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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

HENRY BRANT: SPATIAL MUSIC TO EVOKE THE NEW STRESSES, LAYERED INSANITIES, AND MULTIDIRECTIONAL ASSAULTS OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE ON THE SPIRIT

Henry Brant

Interviews conducted by Caroline Crawford in 2006

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Henry Brant dated April 17, 2006. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Henry Brant “HENRY BRANT: Spatial Music to Evoke the New Stresses, Layered Insanities and Multidirectional Assaults of Contemporary Life on the Spirit” conducted by Caroline Crawford in 2006, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.

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Henry Brant, May 1999 (courtesy of Kathy Wilkowski). iv v

Table of Contents—Henry Brant

Interview History vii

Interview 1: April 18, 2006

Audio File 1 1

Early years in Montreal: 1913-1929 — A musical family: The Hart House Quartet, Bela Bartok, and meeting composers — A talent for sight-reading and a first composition at age twelve: “A minor infant prodigy” — Presenting Ravel with a piano sonata and Aaron Copland with a first orchestral score — A classical approach with Benny Goodman; composing during the Depression — Schooling by tutors and music at McGill University; building “junk instruments” — Moving to New York, becoming one of Copland’s “young geniuses”: Bernard Herrmann, Jerome Maross, Vivian Fine, Israel Citkowitz — Performing at Steinway Hall 1929 — Arranging for Benny Goodman and composing during the Depression — Writing in a variety of styles for Aaron Copland and others:: Neoclassicism and atonal music — Meeting with Copland’s “young geniuses” — Studying with George Antheil and writing for “junk instruments” — Studying at Juilliard, 1929-34 and composing in “oblique harmony” — Exploring polyphonic jazz styles: a one a.m. classroom

Audio File 2 17

Henry Cowell and shape note music — Making a living as an unconventional composer — Writing for documentary film and other commercial enterprises — Studying with Reuben Goldmark and composing at Juilliard, 1929-34 — Teaching at Juilliard, 1947-56, and Columbia and teaching jazz composition — Postwar progressivism and WPA orchestras — The champions of new music: Stokowski, Koussevitsky, Reiner — Composing in the 1950s: The concept of spatial music

Interview 2: April 19, 2006

Audio File 3 26

Ice Field (2001) for five orchestral ensembles — Teo Macero, Leonard Bernstein and spatial music for five jazz orchestras — Charles Amirkhanian and Other Minds— Working with David Bruckman and Andre Kostelanetz: an education — Thoughts on orchestral instruments: considering Charles Ives — Gabrieli and Palestrina: four choirs, four-part polyphony

Audio File 4 39

Fire on the Amstel, barges, carillons and ladies of the night — Recording, acoustics, and electronic sound — Sixty different musics: The Pulitzer Prizewinning Ice Field — A Tsunami Requiem in the works

[End of Interview] vii

HENRY BRANT INTERVIEW HISTORY

Henry Brant, 1913-2008, was a true maverick, a classical composer best known for bold works of spatial acoustic music in which performers, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, are placed on various levels of a concert hall or outside venue, even an entire city, as was the case in Fire on the Amstel, a work written for the canals of Amsterdam.

For Brant, space was a musical dimension equal to pitch, time and timbre. The Pulitzer prizewinning Ice Field (2001) featured woodwinds, brass and steel drums placed on concert hall balconies with the composer simulating earthquake vibrations at the organ onstage. Fire in the Amstel (1984) called for four boatloads of twenty-five flutes, jazz drum set and conductor, three mixed choruses, four street organs, three concert bands and four church carillons. Early music composers had written spatial music, notably Gabrieli for St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Brant expanded the concept to include musics from disparate cultures. For example, Meteor Farm (1982) was written for symphony orchestra, jazz band, West African drums, Javanese Gamelan and South Indian trio, with three conductors.

Brant began composing in this style in the 1950s, when he felt that traditional music “could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multidirectional assaults on contemporary life of the spirit.” The more than one hundred spatial works are complex polyphonically, each with different spatial placement. He used no amplification or electronic materials.

Born in Montreal, where his American father was on the conservatory faculty at McGill University, Brant began to compose at the age of eight. He moved to New York City in 1929 and joined Aaron Copland’s “geniuses” circle and other music societies, as he put it, “a young, unknown eccentric.” Encouraged by Henry Cowell, he wrote in many styles, conducted WPA orchestras that played his work and considered arranging music for Benny Goodman an education. He taught at Juilliard, Columbia and Bennington for many years.

The interviews were conducted at Brant’s home in Santa Barbara and edited lightly. His wife, Kathy Wilkowski,, took part in the interview. At ninety-two Brant spoke as he composed, with great exuberance and wit. Asked about future plans, he said a large orchestral composition was in the works: It would be entitled Tsunami Requiem.

The Regional Oral History office was established in 1954 to record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to California history. The office is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft Library, Elaine Tennant, director.

Caroline Cooley Crawford Music Historian The Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2012

Interview #1: April 18, 2006 [Begin Audio File 1]

Crawford: Let’s get started. Caroline Crawford interviewing Henry Brant for the Regional Oral History Office, UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

01-00:00:24 Brant: I’m ninety-two.

Crawford: I know you’re ninety-two. 1913, am I right? Let’s start by talking about music in this last century, because the New York Times said that the styles of music composed were so diverse that it was a battle of styles; and that, quote, “The din was dismaying.” What’s your comment about that battle of styles?

01-00:00:52 Brant: My reaction to that would be, except that it’s not polite, would be an inquiry into the musical background and experience of the people who wrote this.

Crawford: They were talking about electronic music—

01-00:01:09 Brant: Yes.

Crawford: —about academic music, about minimalism, about twelve-tone music.

01-00:01:16 Brant: Well—

Crawford: Was it exceptionally diverse?

01-00:01:20 Brant: Not to me.

Crawford: How so?

01-00:01:30 Brant: Well, you have to agree, first of all, that [twelve-tone] music is a great departure, a radical departure. Or that you have to take seriously all these other genres. [pause] I’ve never had anything to do with any of those ways of perceiving my music. I’ve never met Schoenberg, and I never wanted to. I’m an admirer of his music. And I was a friend of Cage. I think that he was interested in my music. But I never took seriously the premises on which he worked. And so it seems to me an arbitrary question of what is more diverse, because the premises are not great.

Now, electronic music is another matter. Because although it is spoken of as a way of working which is entirely different from the past and has endless possibilities and an enormous range, I think its range is about from A to A. It’s based on recording. And well, recording has existed for at least a century.

I had records when I was little, that didn’t sound very much different from what comes out now. A real departure would be in, as I see it, the work of Harry Partch, that would be one.

Crawford: You invented instruments when you were very, very young, of your own, didn’t you? In the same way that Harry Partch, perhaps, did.

01-00:04:02 Brant: Oh, he went much further, because he inquired into the basis of tone production itself. And that I’ve never done, to the extent that he did. Who else? I regard the world of Henry Cowell as original and fundamental.

Crawford: Excuse me, I’m just going to be jotting down words for the transcribers.

01-00:04:38 Brant: All right.

Crawford: Go ahead.

01-00:04:42 Brant: Well that— in a general way, I think that’s all I can say.

Crawford: Then let me ask you about electronic music, because you’ve said that it’s actually damaging.

01-00:04:56 Brant: Well, first of all, acoustically, it does not mix with acoustic music. It’s claimed that it blends, and it’s another element. But that isn’t so, and it can’t be so, because it’s—

Crawford: Speaking of electronic music?

01-00:05:28 Brant: Yes. All of it goes into a microphone and comes out of a speaker. And that’s a range of about this much.

Something that is fundamental would use acoustic materials only, perhaps in different ways. And there are different ways. But I don’t feel comfortable in arguing this question, because so far, there hasn’t been a consistent practice in musical materials. Besides— [pause] Well, let’s go back to that.

Crawford: We’ll go back to that. I want to know how you started composing, because you had the idea of composing very early, you came from a musical family, and composers such as Henry Cowell visited your home and later promoted your settling in New York.

01-00:07:10 Brant: I imagine that the way I started is not unique. When I was about six, I was in a place for the summer, in an old-fashioned house. And it had a beat-up, ancient

piano that hadn’t been tuned, probably, since it was finished. And so I did what I could in experimenting on that. And of course, amazing things came out of it, because it didn’t have a single interval or chord or tone that corresponded to conventional tuning. And I also had— there was an old phonograph, and it had some ancient records of opera singers, made in 1905 and 1910. But what interested me was the orchestral accompaniment, as recorded at that time. So actually, if you want to take a little time on this, I can tell you a lot, or what happened to me.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:08:25 Brant: I grew up in Montreal. My father was a first-class violinist, and a professor at McGill University. His idea of modern music would be something like what pupils of Max Reger would’ve written. And he had a big library of up- and- coming composers of that kind. I’ve got a German dictionary of music that has pictures of all the, you know, styles of the period. So he played concerts of chamber music in Montreal, classical. And he always included a piece of genuine modern music. But it was all music written in the style of the late 19th century. So I got all this stuff out of his shelves, and attempted to sight read. And my real talent was sight reading. I played the piano some, but there have been great piano players who started at eight and could do everything, practically, that they’d ever have to do, by the age of eight. So I was not in that class at all.

