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.

AMG: You were born in Montreal in 1913, the same town and same year as Morton Gould, but you have been an “American” composer since the 1920s. Is there still a little of the Canadian in you? Also, did you know Colin McPhee?

Henry Brant: Yes to both questions. My contacts with Canada have continued over the years through new works and appearances as conductor. I did know Colin McPhee, not well, but I was present at the New York premiere of his Piano Concerto with eight winds (that was in 1928!-Ed.). In something like 1926, I’m not sure of the date, Henry Cowell, who was an unusual kind of concert pianist who needed to use elbow and forearm technique in performing his music, also playing inside the piano directly on the strings, came out on one of his concert tours to visit my father. My father was a violinist — and a good one — and Henry Cowell told him “there’s nothing musically important happening here in Canada, and your son will never have a chance to develop as a composer. You need to move to New York.” So that is what my father did, picked up the whole family and moved us to New York. In recent years, though, I have been getting played a bit up in Canada; that piece Ghosts and Gargoyles (slated for release later this year on New World) was premiered in Toronto. And no — I am not the world’s oldest living composer!

AMG: Some of your biographies state vaguely that you worked in the radio studios in New York in the 1930s, which places you in the company of composers such as Raymond Scott, Bernard Herrmann, Gould and Leith Stevens. But there is never much detail offered in this part of your career; could you fill us in?

HB: Two major events happened in modern music in America in 1930: first, the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra told Leopold Stokowski to lay off that funny sounding, up-to-date music, and he did. Second, the New York Symphony Orchestra folded completely. Several other orchestras in town, most of which were playing the big movie houses, started to have a hard time once talking pictures came in. The Capitol Theater maintained an orchestra of fifty players; most other groups were more modest in size. Suddenly, all of these skilled musicians were out of work.

The news wasn’t all bad, though, as some of the big popular band leaders were getting more interested in avant-garde music. I was one of those composers who wrote it, so I got some work. In those days, all of the broadcasting companies had a resident orchestra, and it went from Toscanini and the big NBC Symphony through ABC, CBS, and WOR and down to WQXR that had a band of only nine players. Many of the musicians who had been in the old New York Symphony moved into the Federal Symphony Orchestra, which for a time was the crown jewel of the four New York WPA orchestras (”Works Progress Administration,” a depression-era federal aid program.) All of these groups were interested in my music, and performed works of mine written to strict stipulations — length, number of instruments and rehearsals, usually only one. The musicians in the radio bands were good, so the rehearsal and performance would also be very good. It was a wonderful training ground for young composers, and I’m sorry to say that there isn’t anything around like that today.

Around this time, I conducted a couple of the WPA orchestras, and some of my orchestrations were used in Broadway shows. There were ways in which unusual, experimental music would fit into a Broadway show or radio program — nobody objected if I wrote parodies, or made fun of other music. Well-established composers also employed me for scoring and conducting jobs — I did a lot of that — and that helped this avant-garde composer pay for his groceries.

AMG: Since 1950, you have been involved in creating what you call “spatial music.” Could you tell us a little about that?

HB: The first spatial composer, in a modern sense, was Charles Ives. When I performed The Unanswered Question with my students at Juilliard in the early 50s it marked a turning point in my musical life. As I worked on the music with my students, I seemed to sense an active, liberating power in action. Ives’s simultaneous presentation of wide spatial separation of performing forces, unrelated harmonic materials, colliding and violently contrasted melodic formations and rhythmic combinations of unpredictable irregularity have been points of departure for everything I’ve done since 1950. Few composers care how the instruments are placed in the hall; for them it’s a matter of conventional routine. For me, it is an expressive requirement.

Ives had a substantial income from his insurance business, and didn’t have to worry about material considerations in regard to his music. Ives wrote many things that were technically out of reach for practically everybody; the result was that a lot of his music wasn’t played in public for a very long time. There are certain things in Ives’s music that I would never do because I have to make some sort of living at composing, so I’m very practical about it. One thing about Ives was that he could play anything he wrote, himself — I asked Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles about that, and both said that Ives’s keyboard playing was “first rate.”

AMG: Did you ever meet Charles Ives?

HB: To my great regret, no, I never did. Several of my contemporaries went out there to meet him, and they told me what it was like. I do wish I had gone; I could have found out so many things about spatial music directly, rather than trying to figure it out all on my own.

AMG: You have created an orchestration of the Ives Concord Sonata which has been getting some very enthusiastic reviews. Will we soon have a recording of it?

