At 92, composer Henry Brant is one of the few surviving veterans of the first wave of “modern music” in America. In a composing career spanning seventy years and counting, Brant has advanced Charles Ives’s concept of “spatial music” into the twenty-first century, dividing up orchestras and soloists into distantly placed instrumental groups that talk to one another antiphonally through space and time. Along the way, Brant has picked up two Guggenheim fellowships, honors from the Ford, Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 2002, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his composition Ice Field. Innova Recordings in Minnesota has lately undertaken a fascinating multi-volume recorded edition, The Henry Brant Collection, making available for the first time on record Brant’s wholly unique body of work.

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