Crawford: Technically, you were not.

01-00:09:44 Brant: Excuse me?

Crawford: Technically. Are you talking about your technique and so on?

01-00:09:48 Brant: On the instrument.

Crawford: Yes. Well, how did the sight reading develop?

01-00:09:55 Brant: I think it was a natural ability. A natural talent. The way some people have coordination. Most people have coordination in play, and become great players; I had something— I could give some kind of a version of most anything that you could put in front of me. And it interested me enormously. So I had academic studies, mostly with English teachers. In Montreal at that time, there were English communities and French-Canadian communities of native-born people there, people who were descended from early French settlers, and some of them from Indian settlers. And the communities were kept separate.

So although my father was fluent in French, our contacts didn’t go from the French university to the English model university, which was McGill. And it was only occasionally that we had any contact with French musicians. But at times, the conservatory of music, which was what the music department was called, gave a concert. My father supplied the strings from his classes. That is, the violins and violists. But the cellos, basses, all the wind instruments, and the percussion instruments had to be recruited from musicians who played in the films and vaudeville and places like that. Well, they could all read, sort of. But ideas of them playing in tune or with any refinement of tone were unknown. And I often asked my father, “What is this sound that’s coming?” [laughs] “You know,” he said, “I don’t know. And I’ve been playing in orchestras for fifty years.”

And once in a while, an American orchestra would come and give a concert— Detroit, or even the Boston Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I heard all of them. And it was clear that it wasn’t the same thing at all. And so what I wanted to do was to write— my first ambition was to write something for the McGill Conservatory Orchestra. And this ambition was never realized. Although the conductor, who was the British— he was head of the whole department— wasn’t opposed to what I was doing. But nothing happened.

Crawford: That is, you composed a piece, but they didn’t take it? Or it just didn’t happen?

01-00:13:12 Brant: Yes. When I was thirteen, I was already, in my own mind, a very highly sophisticated musician. [laughter] And at that time, the art of ear surgery wasn’t very— it wasn’t developed. I had an ear abscess, and the only cure was to stick a needle into it. This put me out of commission for about a month, during which time I thought of the old composers, who seemed to be sick a lot. But they continued to write music.

Crawford: Which composers were sick a lot?

01-00:13:55 Brant: You know, like Chopin, Schubert.

Crawford: Oh, the ones— I see what you’re saying—

01-00:13:59 Brant: Yes. Whatever was the dangerous thing, physiologically, composers were likely to get. And I thought, Well, I’m next.

Crawford: What an optimist. [laughs] What a way to translate that experience.

01-00:14:20 Brant: So I, early, found out that there were two kinds of music that I could write. One was professor of counterpoint, his idea of composing. And the other one was the kind I wanted to write, which was going to be the latest modern, as it was then called, music. But I couldn’t get to hear or even own that kind of music very much. Now, here’s the things that added up, made the difference. My father had been a fellow student of Ernest Bloch in Switzerland, in violin. And he wrote to his friend Bloch, who said, “Thank you for writing. I’m so glad to hear from you. But there isn’t— I can’t tell you anything very encouraging about your son’s talent. He may have it, or he may not have it. But what you need to do is to find him an old-fashioned, strict teacher, who will teach him the old method. And then he should stop composing for a year. And then it ought to be a lot better.” [they laugh] So this was a terrible blow, because I admired the music of Bloch, and it did have some unusual features. And we played his sonata together.

Crawford: When was that? Well, he was in San Francisco, of course.

01-00:15:48 Brant: Well, by that time, he— I guess it would have been 1927 or something like that. Is that right? Well, so I thought, Now, this isn’t so good. My idol in composing said I should just wait and perhaps stop permanently. And then another unrelated thing happened. In Canada, there was one professional string quartet of good players, European players, who lived in Toronto, and were endowed. And their idea of existence was much more on a professional symphony level. Well, they, when they played in Montreal once a year, liked to rehearse at our house. It had a big living room, with a fireplace and carpets. A comfortable room, and it sounded good. So I listened to this all the time, and I decided, Well, I’m going to write a string quartet.

Crawford: What was the name of the quartet?

01-00:17:00 Brant: Hart House Quartet. It’s been defunct for some years. So they played all of Beethoven and Brahms. And one of them was Hungarian, and he said, “One of the best composers in Europe is Bela Bartok.” Nobody’d ever heard of such a name. On one occasion, the violinist Huberman gave a concert of [his music]. Do you know that name?

Crawford: Yes. Oh, sure.

01-00:17:47 Brant: His concert coincided with one of the visits of the Hart House Quartet, and so my father invited them all over to the house for supper. And the conversation proceeded in a very lively way in Russian, Hungarian, and other unknown languages. What they did was the quartet played some Mozart or something. They said they’d like to play for us Bartok, since we’d never heard of it. Huberman said, “What is it?” He’d never heard of it either. So they played the

first quartet. And I heard that, and I said, “Now, this is the real stuff. This doesn’t sound a bit like the stuff I’ve been having trouble with. I’m going to write music more modern than that.” And so I approached the quartet people and I said, “If I can write a string quartet, or part of one, when you come next year, would you play it through for me?” They said, “Yes. If we can play it, we’ll play it. But how do we know that it will be?” So I said, “I don’t know.”

Crawford: About how old were you now?

01-00:19:14 Brant: Twelve.

Crawford: Mm-hm. [laughs]

01-00:19:16 Brant: Well, I wrote the piece, with no guidance from my British teacher. And nothing except discouragement. “Just stop, is the best thing you can do.”

Crawford: What was the name of your teacher?

01-00:19:31 Brant: Well, I had several, because they were replaced. Alfred Whitehead, the same name as the scientist, and Bryceson Treharne, who later came here. These were people who knew the business from the standpoint of British academic music. I got along well with them, personally. But from their way of thinking, what I was attempting was nothing less than the complete destruction of the entire musical tradition. And they said, [laughs] “Well, really, I can’t help, my dear boy.” [laughs] And so I had to do it basically by myself.

Well, the great day came. And to everybody’s surprise, it was playable, although it changed style every two bars, and you couldn’t tell what it was going to do. No question that it was playable. And in some places, it had a surprising sound. Everybody was astounded. So I said to my father, “This is what I want to do. I’m going to write this kind of music, and more, and wilder.” And the quartet players said, “Well, he should do it. And [laughs] he should do it with or without help, because he’s able to do something.” So this was my informal, formal beginning as a composer, in an unknown style. Some of it sounded like an “unknown” style, living and dead; sounded like a hint of something possibly original. But the thing was that it was a half-hour of music, in three movements, and switched styles every so often. I was twelve years old.

And I had another encouragement. There was a cellist, had just come over from France, a young fellow who had won a top prize at Paris Conservatoire. And I asked him—he spoke no English at the time. I asked him if he’d like to play a new piece, in a style “moderne.” So he said, “Well, yeah, write it and we’ll see what happens.” I wrote it, we’ll see what happens. And it turned out

that quite a lot had happened. So I would say the first piece I ever wrote which has any connection to what I’ve done since was written for this young man.

Crawford: What was his name?

01-00:22:43 Brant: Jean Belland.

Crawford: Belland?

01-00:22:46 Brant: Yeah, B-E-doubleL-A-N-D.

Crawford: Belland. Ok. Did that piece have a name?

01-00:22:53 Brant: What’s that? Yes, it was called something like Spasm, or Hysteria.

Crawford: Was your father supportive? I guess he was.

01-00:23:13 Brant: He was very worried and concerned. He said, “What I’m trying to [understand] is, how are you going to earn a living with what you’re doing?”

Crawford: How did he get away with putting contemporary music on his chamber concerts?

01-00:23:28 Brant: Well, nothing that he wrote would’ve been considered contemporary.

Crawford: It reflected nineteenth-century music, you said.

01-00:23:46 Brant: Yeah. So it didn’t bother anybody.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:23:51 Brant: Well, then, you see, I had an unusual beginning as a composer. I would call it, I was a minor infant prodigy in composing. Comparable to a twelve-year-old nine-days-wonder fiddler. But certainly, not as a performer. At that time, all my interests were in music of some kind. And I started a signature book. Rachmaninoff came to town, played a concert. There I was, backstage, trying to get him to sign. “No.”

Crawford: He didn’t sign?

01-00:24:38 Brant: No. But he said, “Write!” So I wondered what the reaction meant. I finally figured it out. And I wrote to him at the hotel, enclosing a card, which he was

supposed to sign. A couple of days later, it came back signed. And so I thought, Oh, all right, it’s a beginning. Because I didn’t particularly admire his music, but he had such a colossal reputation.

Crawford: What did the signature mean to you?

01-00:25:14 Brant: It meant a closer contact to active music at the highest level. I wasn’t fooling around with an out-of-tune Montreal orchestra, with vaudeville symphony players and fiddle students of medium talent. This was a step much higher. And then when I heard Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, I said, “This is the way I think I’m going to—I’m going to do something so that he’ll play my music.” But the thing was, this was both an advantage and a disadvantage. It was such a novelty to anyone at that time, any musician. Here comes a small-sized self-styled composer who said, “I want to write music, and will you play it? And will you sign my book?” So this is important.

