Riegger, Antheil and Fritz Mahler. Early on, he made a living as a composer, conductor and arranger for radio, film, ballet and jazz venues, and worked for Benny Goodman and Andre Kostelanetz, among others.

Brant began his experiments with spatial manipulation because he was frustrated that his complex counterpoint could not be perceived with traditional instrument spacings. His answer came in the form of Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, in which Ives included wide spatial separation between simultaneously performing groups. Brant's catalogue comprises nearly one hundred works in the spatial music genre. Not until the early 1950s did Brant's work receive widespread recognition, garnering an award of the American Arts and Letters, which led to the recording of Angels and Devils, and the spate of performances worldwide that ensued.

All three compositions on this recording, Music for Massed Flutes (NW 80636-2), are for multiple flutes, and span seventy years of Brant's work experimenting with spatial acoustics. They display his unique and wide vocabulary of compositional and orchestral technique.

Now recognized as the first flute orchestra, the flute concerto Angels and Devils (1931) (here remastered from the historic 1956 CRI LP), is the brainchild of then-eighteen-year-old Brant's inspired response to Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which featured five flutes in the orchestration. This piece uses three piccolos, five standard flutes and two alto flutes, which employ jazzy rhythms and jazz-like polychords. While the lines are all created by flutes, the three distinct families of flute and the dictated tonguing techniques, such as multiple tonguing (double, triple, and flutter), measured vibrato (a first in notated music), bird sounds and multiple trill sections lend a unique texture and timbric variety to the piece.

Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes (1984), subtitled Mass for June 16, is scored for as many flutes as possible, all playing liturgical music from the Graduale Romanum for masses sung on June 16. The unique acoustical environment of a cathedral, with chambers and chasms that create multiple reverberations and echoes---along with the obvious spatial challenges it presents---holds a particular attraction for Brant. At times, the flutes play in staggered unison echoing one another in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. The result is a hauntingly effective mimicking of a cathedral environ.

Ghosts & Gargoyles, subtitled Spatial Soliloquies, his third work for multiple flutes, was premiered in Toronto on May 26, 2002, as a very delayed follow up to Angels & Devils. This piece is orchestrated for piccolos, flutes, alto flutes, bass flutes and drum set, the anomaly in orchestration on this album being the drum set found here. Brant interweaves music from disparate sources, quoting intermittently from renaissance choral works while spotlighting jazz drum riffs. Paul Taub, who suggested the piece, calls Ghosts and Gargoyles "a very youthful" composition that "swings."

In a professional career that encompasses more than seventy years, Brant has sometimes pushed the envelope toward new and bizarre performance scenarios, using spatial techniques as a compositional backbone, particularly from the 1950s onward. Preferring to work surrounded by natural ambient sounds, he refuses to amplify any sound, including his own voice in front an audience---yet another elaboration of Brant's sensitivity to sound.

Brant's spatial music has been widely performed and recorded in the United States and in Europe. His work has been recognized by many awards and honors, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Ice Field; two Guggenheim Fellowships; the Prix Italia (which he was the first composer to win, in 1955); and the American Music Center's Letter of Distinction in 1982. In 1979, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 1985, he received an ASCAP/NISSIM Award. A Fromm Foundation grant followed in 1989, then a Koussevitzky Foundation award in 1995 as well as Ford Foundation and NEA awards. Brant's work has been recognized by an official Henry Brant Week in Boston (1983), a special week of ten all-Brant concerts at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam (1984), and in New York City's Certificate of Appreciation (1992). The Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel owns Brant's complete archive of original manuscripts, which includes more than 300 works. In 1998, Brant received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Wesleyan University.

Links:

http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2002/music/bio/

http://www.jaffe.com/BrantBio.html

http://newmusicbox.com/page.nmbx?id=45fp05

http://www.carlfischer.com/fischer/brantbio.html

http://www.msu.edu/user/gualtie3/HenryBrant.htm

http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Brantinterview.shtml

http://www.classical-composers.org/cgi-bin/ccd.cgi?comp=brant