Space for More

“In my head, I understand it all right, but the rest of me has just got the shakes.”

Henry Brant is standing in his frontyard late Monday afternoon. The 88-year-old composer, dressed, as usual, in color-coordinated sweats and a visor, has spent the day digesting this news: After years of laboring in the shadows of contemporary music, his most recently premiered commission, “Ice Field,” won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for music.

His wife, Kathy Wilkowski, standing next to him, shakes her head. “We’ve gotten more phone calls today than we have all year,” she says.

And the phone keeps ringing as Brant and Wilkowski move inside the house, which is also Brant’s studio. His primary response to the Pulitzer is simple: Maybe it will be a portal to an easier creative future.

“It was given to a piece that is by no means an easygoing, conventional piece, “ he says, “I regard it as an encouragement to keep going the way that I go.”

Brant’s “way” is what he calls “spatial music”: works designed to be performed by musicians scattered around a concert hall, rather than just on stage. “Ice Field,” premiered by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in December, put some players on stage but also distributed them in various balconies and around seating areas. Brant himself sat at the hall’s pipe organ, playing a few improvisational passages at key moments in the 20-minute work.

Categorically immersive, “Ice Field” weaves together jazz, dissonant Modernism, comical sound effects and even lovely melodies. With sound coming from all directions, the listener is inside the music, in a way that is utterly different from the way concert hall music usually sounds.

Charles Amirkhanian, director of San Francisco’s Other Minds festival, which commissioned “Ice Field,” says Pulitzer recognition was far overdue for “the experimental wing of American music. I sat next to one of the jurors Monday night at a concert, and he said, ‘When you listen to the recording with the score in front of you, it just pops out as one of the most brilliant and entertaining and wacky inventions.’”

“You get something with space music that isn’t attainable any other way,” Brant has said. For one thing, dispersing musicians allows his eclecticism freer rein: Complex music that might be too dense coming from the focused source of a stage opens up when it’s spread around the hall.

It’s curious, Brant says, that “nobody” else is interested in it. “I have the comfort of knowing that I have no rivals.”

From Brant’s perspective, this is just the way music ought to be.

“It is a big thing,” he says, “because music cannot exist without space. It’s a whole big subject of where the sound goes, and that it [usually is] artificially constrained is one of the surprises of the last 50 years.”

Expectedly, Brant has had his champions, detractors and those who straddle the fence, intrigued if not entirely convinced of his vision. The New York Times review of “Ice Field” said that the work “lies somewhere between precision planning and controlled chaos, a mixture of smart bombs and dumb ones.”

Brant was born in Montreal in 1913, and he lived on the East Coast for most of his life, teaching at Juilliard, Columbia and Bennington College from 1957 to 1980.

Besides teaching, he has also played jazz, wrote radio music and worked as an orchestrator-composer for film. All of it shows up in his serious music, he says.

“I’ve had advantages which few composers have had in the 20th century, because of the commercial work I’ve done. In films, all they said was ‘our budget is such. You can have this much for music.’ They don’t tell you what the instruments are to be or what they shouldn’t be.”

He left teaching and his other pursuits behind when he moved to Santa Barbara in 1981. He and Wilkowski live in a woodsy Craftsman house on the city’s west side, but this is hardly retirement for Brant. He has written a steady flow of new works in recent years.

It was nearly half a century ago that Brant discovered space. The concept goes back to Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli and early Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi. Charles Ives--one of Brant’s heroes--also used it. His occasional compatriots in the field now include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter.

For Brant, the epiphany came in the form of the chamber piece “Antiphony 1” in 1953, when he separated five groups of musicians around a performance hall in New York, and got just the sort of three-dimensional sound he wanted.

His current count of spatial pieces is about 120 (he has done a handful of works for conventional musical setups). Signature works include 1979’s “Orbits,” for 80 dispersed trombones and an organ, or 1984’s “Fire on the Amstel,” in which boatloads of musicians traversed the canals of Amsterdam. His inherently architecture-oriented music helped christen the Dallas Symphony Hall in 1990 with “Prisons of the Mind,” for 314 carefully scattered musicians. The New York Philharmonic performed his music for his 80th birthday, and since then there has been a percussion piece outdoors at Lincoln Center, an orchestral piece inside Carnegie Hall, and in 1997, a piece in Central Park called “Festive Eighty.”

But Brant’s work hasn’t been heard much, until recently, in Southern California. His piece “Glossary,” for a roving mezzo-soprano and instrumentalists was performed last month in Los Angeles; his first work done in L.A. in a dozen years. “An ingenious contrapuntist,” wrote Mark Swed in a review of the piece in The Times, “Brant calculates just what music will fit where and the effect is invariably exhilarating.”

Even before the Pulitzer, there was more planned. Brant is the featured composer at the UC Santa Barbara New Music Festival, May 7-12. On April 21, his work “Prophets” will have its U.S. premiere in Santa Barbara’s First Methodist Church. It calls for four cantors singing Old Testament texts and a shofar player.

“All of a sudden,” Brant says, some local opportunities arrived. “For quite a few years, there was nothing. That’s the way it works. It’s happened to me so many times. It has looked like there is some progress and that things would be better and all of a sudden, I’m back to square one, and I stay there for five or 10 years. I guess that’s not a unique story.”

Doesn’t the Pulitzer offer some safeguard against that now?

“Well, that’s the best news of today. I hope it results in opportunities to do more things. I’m at the point where I think I know what I’m doing better than before. Now I can make something with a chance [it will be performed]. This may be it.”

And Brant is already thinking about the prospects. On Monday afternoon, he excitedly shows visitors new scores and thumbs through a book on concert halls around the world, pointing out halls that would be best suited for his kind of compositional plotting. L.A.’s soon-to-be finished Walt Disney Concert Hall has potential, he’s happy to point out.

And then there’s the chance that “Ice Field” won’t end up, like so many new pieces, a work whose premiere is also its finale.

“Yes, that would be fine,” he says and laughs, “but you know, the unwritten pieces are always the best, or at least they seem so at the time.”