Finally, the quartet, the Canadian Quartet, came to Montreal, and they played a concert that included the Ravel quartet. And Ravel himself was there a little later. He gave a concert there. Now, I managed to meet him in my usual way. I’d go to their hotel and get into an argument with the room clerk. Finally, they gave in, and they’d say, “Room A, B, C, the seventh floor.” And there were very few actual failures in my book. Fritz Kreisler would not sign at all. But every other fiddler you can think of did.

Crawford: Did you give them a score? Did you ask them to look at your score?

01-00:27:23 Brant: I tried. But most of them thought that this was just an elaborate way of profiting commercially by their great reputation. Well, so the Ravel quartet was first rehearsed in our living room. And I had a score, and I learned to play parts of it on the piano, just because of my persistence in sight reading. I played some of it correctly. Then, because I wanted to see what it was like to play it myself, I asked my father to give me viola lessons. He said, “I can give you lessons, but you’re going to sound terrible for [laughs] about five years.”

So all right, I learned to play enough so that I could organize a string quartet with my younger brother and a couple of people from the music school. And we played, I think, two pages—severely adapted for players of this kind. And with this amount of experience, I went to see Ravel when he was in town. He spoke no English. And I spoke broken French, but very broken. Mostly silences. Anyway, I asked him whether he’d ever contemplated writing a textbook on orchestration. And once he understood what I said, he said, “Mon dieu. I’m not the man. Try Saint-Saens.” [they laugh] I didn’t consider that Saint-Saens was the man, but I could see that Ravel didn’t want to get into something like this. I wanted to give him a manuscript of something I’d just written, a piano sonata. He didn’t want to take it. He said he would just lose it,

you’d never see it again. I said, “Nevertheless, maybe you’d find some time to look at it.” Well, [laughs] so I handed it to him.

Crawford: You handed him the original score of your piano sonata.

01-00:30:01 Brant: Yes, yes.

Crawford: Your notation was based on the fact that you could sight read so well? Is that right? Or had you studied scoring?

01-00:30:13 Brant: I was my own teacher.

Crawford: What was your piano sonata like?

01-00:30:21 Brant: Well, I can play you a couple of bars.

Crawford: That would be great. Sure.

01-00:30:28 Brant: [audio file stops, restarts] What I’m going to do is to give you an idea of the accumulation of unrelated experiences that I had at an early age, all of which had to do with composing in some way. What I wanted, though, was to write an orchestral piece. And as I started to say, I was isolated, waiting for this horrible earache to subside. It was really awful. It took a whole month before I was out of trouble. An abscess on the eardrum, punctured by a needle, is no joke. Fortunately, the family doctor, old style, he came every day and spent an hour with me, and tried to distract me; assured me that it was going to heal. But I thought that was the time to start writing my symphony. Like an old- time composer. I wrote a dozen pages of an orchestral score, which I showed Aaron Copland, when I first came to New York when I was fourteen. He looked at it with great interest and he said, “There’s something about the middle two pages that’s very surprising.” And I said, “What is that?” He said, “It wouldn’t sound at all bad [laughs] when played.”

Crawford: That’s outstanding.

01-00:32:03 Brant: I met him through relatives or something like that, when I was fourteen. And he didn’t waste any time. I played him six pieces in different styles. But all of them much more radical than I had done before. And he said right away, “Fine. You want to play these in public?” I said, “When?” So he said, “Well, I’m giving a series of concerts, in which the first one is in two weeks. Do you want to play this?” I said, “Sure.” Well, he lost no time in talking about me. He thought I was something special.

Crawford: This would’ve been when, approximately? The late twenties?

01-00:33:06 Brant: Yeah, ’29.

Crawford: When you settled in New York.

01-00:33:12 Brant: And it was in Steinway Hall. So there was an audience of a lot of fairly well known people connected with twentieth-century music. And overnight, I began to be known in New York. And one thing followed another. I got commissions. That is to say, “Would you like to write a piece for me? No money.” The idea of a piece of unusual music connected with money never occurred to me, or any other composer in New York at that time. There were a few, like Copland, who could talk to the all-powerful symphony conductor directly and be actually asked to write a symphony piece, and get royalties for it! Copland even started a society for up-and-coming composers who wrote unusual music. And there were a few other such societies— nearly all of them found me very quickly. In a year, I was a young, unknown eccentric, writing music.

The next thing that was important was that I began to listen to the commercial music and to jazz ensembles and things of that kind. And I thought, Well, they make a big sound, and only ten people do that. So maybe my chances are better seeing what I could do, and it was the case. Benny Goodman found out about me. And he said, “We’ve never played anything except jazz. But maybe there’s something, some way to do it that we could.” I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about it.” He said, “Well, we don’t know anything about it,” [but] he did. He was classically trained.

So one day, he showed me a piece of sort of half commercial piano music, called Bach Goes to Town. It was written by a blind British composer. And it was supposed to be a parody of the Bach style, and it was. And quite a good one. So Benny showed this to me, and he said, “Now, do you think we could play this piece at all?” So I went to a rehearsal of his, and both he and his band were surprised. It turned out that they never wrote down dynamic marks. So I said, “Well, how is that?” He said, “We’re good players; we play as loud as we can. And that’s the way to play.” So then I said, “Well, would you object to my introducing things of this kind, piano, forte, crescendo?” He said, “Try it. Maybe there’s something to that.” So [laughs] he explained this to the orchestra, that, “We’re not going to play this piece loud, the way we usually do.” They said, “Okay. Well, why? Is it such rotten music [laughs] we don’t want anybody to hear it?” So at that point, it was decided. Also, they never wrote down phrasing or articulation.

Crawford: They just wrote chords?

01-00:36:58 Brant: No, they wrote notes sometimes. So I, as a matter of course, being meticulous about such things, I wrote out slurs, staccatos and effects of articulation,

which astonished everybody. Well, this was part of my education. After a year or so of that, I knew a lot more about what I was doing than I did before. And I was the only musician who would even attempt—with a classical background—who would even attempt to use jazz materials. What I was trying to do was to write in their idiom, which I found out wasn’t so simple. And this being the depths of the Depression now, I had to make some accommodation. Now, this is what you could do, if you’re a composer and wanted to be a radical composer. You could stop composing, so the problem didn’t exist.

Crawford: During the Depression.

01-00:38:31 Brant: Yes. Or you could write in a commercial style, same as other commercial writers. Or you could quit entirely. Pretty bleak. But I found it so interesting to invent music. And the idea of it being played by several players was a big thing. Well, you mentioned something before, which was an earlier attempt in Montreal. I knew some kids on the block who were sort of vaguely interested in what I was doing. And I think two of them had instructions on a wind instrument, and could read. The others couldn’t. So I made instruments for them. I built packing-case, wooden-case cellos, with one string. And sort of wind instruments out of plumbing pipe. But it was actually a real orchestra; we played from music. I showed them enough so that they could get the idea of what I meant.

Crawford: From your music?

01-00:40:09 Brant: Yes. But a piece of music, at that time, meant something about— [pause] oh, maybe ten seconds long. A twenty-second piece was a big achievement. So this was way outside my legitimate efforts that used a professional string quartet.

Crawford: You worked at every level.

01-00:40:40 Brant: Well, yes. This was because of another related problem. In the Province of Quebec—I think this is still the case—there are no nondenominational schools. The schools are religious connected. There are Catholic schools, French-Canadian and there are the Protestant schools, which were English. And for a Jewish child, it didn’t seem too appropriate or useful, all things considered, that I should go to a Catholic school—although the Catholic schools were very superior in one respect; they taught English. They could all speak fluent English, with a French-Canadian accent.

The haughty British schools, they taught French as a sort of perfunctory academic study, and nobody could speak it at all. So that was the school that I went to. And in that school, Bible study was a required course. And so this

was all right, when I was only ten or something like that. But it got to be more serious later on, where it seemed to my parents that everything was subordinated to religion and athletics.

So my father took me out of school. He found an intelligent young student at McGill who volunteered— no, who agreed. He was a prizewinning, scholarship— he won all the big academic prizes. His brother wanted to study the fiddle, so they made a deal. His brother, who was the first Canadian to make a study of the work of James Joyce, showed my father some of the early editions of Ulysses, and I saw it once. So that brother learnt the fiddle, and the literary brother taught me every subject I was supposed to learn in order to be able to compete with the most advanced stuff in my school.

It wasn’t a bad idea. Well, it was in some ways. I was lazy about everything except music. And I continued to study music at McGill, with the teachers there, such as Iris Clark. So all right. You want to know how I got started as a composer? It was all that stuff combined together. By the time I had been in New York a year, I knew more about composing than most people there. And I knew all the composers, of all ages. And Aaron Copland started something very useful. He collected about a dozen geniuses like me, and every one of whom considered himself put on this planet so as to save music from absolute decay, and we met at his house every two weeks, and had a talk about our ideas, about the latest stuff.

Crawford: Who else was in the circle, do you remember?

01-00:45:46 Brant: Well, Bernard Herrmann, who was a big name later in Hollywood scores; Jerome Maross, who wrote musicals later; Vivian Fine, whose name became later known for her chamber music; and Israel Citkowitz, who was a big name, because he’d done what Aaron Copland said we should all do, go to Paris and study with Nadia Boulanger.

