Brant, Henry Dreyfuss

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BRANT, HENRY DREYFUSS

BRANT, HENRY DREYFUSS (1913– ), composer, flautist, pianist, and conductor. Born in Montreal, the son of a violinist, Brant began experimenting in composing at the age of eight. From 1926 to 1934 he studied in Montreal, New York, and the Juilliard Graduate School. In New York, he worked as a composer, conductor, and arranger for radio, film, jazz groups, and ballets, later extending his commercial music to Hollywood and Europe. Brant taught composition and orchestration in several institutions. Among his honors are Guggenheim Fellowships (1947, 1956), Prix Italia (first American recipient, 1955) and the Pulitzer Prize (2002).

Brant was one of the first American composers to incorporate elements of jazz and popular culture in concert music. His earlier works include a Saxophone Concerto, while Music for a Five and Dime (1932) for clarinet, piano, and kitchen hardware indicates his humor. Fascination with unusual instrumentation/timbral combinations has been his distinctive trait. Angels and Devils (1931) is scored for solo flute with flute orchestra, his Consort for True Violins (1965) is written for eight instruments of the New Violin Family, which he helped to develop.

In the early 1950s, inspired chiefly by Ives, Brant became a pioneer in the field of spatial music, in which the variously independent ensembles (instruments and vocal) were to be placed at specified point in space.

He felt that spatial music would speak more expressively to the human predicament, and create audience participation. Early work in the genre is Antiphony i (1953) for five widely separated orchestral groups, a work that predated the signal European spatial work, Stockhausen's Gruppen. Later pieces also make use of theater (The Grand Universal Circus, 1956), lighting (Concerto with Lights, 1961) and continuous movement of the performers (Windjamme, 1969). Because of the magnitude of their production and the logistic problems of placing ensembles outdoors or around an auditorium, large-scale works like Kingdom Come (1970) are rarely staged and recordings fail to reflect the nature of the music.

In the 1980s Brant expanded his concept of stylistic diversity to include the music of non-Western peoples. Meteor Farm (1982) is scored for Indonesian gamelan ensemble, jazz band, three South Indian soloists, and West African chorus with percussion as well as conventional European performers. He also turned to improvisational scoring. Gaining recognition in his later years, Brant received commissions for big works. He continued to eschew amplification and dreamed of developing larger, louder acoustic instruments and a new kind of concert hall with movable walls. Three Brant works were premiered in the year 2000, including Prophets for four cantors and a *shofar player at the Uilenberger Synagogue in Amsterdam.

Brant composed over 100 spatial works, as well as symphonic, chamber, and choral works, ballets, and films scores. He made the scoring of Ives's Concord Sonata (1995) a project of 30 years.

His writings include "Space as an Essential Aspect of Musical Composition" (in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. E. Schwartz and B. Childs, 1967) and "Spatial Music Progress Report" (in Quadrille, 1979).