HB: I hope so. The best performance so far was one given by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, but extra funds are needed to compensate the musicians to make this recording available. The terms, to me, are entirely reasonable, but so far, no one has come up with the funding. My intention in orchestrating the “Concord” was to present Ives’ music in an easily playable form, and to make it available to conductors who don’t have special kinds of qualities. Only the most gifted conductors can handle the half-dozen or so original major orchestral works of Ives. I decided against a spatial orchestration, and the score doesn’t have a typical Ives sound at all — it’s as practical as Tchaikovsky. My arrangement of the “Concord” was completely a labor of love; I worked on it over a fifty-year period, in between commissions, teaching and performing. And one day, it was finished. Dennis Russell Davies was the first to take an interest in it, and so far, is the only one to perform it often. If anyone wants to play A Concord Symphony, Schirmer has it.

AMG: Have you ever heard Johann Christian Bach’s symphonies for multiple orchestras?

HB: J.C. Bach’s “Symphonies” are only nominally spatial. I regard him as one of the low-voltage Baroque wimps. The first true spatial composer was Giovanni Gabrieli (1555-1612) of both instrumental and poly-choral spatial music. I’ve conducted his sonatas and canzonas. Only one composer, Hector Berlioz, is known to have written any spatial music whatever during the 19th Century. I’ve heard his famous Requiem at the Invalides in Paris, the place for which it was written. It uses both echo-procedure and identification of musical material via timbres of the most contrasted character.

AMG: Turning now to The Henry Brant Collection on Innova, many of these pieces are played by collegiate ensembles and community orchestras, and you managed to get some good performances out of these groups.

HB: Many community and school orchestras in this country are very good, a situation that wasn’t even imaginable in the 30s. The problem wasn’t one of level of performance so much as the competence of conductors, or that of incompetently written music being performed by incompetent conductors! But you don’t need to have your music played by big-name orchestras and a famous conductor to get a good performance.

I have gotten some of my best opportunities out of writing music for colleges. When I go out to a college to research a commission, I do my homework; I ask “What kind of ensembles do you have on campus?” And I write down the number of musicians in each one. Then when they think they’re done telling me about their ensembles, I ask them “are there any otherensembles?” There always are — usually trying to start up something that’s not really off the ground yet. I target those groups, and help add to their resources. It’s not a bad deal writing music for colleges — you can almost break even doing that, and it’s the best kind of education for students.

AMG: In your recent work, you are using more montage and quotation, for example breaking into Glenn Miller-styled dance music in one piece, or briefly imitating a composer like George Antheil in another. Do you care to comment on this?

HB: I think it’s a mistake to ignore any available source of subject matter or musical experience, no matter how modest or crude these days. My use of quotations is a part of the satire and parody content in my music, and Ives is the model for that. Ives used quotes in so many different ways that it would make a good study for a musicologist.

The public reaction to my spatial music has been most peculiar. No one denies me the right to claim primacy in pursuing this space music, and it’s not a reaction of antagonism, but when people learn I was composing spatial music in 1950 and am still writing in it 2006, they say “Brant writes spatial music. That’s fine, but I don’t know Brant. What does a Brant piece sound like?” Critics, musicologists and even the popular audience want to see spatial music as belonging to a trend, and it doesn’t. This has been the inevitable reaction to my work, and after seventy years of composing, I would think I should know why that is, but I still don’t. But my music has been fairly widely played, considering.

AMG: You have written more than 300 pieces, many of them of substantial length. Is your musical legacy going to be like Ives, 6000 manuscript pages that take thirty years to sort and more to decipher?

HB: Well I’m hardly the person to ask; so much of it is out of my control. I don’t set down the first note until I know when and where it will first be played, by whom and for how much. It makes a big difference in that I don’t have a big library of music that’s never been played. Most composers don’t have many published works, either in print or merely works that are placed with a publisher who acts as an agent would. The people who are in print are in the money; there’s less money made with scores that are rented out, but it’s not bad money certainly.

The Innova series is possible, in part, because the schools and orchestras that commissioned these pieces have an interest in seeing them performed again. So we’re getting these pieces out in hopes of generating some attention from orchestras and conductors and obtaining that elusive second performance, which is the hardest thing for a composer of avant-garde music to get. But, still more important is that performances should not end with that second performance, but enter the repertory and stay there.

I’m enjoying this! Can we continue our conversation in a year or two? I can assure that there will be further developments.

AMG: I would be honored.

HB: Very well, then. To be continued….