Crawford: Everybody did.

01-00:46:23 Brant: Yeah.

Crawford: You didn’t.

01-00:46:25 Brant: No, and the boys who went into the movie stuff and the commercial music didn’t either. There was one who was going to be a critic, he said he was a critic then, and that was Arthur Berger. And he actually became a critic. His writings about music are published. Then occasionally, there’d be a guest composer. A really famous name who’d made it. One evening it was Carlos Chavez. And another one, Virgil Thomson. And George Antheil came once.

Crawford: You studied with Antheil, didn’t you?

01-00:47:14 Brant: Yes. Oh, now, I have to put this in, too, because it had a lot to do with my subsequent ideas. After a couple of years with Copland, very informally— he said, “You’re broke, I know.” I WAS broke. “When you’ve got something, come and see me. We’ll talk about it. But you don’t have to do stuff that will be an annoyance to the rest of the folks.” So I got to the point where in a week’s time I could write a symphonic movement, fully scored. And this made a big impression on him, because he himself said he was one of the slowest composers he’d ever heard of.

Crawford: He was.

01-00:48:02 Brant: [He said] that in one week, which was his greatest achievement, he’d written eighteen bars.

Crawford: What did he tell you about your music?

01-00:48:17 Brant: A lot. But his own voice at that time was neoclassic music.

Crawford: Yes.

01-00:48:31 Brant: So naturally, I wrote that. And I was the only one in our group that did this. My young colleagues were about to expel me from the group for betraying the whole cause of future contemporary music. Well, so this was the end of it.

Crawford: Let me ask you a question about Antheil. He was famous for wanting to épater les bourgeois. Did you think about audiences? Did you— what did you want your language to achieve?

01-00:49:20 Brant: I wanted it to be a multiple style, polystylistically. I couldn’t have expressed that at the time, but that’s what I wanted. And the idea that if it consists of parodies or quotations of European seventeenth-century classicism, I didn’t think was inept. In fact, I didn’t think any style was inept. It was clear to me that if you stick to one style, you make a big mistake, because nobody’s interested. So this was very much in my thinking. And the middle period of Schoenberg interested me enormously, because it was mostly a very dissonant, abrasive content, which I was after myself. I thought there might be a new kind of expressiveness there. And of course, there was.

But to bring mathematics in it, mathematics doesn’t sound like very much if that’s all you’ve got. I couldn’t see spending time doing that. So I wouldn’t take on neoclassicism only, although I learned how to do it. And I did highly dissonant pieces that had no tonality.

Now, part of this aspect of unusual or junk instruments represents part of another tendency, which all these composers were somewhat aware of, especially Antheil. But he’s a good example, because he’s probably the best example of any composer in Europe at the time, or here, who thought of using any kind of device to make sound besides conventional instruments. But I’ll tell you how I happened to study with him. I played at a party, where there were all kinds of people. And I played a piece which was supposed to be an imitation of piano music as played in five-and-ten-cent stores at the time. And this was a novelty kind of thing at the time. But Antheil was there, and took it very seriously, and so did Virgil Thomson. [ Music for a Five and Dime, Carl Fischer,1932]

Crawford: Your music.

01-00:53:46 Brant: This piece was written in what was supposed to be an imitation of music in a five-and-ten-cent store. It was originally a piece for piano alone. I wanted more instruments, and I couldn’t wait till I found a fiddle or a clarinet or something, which eventually I did. And I thought, All right, I’ll use things around the house. Old tin cans or anything that I could get a sound out of. But even at that time, I didn’t want just something like it was an accident; I wanted something that had a sonority, or something that could be used seriously. I got around to quite a few performances in New York, different up- to-date societies all wanted me to play, and eventually acquired a percussion part. Entirely kitchen hardware. Since nobody else could play that, I played that part. And Vivian Fine learned how to play the piano part. When my father heard this, [laughs] he said, “From now on, you’re on your own. I will have nothing to do with this.”

Crawford: Well, now, the Depression era music, I don’t know how you feel about that, but for instance, the Marx Brothers portraits.

01-00:55:04 Brant: Did you ever hear this played?

Crawford: Yes—what do you feel about it?

01-00:55:14 Brant: Well, I don’t have any feelings about any of this. It was my history. It was what was possible to write, instead of the grim alternatives.

Crawford: Yes. Choosing not to write.

01-00:55:29 Brant: Yes. And sometimes it came to ten bucks or some other vast sum.

Crawford: You were living all right? Benny Goodman paid you something, I think, didn’t he?

01-00:55:50 Brant: Yes, he did.

Crawford: And you did some ballet work, and films.

01-00:55:53 Brant: Well, that was later. That was later. And there, I began to see dollar bills occasionally.

Crawford: Do you want to say something about your looking into jazz, because you felt jazz wasn’t commercialized and that it was something very genuine. Did you get to Harlem? Did you look in on that?

01-00:56:14 Brant: Yes.

Crawford: What was that like?

01-00:56:17 Brant: Pretty good. Pretty interesting. I don’t think it’s interesting now in the same way, although I’ve had many jazz students since I— from the time when I was teaching at Juilliard. Juilliard was the place that I went to when I first came to New York, and got scholarships. And I won all the prizes that existed, because nobody could write a symphony or write a piece of that length and complexity. I had no competition.

Crawford: The faculty at Juilliard was open to what you were doing?

01-00:57:10 Brant: No. Not at all.

Crawford: Oh, they were not.

01-00:57:12 Brant: No. So the solution was, I wrote one kind of music for my teacher, Leopold Mannes, and this was played at the one concert a year of student composers. And it easily won all the prizes. Who could compete with pieces of such length and complexity. So I would do that, and then I’d write a different kind of piece for Aaron Copland, to be played by the Modern Music Society downtown.

Crawford: By that you mean neoclassical?

01-00:57:56 Brant: Or whatever.

Crawford: Or whatever. [laughs]

01-00:57:58 Brant: Well, I started my pieces in what I called “oblique harmony” around that time. This was supposed to outdo Schoenberg.

Crawford: This was also at Juilliard, and that was single-style music?

01-00:58:16 Brant: Yes, but there, I had no instruction whatever, except that I showed it to Henry Cowell. And he said, “Keep doing that. This is the most important development in music since 1900.” Now, I had no idea that I was gonna do something like that. But he said, “You’ve got an entire life work, with a style that you’ve invented.”

Crawford: So— but you said to me that the Juilliard faculty— that people at Juilliard were not receptive? But your music was played.

01-00:58:59 Brant: They accepted one kind, but not another.

Crawford: I see.

01-00:59:04 Brant: I was looked upon as dangerous. I did everything that they wanted, although in a somewhat eccentric way, I still got all the prizes. Later on, when the administration changed, and the composing faculty consisted entirely of active composers, it was different. There were other composers who had graduated from Eastman and other places like that, who could write elaborate pieces, but only in a very conservative style.

Well, what I was telling you about was the jazz students that I had. They found that I was very sympathetic to what they were doing. And when I suggested to them to write in a new idiom, but write it only jazz, without any concessions to what was considered commercialization of jazz, I was considered the head of a new movement, which was going to be jazz in the large classical forms. A bunch of these people were black composers, just out of the army, and they asked if I could make a class outside of the school. So that’s what we did. We met in a garage or a cellar or wherever it was that these people were working at the time, and only at one o’clock in the morning, or whatever time these people were free. So they would come and they’d leave their ten bucks. But some of them never did.

Crawford: What were they looking for?

01-01:00:34 Brant: They said they wanted to write a new and bigger kind of jazz. I said, “Fine. I know how to do that. You show me what the idioms are, and we’ll stick exactly to that.” But there were some who took an academic approach. They said, “That’s not real jazz. You shouldn’t change it. Leave it the way it is.” So I said, “Well, then don’t come to the class.” [laughs] What they really wanted

was a class in conventional jazz arranging. They really didn’t want it experimental. My interest was in jazz motets and masses and fugues that would advance the polyphonic styles of jazz along experimental lines; also, explorations of unorthodox harmony.

Crawford: Anybody we would know among those people, among that class?

01-01:02:03 Brant: Yeah, I think so.

Crawford: I have to change my tape here.

[Begin Audio File 2]

02-00:00:04 Brant: After about six or eight months, they went their separate ways, and most of them disappeared. But some of them remained, and became prosperous and solid citizens, in one way or another.

Crawford: You were going to tell me some of the names of those musicians.

02-00:00:27 Brant: Bernard Herrmann, you already know; Jerome Morass, and Israel Citkowitz; and Vivian Fine, the only woman in a class of about a dozen; and Arthur Berger. He couldn’t make it as a critic, although he got into academic work, college work, and started all over again as a composer.

Crawford: The Copland “geniuses.” Well, you were at this point still at Juilliard?

02-00:01:54 Brant: Well, let me see, as a teacher, from 1947 to ’55 or ’6; and then earlier, as a student, from ’29 to ’34.

Crawford: This is off subject, but you mentioned in one writing that you loved shape note music.

02-00:02:43 Brant: Oh, that’s something different. Shape note music—have you heard anything of it?

