Cause you gotta think big:
In 1984, he turned central Amsterdam into a concert venue with "Fire on the Amstel." He needed four boats to carry 100 flutists for a piece that also incorporated multiples of jazz drummers, church carillons, brass bands and street organs. "Orbits," a 1979 work for 80 trombones, at one point has an 80-note chord, half the pitches part of the standard 12-note scale, the other half microtones (pitches that would fall between the cracks of a piano keyboard).In "Ice Field," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer in 2002, he placed sections of the San Francisco Symphony all over Davies Symphony Hall. The full brass section became a jazz big band. Woodwinds squealed as high as they could from the balconies. Facing the audience were gongs, bass drums and steel drums. The oboes and bassoons buzzed in the choir loft. Brant, in concert dress but nevertheless sporting a poker player's visor, improvised on the hall's large pipe organ.
All of this gave him the reputation of a kook, even with the Pulitzer. The prize came late in his career. At 88, he was the oldest composer to have won it. But he said in an interview that the most it did for him was to persuade a few more presenters to say, "Well, let's look at this minor screwball music."
Nonetheless, Brant was a major figure in American music. He was a noted educator and orchestrator with a varied career that included jazz, conducting and film work. Beginning with "Antiphony 1" in 1953, he was a pioneer of spatial music, and from then on he wrote more than 100 works in which the layout of the performers determined the nature of the music. All music is spatial, he said, because all music must emanate from somewhere. But he was the first composer to devote a career to exploring the expressivity of space.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 1 May 2008 16:43 (seventeen years ago)
http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2008/04/henry_brant_19132008.html
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/interview_brant.html
I knew & admired him for expanding Ives' experiments with Spatial music, and for his orchestration of Ives, the "Concord Symphony". the CD that came out on Innova last year of that is wonderful. Things I didn't know: participated in the first NYC concert of Harry Partch's music in the early 40's, and Teo Macero was a student of his
one of those people who's been at the heart of the US experimental scene for such a long time that he's incredibly well known & loved by the hardcore audience for 20th century classical. but his focus on spatial music means it's almost impossible to translate to recordings -- the point of "Orbits" when that 80-note chord hits is that the players are surrounding the audience, in person you can navigate & pick out all the voices, on the recording you just have this massive sound that sort of washes over you
I saw the SF Symphony performance of "Ice Field" and he had ensembles spread throughout all three levels of the hall -- he conducted from the pipe organ, playing like a mad professor, occasionally turning around and pointing as if sending out lightening bolts all over the hall to trigger the different groups of players, setting them against each other. some great swingtime jazzy sections where the musicians really get dirty in a very American way you seldom hear in concert halls, though many of the melodies are crazy and atonal (atonal jazz best of both worlds for me)
a friend of mine was a music copyist for him in the early 90's & I visited his house once while he dropped off some scores. he was already 80 but jumping with nervous energy and utterly sharp, and I remember there was a daily schedule scotch taped to the wall near his grand piano handwritten in block letters that said something like:
8:30: BREAKFAST
9-12: WORK
12-1: LUNCH
1-6: WORK
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 1 May 2008 19:12 (seventeen years ago)
I figured you'd have something to say, Milton -- great post, and thanks.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 1 May 2008 19:29 (seventeen years ago)
from that mavericks interview, two bits
How about the American aspect of things. You've got someone like Frederick Rzewski who is an American living in Europe. Is he writing American music like these composers on this list? Is there such a thing that's recognizable perhaps?
I think it would be if American composers of non-popular music knew more about jazz. They don't. They don't know how to use it. They can't play it. They don't know how to put it in their music, and jazz musicians who have the ability to play it don't know about what non-popular composers are able to do with long musical continuities and complicated textures. It's a matter of mutual ignorance and snobbery. I don't mean jazz in the sense of Gershwin's Copland's jazzy music. Those don't even get to it. I mean jazz materials of the kind that jazz musicians say themselves are the real thing. Composers don't know anything about this. This is really unfortunate. I've always taken it seriously. I've had opportunities to work with jazz musicians in the commercial part of my career, and I now use it in most of my pieces; my own adaptation. I want the jazz figurations the way jazz musicians would improvise it, but I've thrown out entirely the harmony of popular music, which I think is pure junk. The chords and the chord changes, none of them are of any use as far as I'm concerned. The single lines invented by jazz musicians are so far in advance of what the modern classical, if I may use that term, musicians can do. There's no possible comparison.
this ties into what I was trying to say about his music -- he understands the looseness jazz in a way most orchestral composers who composed for sheet music usually just can't, but it's filtered through the melodic sense of someone who came up in the choice modernist atonal early 20th century environs. I'm glad someone sounds like that, I can't think of anyone who really went for that, certainly not Antheil
and the other comment about Teo Macero's spatial piece also giving him permission in the early 50's is very very interesting in that both of them pre-date Stockhausen's Gruppen, who as the loud-mouthed self-promoting european usually attributed himself as the pioneer of spatial / surround music.
― Milton Parker, Thursday, 1 May 2008 22:04 (seventeen years ago)