Henry Brant, 94; maverick composer won Pulitizer

Henry Brant, flipping through his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, "Ice Field," in the library of his home in Santa Barbara, Calif.. (ap/file 2002)

LOS ANGELES - Henry Brant - an American maverick composer who added the dimension of space to music by placing musicians in nooks and crannies of concert halls, on boats floating down the Amstel River in Amsterdam, or arrayed throughout sports arenas - has died. He was 94.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer died Saturday at his home in Santa Barbara, according to associates.

Mr. Brant specialized in events tailor-made for specific sites. A typical example was "500: Hidden Hemisphere," commissioned in 1992 by Lincoln Center in New York in honor of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. Mr. Brant positioned military and civilian marching bands as well as a steel-drum band around the campus's reflecting pool.

The composer, a small man never seen without a baseball cap or visor, was dressed in his usual color-coordinated athletic garb, this time blinding yellow.

Much of the music of America's past, its dances and marches and dirges, was played simultaneously. But Mr. Brant's ingenious use of the location and carefully engineered counterpoint allowed the ear to accommodate the various musical strands. Music not meant to get along did.

In "Ice Break," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer in 2002, he placed sections of the San Francisco Symphony all over Davies 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 drum, and steel drums. The oboes and bassoons buzzed in the choir loft. Mr. Brant, in concert dress but nevertheless sporting a poker player's visor, improvised on the hall's large pipe organ.

All of this gave Mr. Brant the reputation of a kook, even with the Pulitzer. The prize came late in his career; at 89, he was the oldest composer to have won it.

But Mr. Brant noted 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, Mr. Brant was a major figure in American music. He was a noted educator and orchestrator with a 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.

Henry Brant was born Sept. 15, 1913, in Montreal to American parents. His father was a violinist who had studied with Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his violin concerto.

Mr. Brant had an early musical education and was naturally drawn to the offbeat, designing instruments out of plumbing pipes and cigar boxes.

At the suggestion of Henry Cowell - the experimental West Coast composer who was the first to play the strings inside the piano - Mr. Brant's father moved the family to New York in 1929 to widen his son's musical education.

Mr. Brant attended Juilliard and studied privately with Aaron Copland and George Antheil. In New York, Mr. Brant wrote the furthest-out music he could come up with - contrapuntally complex, dissonant, and unconventional in form - but he also became more deeply involved in jazz and popular music and found work during the Depression and the World War II years conducting on radio and orchestrating for films.

Virgil Thomson brought him in to orchestrate his scores for the Pare Lorentz documentaries "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River."

After the war, Mr. Brant taught at Juilliard, Columbia, and Bennington. He continued film work on the side and orchestrated several notable Alex North scores, such as those for John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" and "Cleopatra." However, Mr. Brant's name never appeared in the credits.

Mr. Brant's breakthrough was in the early 1950s when, all about the same time, he heard Berlioz's "Requiem" written for Les Invalides in Paris, the Baroque music of Gabrielli intended for St. Mark's in Venice, and Charles Ives's antiphonal "Unanswered Question." Mr. Brant had found his music growing so contrapuntally complex that the result was a mess. These various scores persuaded him that all he needed was a little physical distance between the players.

In 1981, Mr. Brant gave up academic life and devoted himself full time to spatial music, although he continued to take on occasional orchestral projects on the side, such as orchestrating Ives's "Concord Sonata," turning it into a symphony, and finishing Schubert's B-minor Symphony.

Mr. Brant wrote small pieces too, separating as few as three players in three corners of a concert hall. But he always worked the same way, changing the character of whatever venue he worked in by putting musicians where they had never been before. His first task whenever he arrived somewhere to create a piece was to make friends with the fire marshals.

Mr. Brant leaves his second wife, Kathy Wilkowski; a brother, Bertram; his children, Piri Kaethe Friedman, Joquin Ives Brant and Linus Corragio; and four grandchildren.