Crawford: Yes.

02-00:02:54 Brant: I was always interested in music of other cultures, but not from the cultural standpoint, only from what the musical manifestations of it were. I never thought of writing a shape note music piece myself.

Crawford: What was it about it that was important for you?

02-00:03:24 Brant: Well, this goes into the history of composed music in the United States. It was the first notated music. And the notation was not academic, it was a home- grown notation. You’ve seen what it looks like.

Crawford: An American folk music with notes shaped like diamonds, circles, squares.

02-00:03:49 Brant: But instead of writing down what were supposed to be melodies from the old world, which they brought with them when they came from the British isles, it looks like—well, the whole system of it is very much grown on the farm. And they adopted things that they’d seen in the notated conventional music, so that it looks sort of like a kind of classical music. And then in order to distinguish the pitches, they first used note heads of different shapes.

And there were as many as, I think, thirty or forty different systems in use at that one time. It’s boiled down to four shapes. Then to make sure, they used conventional notations on the lines and staves, also. Well, you’d find it interesting. It’s published, the music which they wrote— their hymn books.

Crawford: Where did you learn about it?

02-00:05:27 Brant: Well, Henry Cowell was very interested in this, and he arranged for a group from Tennessee, I think a family, there were about a dozen, to give a concert in New York at Columbia University of their shape note music only. And it caused a scandal. I’ve never seen an audience so outraged.

Crawford: Not acceptable?

02-00:05:51

Brant: It didn’t sound like any music that anyone was familiar with. It didn’t sound like what was called folk music. And it was a polyphonic music. I talked to one of these men, whose English I could hardly understand, and I said, “How do you write it? What do you do?” He said, “Well, there’s always one main tune that we all know. So you start with that.” And it was written in three polyphonic voices, or four. But never less than three. Each one was supposed to have a melody of its own, in this style. And what they do, they’d add one, and play the tune again and, “Well, that’s okay. Now we add another one, start from the beginning. And their method of checking what they had was just to sing all of them at once and see what happened, and then write that down. And [laughs] this was some pretty rough stuff in there. It resembles mostly the medieval style that we know now. And it’s been highly interesting, and very different from Western concert music. So all those things appealed to me greatly.

Crawford: What other musics, apart from the Westernized styles did you hear? Bluegrass, blues? Did you consider them respectable forms?

Brant: I don’t know, maybe they were played by crooks.

Crawford: You looked at jazz. How about blues?

02-00:07:54 Brant: I don’t think that it’s possible to have a point of view about such things. They’re already established. They can be played very badly, so that they don’t have any identity. But I’m not a partisan of one popular style over another.

Crawford: In these student years of yours in New York, how did you make your living?

02-00:08:31 Brant: Oh, now, that’s something else. With all these things I was doing, many of which involved orchestral ensembles from about ten to maybe forty or fifty, and radio, and movies, it turned out that a lot of commercial entertainment of that time wanted unconventional music of one kind or another. And I acquired a reputation to be somebody that could do that. And would be willing to do it. So some of these things went into commercial treatments, especially what I wrote for documentary films. And out of that came a precarious living.

Crawford: What was your approach to writing for film?

02-00:09:37 Brant: Oh, well, it was positive, of course. But the main thing was that all films had music, and the music was always played by instruments. And sometimes I could get as many as thirty instruments. It depended on the budget. So it was a completely hundred percent freelance existence. And I very seldom, when the phone rang, said, “No, I can’t do that.” And many cases there were that I wished that I hadn’t accepted it; and others were just fine, I was glad for the opportunity and I learned from doing it. But I didn’t exist by one kind of job and just stick with it. Nobody was going to offer me that kind of job anyway.

Crawford: Was it all by word of mouth? Not by agent or anything like that.

02-00:10:55

Brant: No, I never heard of an agent for composers, until much more recently.

Crawford: So you were pretty much fully employed, as well as studying at the same time. And then your first teaching post— well, you’ve said that you don’t really think you can teach composition. But you did teach composition.

02-00:11:27 Brant: At Juilliard. The school that had thrown me out as a student.

Crawford: Oh, they finally threw you out. You didn’t tell me that. What happened?

02-00:11:42 Brant: Let me see if I can reconstruct it. Well, at that time, the boss teacher of composing was Reuben Goldmark. He was a big name in New York. His musical interests, I think, probably went from about 1815 to 1915. Nothing forward or backward. And this was the first school in the country, and this was the chief teacher of composing. So everyone had to study with him— I didn’t want to study with him. But my father wanted me to. He said, “Well, that’s the prestigious man to study with.”

So I thought, Anyway, he’ll probably throw me out. But it turned out he was very glad to see me, and he’d heard a piece of mine at composers’ concerts, a big, hefty sonata. And he said right away that he admired my talent, but he didn’t know whether his point of view would be so different that we couldn’t get along. So I said, “Master, I’m in your hands.” I was instructed to say something like that. [they laugh]

Crawford: You said the right thing.

02-00:13:06 Brant: Yes. So I was an absolute failure as a student of his. Because of my numerous unsatisfactory and dangerous tendencies. I brought him this five-and-dime piece and played it once. When I started, he first said, “Please, no jazz.” So, “Then I’ll stop.” He said, “No, play the thing. Let me hear it.” And he was hard of hearing, so I had to play everything very loud. So I’m being punished now these days, when I’m hard of hearing. But he said, “You don’t fool me. You know, what you’re trying to do is to remove all beauty and logic and sense to music.” And he said, “And you’re very good at doing that. Because you think you can make money by ideas of this kind.” So this was his explanation.

Crawford: What was his style of composing?

02-00:14:34 Brant: Rachmaninoff. Everything easygoing. But he was a pleasant man, very witty, very much in demand as an after-dinner speaker. And he did a lot to help me. After a year, I went to see him and he said, “Look, I see what the trouble is. You need to study here because it will be useful to you.” He said, “That’s all right with me. Don’t come to classes. And come and see me every once in a while and we’ll talk things over about how things are going in music,” which I thought was very decent.

Crawford: That’s pretty wide open for a conservatory.

02-00:15:30 Brant: Well, there was always some distinguished guest composer from Europe, like D’Indy himself or Sessions or somebody in the country. And he was a guest of the bohemians that played music, of the conventional academic musicians. So he invited me to all these things, and presented me to the guests. And he

said, “Well, this man, he’s absolutely crazy, but I like him. All he wants to do is to destroy music.” [laughs] And so one of these men, I think Bridge, said, “This is not a bad idea.”

Crawford: Which one said that?

02-00:16:31 Brant: Frank Bridge. I liked Frank Bridge.

Crawford: What was the involvement with Frank Bridge?

02-00:16:38 Brant: He was a guest. He was a guest composer from England, of considerable prominence, probably, among the conventionally minded people, the leading one, although he gradually became more radical. He was the teacher of Benjamin Britten, who was, in a mild way, even more radical.

Crawford: Britten?

02-00:17:20 Brant: Yes. I had— I’ve always had an interest in older styles. And this baffled my conservative teachers, because in my classes at Juilliard, I performed Bach’s Art of Fugue completely. I was considered then to be somebody who knew nothing whatever about music. And I even completed the last fugue, which took me a year. With no guidance.

Crawford: And that was a surprise to everyone, that you performed Art of the Fugue.

02-00:18:11 Brant: None of them could’ve done it.

Crawford: What did that do for you?

02-00:18:19 Brant: Got me thrown out.

Crawford: [laughs] Why? I would have thought they would’ve approved of that.

02-00:18:25 Brant: Well, the president of the school, Schuman himself, was a composer. And he didn’t want his staff of composers—who had started with only one, and gone up to eight—he didn’t want any trouble with them. Now, they were personally friendly, but they didn’t like the idea of when I wanted something played, I just got my class together and we played it in a student concert. So I could play the new music that I wanted. And most of it was available, with a little trouble, for other combinations.

Crawford: So what they objected to was that you organized concerts of your music?

02-00:19:25 Brant: Or other people’s music.

Crawford: Or other people’s music. And so did they actually dismiss you?

02-00:19:31 Brant: Yes. Well, “Your contract’s not going to be renewed next year.” I could’ve stayed, I think, if I had more of a political gift than I did. Because I think there were about eight hundred students. So a few of them came to see me, said, “Look, we want you to stay. Teach instrumentation. If [not], there’s gonna be trouble.” So I said, “Do that if you like,” but the idea did not come from me. I can’t take credit for it. So I finally decided—foolishly, I think—not to let them [protest] at all. Which shows the political instinct that I have.

Crawford: Did you already have a contract from Columbia?

02-00:20:42 Brant: That ran out. It was year-to-year in both places.

Crawford: Did you feel inhibited by being on the faculty?

02-00:21:01 Brant: The musical thing has never inhibited me. I felt there’s no possible comparison. I considered them just thinking of my music as not even professional. And I suppose I wasn’t able to conceal this sufficiently. Meanwhile, everyone gave me advice. “Don’t write that kind of music. It’s only for yourself. That’s self-indulgent.”

Crawford: But it was performed. It was successfully performed.

02-00:21:44 Brant: Yes.

Crawford: We’re into the 1940s now. So the Depression had passed—what was the music scene like then?

