A Composers’ Guide to Life

It would be a ridiculously tall order to expect composers to solve the overcrowded world’s most pressing problems. But world leaders let us down when it comes to finding ways for different people with different ideas and means to get along. They clearly cannot or will not manage the planet’s territory and resources to the benefit of all.

Better, I say, to turn to the most thoughtful scholars, scientists, religious leaders and, especially, artists. We need look no further than our backyard for musical sages, two of America’s greatest composers who have spent their lives writing music that deals directly with the all-important issues of space and community. Let the actions of musical tones serve as an example to people, and we have a model of how to live together, or at least a start.

The 88-year-old Henry Brant, who lives in Santa Barbara and who won the Pulitzer Prize for music last month, has discovered that radically different kinds of music can get along marvelously well if their sources are accorded their proper place in physical space. Lou Harrison, the Bay Area composer who celebrated his 85th birthday two weeks ago, has taken the approach that the entire world of music is an immense playground.

“I spread my toys out on a large acreage” is one of his mottoes for music that blends Eastern and Western cultures, yesterday and today, with exquisite, loving and inspiring ease. Brant insists that no single style can hope to evoke the “stresses, layered insanities and multidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.”

Crusty old outsiders though they are, Brant and Harrison aren’t exactly unknown, unhonored or even altogether anti-establishment. But their work seldom reaches the most prominent musical institutions with their attendant large audiences (except for the maverick-friendly San Francisco Symphony). So fragile is Harrison’s standing that all it took for the Lincoln Center Festival to cancel a planned birthday tribute this summer was the failure of Bill T. Jones to come to terms with Harrison’s opera “Young Caesar.” The festival asked the choreographer to direct the premiere of a festival-commissioned revision of the work. But when Jones, who has a very different artistic sensibility from Harrison’s, turned down the project, Lincoln Center decided to save money and drop Harrison altogether, rather than find a more suitable director.

Likewise, the Los Angeles Philharmonic put up roadblocks for a Brant evening that the CalArts New Century Players had hoped to present at their annual appearance on the orchestra’s Green Umbrella series this spring. The Philharmonic required a program that could be linked to its Schoenberg Prism series, and so a single Brant piece, “Glossary,” was conducted by the diminutive composer, wearing his trademark color-coordinated sweatsuit and baseball cap, at the end of long mixed program. (A spokesman says that the orchestra remains open, however, to a more extensive future Brant collaboration.)

Still, there has been just enough Brant and Harrison in the Southland lately to remind us not only of the importance of what the two composers represent, but also of their music’s sheer persuasiveness and utter likability. Earlier this month, the annual New Music Festival at UC Santa Barbara was host to Brant as composer-in-residence and also celebrated Harrison’s 85th birthday. Southwest Chamber Music noted the Harrison milestone, as did MicroFest 2002, where the composer was scheduled to make an appearance Saturday night.

What is ironic about this semi-neglect of Brant and Harrison is that they are about the friendliest, most appealing visionaries you could hope to encounter. Watching the plucky Brant, dressed like a high school football coach, walk up to the podium and then expertly command the quirky outpourings of individual CalArts players spread around Zipper Hall, as he did for “Glossary,” had practically the whole audience smiling.

For “Horizontals Extending,” a kind of battle of the bands at UCSB, Brant separated a wind and percussion ensemble into two groups--one on stage and one in the pit of the Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall--while a jazz drummer was stationed behind the audience. The two bands began by trying to outdo each other with their different sorts of quirky music but worked it out in an attack on a common enemy, the insistent drummer. What proved most remarkable about this work was not the outcome but the process. The fact that each music group had its own acoustical homeland gave it equality and, most important of all, intelligibility. In the end, it proved that three different kinds of music could co-exist perfectly well, as long as they have enough room.

Brant’s Pulitzer Prize-winning score, “Ice Break,” was given its premiere by the San Francisco Symphony in December. I recently caught up with it via tape. Obviously this is music that needs to be experienced in the theater, but even heard on a recording (which is the way the Pulitzer jury heard it), there is a thrilling sense of music accomplishing something valuable.

In “Ice Break,” Brant placed groups of musicians around San Francisco’s Davies Hall. The strings remained on stage; oboes and bassoons were seated in the organ loft, where they joined the composer, who manned the keyboard; other winds and brass and metallic percussion, along with another jazz drummer, mingled among the audience in the side boxes and on the two upper tiers.

The piece asks each group of instruments to play in a distinctive style--brash and jazzy or dark and melancholic. Some groups are on their own; some are controlled by one of two conductors the piece requires. At one end of the second tier, three piccolos and three clarinets make chaotic background noise that doesn’t connect with anything--Brant said it represents everyday life.

Again, every group goes its own way. Brant emphasizes the startling individuality of the different sorts of music by making each stand alone, not permitting the lower winds, say, to double the lower strings, as often happens in an orchestra. Brant’s contribution to the performance was the most distinctive of all. He set loose the organ’s tallest pipe, creating near earthquake-strength vibrations.

The result is an antidote to concert-hall claustrophobia, a feeling that space can expand to include whatever we need to fit in it. Spend 20 minutes with this piece and you feel not that you have been given a respite from fractious modern society (which is what some listeners have come to expect from classical music), but that you are now better prepared to deal with it.

Harrison accomplishes much the same thing by different means. He has a marvelous gift for lyric melody, which he refers to as “the audience’s take-home pay.” But he also has overcome the limitations typical of great melodists.

Tchaikovsky, for instance, never did much that was interesting with his inspired melodies. Beethoven, on the other hand, stunned listeners with the rabbits he pulled out of the most banal melodic hats. With his ravenous musical appetite, Harrison can do both. He enlivens already grand tunes, within stunning contexts, by incorporating esoteric tunings or including something from Java or Korea or Renaissance Italy, or a technique he might have picked up during the year he spent in Los Angeles studying with Schoenberg.

The recent local Harrison performances were mostly of small pieces, and the only one I heard was Southwest Chamber Music’s Suite for Cello and Piano, which was also performed at the UCSB festival. It is a minor eight-minute score written seven years ago. But even at that, and despite Southwest’s dutiful performance, there was no mistaking that the composer could fashion half-century-old melodic sketches from his workbooks into a small jewel of a piece that mixed Western melody with subtle harmonic devices plucked from the wide world.

Harrison’s more ambitious pieces--there are many, both he and Brant have been prolific--leave us with the vision of the world as a big happy family, not a group of warring tribes. Round, ponytailed, bushy-bearded, and with a penchant for wearing oversized red shirts, he has been dubbed new music’s Santa Claus. It suits him, as he flits around the globe in his music, delivering gifts from the West to the East and from the East to the West.

In Harrison’s world, a Javanese gamelan seamlessly fits with modern fiddles or horns; Renaissance dance forms, arcane systems of tuning and modern techniques can all be tied together into melodies worthy of Schubert and textures as sensual as any music has known.

The music of Brant and Harrison won’t cure AIDS, lessen the resolve of suicide bombers, ease the tensions in the Middle East, feed the hungry, halt global warming or balance the budget. But in offering a believable glimpse of a happy world, these two inspiring mavericks remind us of what is possible. A beacon in dark times is no small or meaningless thing.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.