Henry Brant, the composer who experimented with the spatial arrangement of musicians, has passed away at the age of 94.
Henry Brant, a U.S. avant-garde composer, died at the age of 94 on Saturday, April 26 in his Santa Barbara, California home. His death was due to natural causes.
Born in Montreal in 1913, the composer was the son of American parents and eventually moved to the US. As a composer, he experimented in order to find a new music that reflected the hodge-podge collection of sounds in daily life. Simply by walking down the street, the average person can hear jazz from a restaurant, rap from a car stereo and someone's own collection of favorite hits coming from an upstairs apartment.
He was also a composer who liked to put musicians in their places. At least, he enjoyed exploring acoustical space and the effects of placing musicians in different parts of a performance venue. A work such as Horizontals Extending entails two ensembles placed widely apart and a trapset (percussion) on stage; all three groups of musicians then play in a different time.
He played instruments ranging from the tin whistle to the organ and violin. He studied at McGill University in Canada and later in New York. He has also taught at the Juilliard School, Columbia University and Bennington College.
In 2002, Brant was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his composition Ice Field. Brant received two Guggenheim Fellowships and won the Prix Italia, becoming the first American to take home that prize.
For more information, please see the CBC News Article.