02-00:21:54 Brant: Oh, it was a very important time, which I recognized. The men, the soldiers were back. And they not only wanted to start making a living and support their families, but they thought, Here’s this war; what’s it been about? And it appeared that there was a good deal of feeling in favor of doing new things. Even the most conventional people were a little less conventional. And this, combined with a few further developments that we haven’t even got to, had an effect—a drastic effect, a radical effect—on what I was doing. I started out in 1927, as the most radical composer I could think of. Now it seems maybe I could be that, and would find some opportunities. And that’s what happened.

Crawford: But how do you account for that change in awareness and receptivity?

02-00:23:19 Brant: Well, I think it’s a matter of cultural history, not only musical.

Crawford: Post-war economics, that kind of thing?

02-00:23:30 Brant: Yes, economic and social.

Crawford: What was going on socially that made it more acceptable?

02-00:23:41 Brant: Everything. Progressive bills were passed in Congress. But it’s— the authority there would be a historical authority. As a musician, I was only aware of the aspects of it that could affect composers.

Crawford: The WPA projects. Were you involved with those?

02-00:24:20 Brant: Those, all those projects were of the greatest importance, I think. You’ve perhaps read about them. There were, in New York alone, five symphony orchestras, supported by government money, our tax money. And one of them was an almost first-class outfit, consisting of many players from the defunct New York Symphony, which had had to disband around that time.

Crawford: And what was that orchestra?

02-00:25:17 Brant: Well, in New York, when I first came, there were two orchestras, the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony. And they both maintained full schedules. The New York Symphony folded because— well, many reasons were given, but the principal donor decided that they needed conductors who could compete with people like Toscanini. And the reason often given was that the Damrosch family withdrew their support. So here were ninety of the best players in the United States, with nothing to do. How did we start this?

Crawford: We were talking about the government support for music that was so positive.

02-00:26:34 Brant: Well, so it was the WPA time. So one of the orchestras, WPA orchestras, consisted mostly of the disbanded New York Symphony players. And it was very good. And they had grade A, top notch conductors. And what’s more, they didn’t have to worry about the conservative subscribers. They could play unusual music, if they wanted to.

Crawford: But you needed a conductor who could choose that music.

02-00:27:17 Brant: Well, it turned out that there were many middle-of-the-road conductors. Actually, they were interested in the music, too, but they were afraid of being blacklisted in favor of the hacks.

Crawford: Who were the champions of new music?

02-00:27:43 Brant: Well, in the established orchestras, they were Stokowski, Koussevitsky and Reiner. Reiner liked my music. And only an accident, I think, prevented him from playing something. And he later, with the Pittsburgh Orchestra, did play something of mine. But let’s say the worst one of the five WPA orchestras consisted mostly of broken-down orchestral players, and things like that. Still it was an orchestra of people who had some training and they turned that over to me for kind of half of a concert. So the rehearsals were something indescribable. Few of them had played anything resembling twentieth-century music. But still I stuck with it. I thought, There’s a lot to be learned here.

Crawford: Were you artistic director or conductor?

02-00:29:08 Brant: Yes, for the ones that played my own music, I was the conductor. At first as a beginner, and then with more experience.

Crawford: You hadn’t conducted before, had you? Well, you had at Juilliard, I guess.

02-00:29:23 Brant: Not very much, though. I was hardly experienced.

Crawford: How did they handle your music?

02-00:29:30 Brant: Pretty roughly.

Crawford: Pretty roughly? What did you choose to have them perform?

02-00:29:35 Brant: Well, let’s see. I wrote a piece, a requiem piece, on the death of Roosevelt. But oh, no, that was not a WPA orchestra. Even every radio station had its own orchestra at that time, big or little. ABC had a forty-five piece orchestra. Well, there was a distinct feeling that the times wanted something new. And that it should be done now, and not wait. So this did reflect itself in more WPA money. But by 1950, I think, all that was gone.

Crawford: But the forties was a time when you felt you could compose freely, and your work would be performed. How much of your work was performed?

02-00:30:51 Brant: Everything I did was performed. The idea of learning symphonic music that would take a week to do, of Aaron Copland, was absurd. I felt I’ve done enough of this. If I write anything, somebody’s going to play it. And then came the radical idea—have I said this already? One of the bold composers in the society of geniuses of Copland’s asked, “When they play your music in Boston, they pay for it.” Everybody was just so shocked. He said, “Of course, they pay!” But gradually, things improved. But still sometimes the unpaid pieces were worth writing, because they offered up opportunities that weren’t available.

Crawford: Is there a way that your work was changing? Were you conscious of changing your style? The music you started writing in the 1950s has been described as having “textures of unprecedented polyphonic and/or polystylistic complexity.” You have said that you turned in this direction because you wanted to write complex music that could evoke the “stresses, layered insanities and multidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” Strong words.

Brant: Yes. Definitely. And here we get to the magic forbidden words, “spatial music.” I discovered it in a number of places. Mostly accidental. And the same thing happened all over again. I thought, I’m going to investigate it myself. And since it’s not played at all, there’s no place to start from. You haven’t heard Antiphony I, that’s my first spatial piece.

Crawford: On recording. At the library in Berkeley or Santa Barbara. You have said, and I quote: “I had come to feel that single-style music, no matter how experimental or full of variety could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.” You felt that this new music, spatial music, addressed the human condition more adequately. You are nodding yes.

Interview #2: April 19, 2006 [Begin Audio File 3]

Crawford: Let us talk about Ice Field, 2001, written for five large and small orchestral ensembles, commissioned and premiered by San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas...The winning of the Pulitzer. What has that meant to you, in terms of performance play and commissions?

03-00:00:09 Brant: I don’t know. [chuckles]

Crawford: You don’t. So nothing? Nothing? That’s staggering.

03-00:00:14 Brant: Well, the climate seemed a little better.

Crawford: By that, you mean that some things have come up.

03-00:00:27 Brant: Well, I can’t think of anything that I’m certain is related to that. I think what happens is that more people have heard my name, Henry Brant, or they think they have, than before. It’s a vague thing.

Crawford: The Pulitzer recognizes a body of work, isn’t that true? The work that year was Ice Field, 2001.

03-00:01:01 Brant: Well, that’s what they say they do. But how do they know? How can they encompass— how can their entire jury encompass what’s going on? There’re a few pieces that are widely publicized and that are played. And they draw conclusions. And none of them are consistent investigators, who would take the trouble to find out something of that kind. So I don’t take this kind of thing seriously at all. It is said that it was a great benefit because of this and that, but— and maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t.

Crawford: Well, a work like this, like Ice Field, written for several— I think five large and small orchestral ensemble— and inspired by a trip through icebergs to Europe in the 1920s.

03-00:02:00 Brant: Oh, well, that’s easy. We got a score. And I played in it, so I was present at all performances.

Crawford: Michael Tilson Thomas conducted, and he commissioned it.

03-00:02:19 Brant: Well, that was a complicated set of circumstances. Several things came together. You’ve seen this?

Crawford: No, I haven’t seen the score [for] Spatial Narratives. But I have heard your pieces with Other Minds. Talk a little bit about the commissioning of it.

03-00:03:04 Brant: Well, I need my wife’s memory and—

Wilkowski: [Kathy Wilkowski is Brant’s wife] Commissioning of Ice Field? The commissioning of Ice Field? Well, Charles Amirkhanian, who runs Other Minds, of course, was working on getting a kind of a community relationship kind of a coalition with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. He wanted to do things with them, and for them, and with that kind of in the back of his mind, he applied for this grant to the Rockefeller Foundation, Multi-Arts Production Fund, to get a commission for Henry to write a piece for the San Francisco Symphony.

Other Minds was kind of the producer. They were the one that wrote the grant proposal. So that was Charles Amirkhanian that wrote the application. And it was in the works for a long time, and then it cooked. And then there were all sorts of weird things that happened. It was going to be on an Other Minds concert, I think. And that fell through, it didn’t work. And then it was extended an extra year. He wrote to the Foundation and asked if they could do the piece later.

Crawford: I’m interested in the process of composing.

03-00:06:31 Brant: I can talk about the piece, although I don’t know about the mechanics of composing it. It was all I could do to write it. But do you want to take a look at Antiphony I, which was the first big spatial piece that I worked on?

Crawford: Sure. That was about 1952-3, is that right?

Brant: ’53. Now, have you seen this score? Antiphony I , Carl Fischer, 1953]

Crawford: Yes, at the university library here. Maybe you could talk about what made this work begin to be different. What were you looking for?

03-00:07:19 Brant: Oh, well, now, that’s an excellent question, because that occupied my mind for quite a while. In my last year at Juilliard as a teacher, a student of mine, Teo Macero, do you know this name—he asked if he could present a concert, an all-jazz concert. And he said his friends in the school, many of them already of considerable reputation, wanted to do that, too. And would that be okay with me? Since I was the only faculty member who had ever expressed any opinion on that I said, “Yes, certainly.” And then he said that he wanted to write a spatial piece. And for five jazz orchestras. This is before I’d written even one spatial piece.

So I said, “Where are the five jazz orchestras?” He said, “Leave that to me. They’ll be there, if you say it’s okay.” So he said the way he’d like to do it, he’d like them all to be improvising, independently and uncoordinated, the way I’d spoken about my yet unwritten pieces. [laughs] “So it’s up to you. You know more about this than I do. Can you do it?” He said, “Count on me. It’ll all be done.” And he was going to be the boss conductor, and he would appoint certain of his already well-known colleagues to conduct the individual orchestras. Well, this was actually done. And his piece, Area, was written before I’d written any spatial piece. And I consider it one of the landmarks in twentieth-century symphonic composing. But as far as I know, it had only that one performance.

Crawford: That’s a sensitive issue, isn’t it? Why is it that so many of these contemporary works are played only once?

03-00:09:50 Brant: I’ve never said, “This piece is to be played once and once only.”

Crawford: No, you haven’t, but it’s the assumption, often. [Is] that just because of the scale of the work?

03-00:09:59 Brant: And the complications, and the special arrangement, practical arrangements have to be made, and the logistics. I don’t think that’s my affair at all. Very different things were active, in my case. I played— My colleagues told me about Gabrieli. And— So we got hold of Gabrieli’s music easily enough. Pieces for three, four separate groups. And we knew that they were played in Venice, in St. Mark’s Church. And around that time, I decided to go to Europe. For no special reason. Nobody asked me to come. So my then wife and I went. And we went to St. Mark’s Church. And I saw that, as far as placement goes, there are any number of possible positions to put groups of eight, ten instruments or more. And the music showed that they were playing different things. But it was clear that they had to keep together; they had to be coordinated.

A problem that always arose when attempts were made to play it in concert halls was, at the end of each piece, there’s always a passage in chords, in harmony, in the usual sense. No power on earth could ever get those coordinated. They were twenty, thirty, forty feet apart, some of them higher than others. The conductors looked at each other in vain. And this part of it couldn’t be considered a success. So I was puzzled about this.

And meanwhile, I’d performed some Ives, who attacked the problem in a very different way. I’d heard the Berlioz Requiem, of which I’d had a score since my twelfth year; I’ve still got it. So it seemed to me that Ives had the right idea, to have more than one group, and each group would have its own musical subject matter. And if they could— some of them would coordinate,

29 and some of them would not coordinate. Okay, they just don’t coordinate, that’s it. That’s what I mean. But it was clear to me that in music such as his, which was almost not playable if you tried to play just what was there, made everything possible, because his unspoken credo seemed to be write what you need to write, and never mind whether it’s playable or not. He never put it in words of that kind, but that’s what it came down to. And he thought that some way could be found.

And although this was against everything that was taught in the Juilliard School, or ever had been , or in the Berlin Hochschule, or any place where you’re supposed to be able to get a good musical education, it seemed to me that there was some horse sense there. But I hesitated to write a spatial piece myself. I said, “This is too big a thing. I don’t know anything about it. I’m just trying to point out something.” So a student of mine beat me to the punch, with my encouragement. And later, he started to become known in the concert music world. And Bernstein, who was then a New York conductor said, “Can you write a piece for jazz group and symphony orchestra?” And Teo said, “Give me a couple of days, and I’ll tell you.”

So he asked me how such a thing could be done. I said, “There’s a way to do it. You need two conductors. And there have to be places where the two groups are not supposed to keep together.” But I said, “If you’re writing a piece for a symphony orchestra, you can’t do your slapdash-in-a-hurry music, where you have a great idea and write it down fast, get the boys together and [when]we play, something comes out. That won’t do. You won’t get the most out of a symphony orchestra, which has to be a very rigid, exact, and routine way, although it could be along unusual lines.

The piece was written, and I said, “All right. Go ahead and show it to Bernstein. And if you like, tell him I said there are no bad monkey wrenches or things, or terrible surprises at the last minute. It was played four times, and had a very good reception. So he was two pieces ahead of me. Both of them performed. And then, I think even if I’d wanted to write a spatial piece, nobody was asking for a spatial piece by a composer who’d never attempted one.

Now, I think I started to talk about this a couple of days ago. David Bruckman, who was a conductor of commercial programs on radio stations, was a composer of Dutch origin, who’d come to this country and got into commercial music. And at that time, commercial music was played, no matter what the style, by fairly large groups. A big name at the time was André Kostelanetz.

He had the largest group, I think. His was forty-five players. And it consisted of eighteen violins. And everything he played was arranged by his staff of arrangers, there were six of them. And eventually, somebody told him about me. And he said, “Well, if he will make an arrangement of a popular hit tune

of my choice, or agreed upon, we’ll play it in a rehearsal. And if it suits us, I’d like you to join our staff.” So it was done. And I joined the staff.

Now, the staff consisted of a red hot jazz arranger, who could, himself, play blues and every known kind of jazz at the time, plus a nondescript style, and there was an expert on Latin-American music. I was appointed to this chair. They couldn’t find anybody satisfactory, until they found me. So I was the expert on arranging such music so that orchestra sounded something like Ravel, or early Stravinsky. Well, I had no rivals in the field. I could do that. And at that time, my orchestral music, when it was played at all, was played only in the form of arrangements for Kostelanetz’ orchestra.

: All right, so that— Now, I don’t want to lose the track of this. How did we get started on this?

Crawford: We’re talking about composing. One of the things you said is that the idea, for you, is not to upset yourself. You said when you were a very young composer, you found it upsetting, or enervating. But you decided you wanted to agitate others, and not upset yourself. What does that have to do with your writing style?

03-00:20:39 Brant: Well, the other boys who write, or wrote, unusual music had very different ideas. They thought about destiny, the world, the past, the philosophy, humanity, and matters of that kind, that they knew no more about than I did. And I had no interest in that kind of thing. To me, it just meant a cop-out. I mean, you could get away with good-sounding publicity statements, and get talked about. Well, I had neither the gift for that, nor the interest in that. My interest was in making the product itself, and nothing else. But it was clear to me that the big names didn’t know much about how to write unusual music with unusual technique. But their studies were academic. Mine were personal, and one-man jobs. And that was, to me, interesting enough. But otherwise, my attitude was something like a master plumber, who had the job of fixing up a new condo, with the plumbing. I was interested in the process. And it seemed to me that everybody who had written music worth listening to had the same attitude, of course, but they never expressed it this way.

In one way, it was the opposite of art. I knew at that time that, although there were resources of various kinds to compose music, there was not a lot of time, not a lot of rehearsal time. It had to work. It had to run. It had to run right away, the first time. So what this led to was more work of this kind, with other people who had programs of this kind, but not on so grand a scale. So I was telling you— this is important, because why did he have eighteen violins? Well, he explained to me. He said, “These eighteen are individually the best violinists in town. And you couldn’t find eighteen in the Philharmonic, with their thirty violins, who are the equal of what we’ve got here.” So I said, “But why eighteen?” He said, “Well, Wagner had eighteen first violins. And what

31 you hear when an orchestra plays is the top, mostly. And what you hear is those eighteen.” And once when I brought him something, it had a lot of divisi, so that the top part was played by only six. He said, “Why am I paying eighteen of the best, when you’re going to write for six on the top part?” He said, “That’s an inferior brand of goods,” and it would be a disgrace for me to write that. “When you want the sound of the Philharmonic or better, write it in unison, no matter what kind of music you write.” I’ve never forgotten that. It’s still true.

Well, such was my real education. This immediately put me way ahead of all other composers in the country, because their experience of music was classes. Where they taught, what had been taught to them, which was full of conjecture and full of ignorance, and empty of real know-how. They didn’t know how to install a sink. How would they know how? They were [involved with] high-flown talk and textbooks which had been out of date for at least a hundred years, some of them more.

So in this sense, I had no rivals at all. And what they have to say about their aims, I can’t comment on. They know better than I do why they made these strange, pretentious statements, and why they were gobbled up, and their names became known. All right. So the violins. Then he had three violas, and three cellos, and two basses. So I thought, What a strange string orchestra. So he asked me how many notes should be in a chord, for popular music. So I said— I didn’t know too much about it, but I said, “I think it’s more than four, I think five or six.” He said, “Six is right.” The music of all the famous popular composers is harmonized in chords to six notes. Ninth chords, eleventh chords. So he said to do, for harmonic purposes, a texture of strings, and you go by that formula.

So I said, “What about the eighteen on the top part?” He said, “We’re talking about harmony now. It’s very different. Harmony complicates the impression people are going to get. And we’re trying to sell harmonic music, and with the best string sound possible.” So I said, “You mean to say that your four on top are going to be adequate?” He said, “Yes.” In harmony, four isn’t quite the idea, but six is. If six first-class violins play together in unison, on top of a harmonic texture, it’ll give the proper sound. And you can’t get it better in the largest symphony orchestra. So the top note in the chord, six players. Now, that work out right? [pause] Well, it worked out to sixteen, what we’d want. I think it was something like six, four, three, three (referring to the top four notes in the chord). He said, “Violas and cellos, if they’re good enough, three is enough. If they’re not quite good enough, three is no good. Where you going to learn that in a university or in school? Nobody has any idea what you’re talking about.

03-00:28:52 Brant: The sound in Kostelanetz’ orchestra, I think you can still hear on old records. It sounded like a well-orchestrated piece by Ravel. It was the sound of Ravel, but limited to the elements that were available in concentrated form with this kind of instrumentation. His woodwind section had six players, all were saxophone players. Like a jazz band. All of whom were doublers. And so six flute players, who could also play alto flute and piccolo, and they could all play saxophone and clarinet well enough for a good jazz band. And one oboe, the best he could get. He said, “We need him for solos.” When you try to think of what do you remember from the classical repertory for an oboe, you don’t think of a quartet or a duet, you think of one player. He’s famous. So he had one, the best he could get.

So you could fake the sound, any sound you wanted, because the players were there who could do it. It was limited to that. But six flutes is a lot of flutes in a symphony orchestra. Also six clarinets. A Mahler symphony doesn’t have more. It was a very interesting conversation, and very instructive, on the highest composing level. Its aims were limited. But the level of technique and the level of procedure was very high. Well, I did that for a year, until I couldn’t tolerate it at all. Now, the brass section had only six players, three trumpets and three trombones. But again, he had the best. The good large orchestras did have that number. I’m telling you this in detail, because it’s one of the main things that distinguishes my music from most of my colleagues.

The percussion was limited to percussion of definite pitch. So there were no sounds that were mere bangs and crashes. And there were only two players. But they— and I got something from that that has never left me, which is percussion instruments, in order to have any reason at all in serious music, should be melodic instruments, and they should play melodies. Now, what kind of Western music will do something like that? It meant taking a lot of trouble to see if they could do that. And how are you going to play a melody, instead of two or three notes, on kettle drums? Well, the obvious way to do it was in my old Berlioz book. You get a different instrument for each pitch you want. And if you’re satisfied with two notes, well, that’s your idea of melodic range. If not, you say, “Well, I need seven, so as to make a scale.” There’s no mechanical problems, there’s just a ridiculously limited and ignorant view of what’s possible.

I found out later, when I was writing for symphony orchestras, that four percussionists was standard. So I asked what instruments. And they said, “Well, our boys can do most anything. But it’s better to limit it to the instruments that are used in the famous and much-played scores.” So this got me into trouble. A symphony orchestra doesn’t like the idea of having seven timpani players, any more than they liked the idea of sixteen in Berlioz’ music. But once they do it, what the player can do is so obviously superior.

Then I realized that an instrument that has a range of only an octave or something like that has limited resources. So my idea was to see what could be done by extending the range of all of the instruments, including percussion. Now, timpani had started with an octave including only two pitches. The mallet percussion was much better. They started with about three octaves. And during my lifetime, that’s been doubled. Now the range of the xylophone is six octaves. The manufacturers realized the instrument was in demand, and they started making different sizes.

So I had three or four vibraphones and marimbas and timpani. And then I thought, Now, once in a while, you can tolerate a non-pitched percussion instrument. Okay. Also, there’s a third category. You could have non-pitched instruments of different sizes. And this creates an in-between pitch area, which I call relative pitch. And so in many of my pieces, there are parts where it requires three or four players, each of whom plays something with a lot of instruments of the same kind. But none of them of definite pitch. But nevertheless, you can say, “That’s higher than that one.”

So all this was raising the expressive power of percussion to levels that nobody had attempted consistently. Berlioz came the closest. Well, my education during that time with Kostelanetz was better than going to the best conservatories in Europe. And I’d always spent a lot of time with the orchestral musicians, and I asked them questions in the tuning-up room. And of course, they were interested, because it’s not very interesting playing in a symphony orchestra when you’re not playing. When you are playing, it’s not much different from when you’re not playing.

All right. So all these things had an effect on the music that I hadn’t yet written. I’d written music along conventional lines, comparatively speaking— except using the idioms of Schoenberg and Hindemith and people like that. So I’m now getting to the point. This David Bruckman was approached by the musicians union. And he was told, “You conduct a lot of different stuff. And we have concerts in the parks. And the money goes to unemployed musicians. Would there be any sense in having an indoor series of symphony concerts, with classical repertory? One rehearsal per concert, fifty-piece orchestra. And we decide who the orchestra is. Whoever needs it that week is on the list; whoever doesn’t, doesn’t get the gig.”

This man approached me. He said, “What I want to do, I want to see if there could be an unusual kind of American symphonic music that didn’t have to depend on the restrictions of the past. And the idiom doesn’t matter. The orchestra is a classical symphonic orchestra. And I have to be able to do it in one rehearsal.” So I said, “Yes. Can I do spatial music?” He said, “What is it?” So I explained; he said, “Go ahead.” One piece. Here it is. With all this in my head, we got a little beat-up place in the country, and I spent three or four months just trying to figure out how to write this strange piece. I didn’t have much precedent, but I had a fair amount of raw experience. So the spatial part

of it had nothing to do with what I’ve been telling you so far. The spatial ideas came from Ives, who had talked about it. He’d written about it vaguely. He said, “This is the way it ought to go. If you can’t do it, come as close as you can.”

Crawford: Different entities playing different music.

03-00:40:01 Brant: Yes. The whole idea was contrast of material; and that every kind of instrument should play a different kind of music. That’s contrast. And it also means that it demands something of the composer that he didn’t have to confront before. Before, if you were a real A-one, terrific composer of polyphonic music, like Bach, for, let’s say, six-part polyphony was the limit. Nobody wanted more than that. But Ives said, “There’s no limit to what the human consciousness can take in, in sound.” Nobody says there is.

So there I was, with a commission to write a piece for a kind of orchestra that I don’t, with all my experience even to that point, I really didn’t know much about. So I cooked on it for three months. I did nothing else. And finally, I arrived at the plan of that piece. So I showed it to Bruckman, and he said, “It’s up to you. I’m not responsible. I’ll play it. And that’s all.” And so there it is. Now, look at the score. So we’re back to symphony orchestra again, with first fiddle, second fiddle, viola, cello, and bass. And even the strings, no two groups are playing the same thing.

Including the double basses, that are not associated in some way with the cellos, as is customary. Let’s not go through all this, because this is an arrangement playable by bands, in which there’re a lot of clarinets. So I used the band convention. The string parts are played with some changes.

Crawford: And the spatial idea is that you can hear the distinct musics.

03-00:42:44 Brant: Better. Now, with the strings, it’s not going to be that distinct, because the tone qualities were really just one. But you can hear a texture that has all kinds of internal lives of its own. That’s obvious. And now, then, well, it’s still in conventional style. Woodwinds, I had nine players. Three flutes, three oboes, and three clarinets. So I managed to find out that they all could play different instruments. The flute players all played piccolo. The clarinets could play bigger clarinets. And so I could quite safely write what would ordinarily take twelve instruments, twelve players. And the only other effect that I allowed myself was unisons. Like the strings. Nobody would say, “There’s something the matter with the violins, because they’re only audible playing the same thing.” So this kind of— Gabrieli and Palestrina—at their most complicated, they manage it by having three or four choirs, each one in four-part polyphony. So they had the possibility of writing eight, or even sixteen parts, if you had more than one group. How many have I got? Strings, one, two,

three, four, five. And these are not even remotely alike. I took a lot of trouble to do that.

Crawford: And you can hear how these lines will sound.

03-00:44:55 Brant: Oh. That’s another great point. The way the ignorant, incompetent professional university teacher can intimidate anybody by saying, “Everything that’s there is audible. Look at his head. Look, there’s a head that can hear all that.” And it’s possible to imagine the sound of five different things at once. I can do it myself. Even if they’re very complicated. But I’ve never been able to manage more than that, without a complicated score. I can do pretty well with up to five, even if it’s complicated, although it’s very slow. Anybody who thought that slow couldn’t keep a job. So I wanna make sure.

So I consulted my medical advisor. I said, “Now, there’re people in my business who say that they can ‘hear,’ which is the word they use, up to five different things at the same time, in their heads. And I sort of think I can, maybe, and four easily; it depends on the style.” So he says, “Now, at the time when you can hear, as you say, something like that, is there any actual sound going on?” I said, “No, it’s all in my head.” So he said, “Next time you have one of these hearing experiences, come and see me. Otherwise, you don’t hear anything, unless there’s a sound. Nothing. Nothing makes any noise, so you don’t get any noise. So find some other way of figuring.” Well, that put me miles ahead of my competitors who could hear all kinds of stuff, [laughs] even when there wasn’t a sound made.”

Crawford: [laughs] Okay. I get your point.

03-00:47:19 Brant: Yes. Well, so process will account a little bit for my lack of respect for the competence of many of my academic colleagues, the teachers. Oh, it seems to me, what can they teach? Could they play a jazz lick if necessary? Well, hardly. And could they—how many parts, contrapuntal parts, could they write? But it turned out that although they could talk a big, long sell that I couldn’t even approach, they didn’t really know the first thing about music, to tell the truth. And I thought, Well, I’m not in the business so as to become that kind of expert.

So from that time on, the only thing that I realized was important was my manuscript. It took time to write a score with that much detail by hand, and have it as neat as that. And at first, I wouldn’t even use rulers. But I found out that it made a big difference if the player of whom I asked such things had in front of him a manuscript that looked like this. It saves a lot of argument. “There it is. Can you continue?” You know, “Here. Can you do it?” “Well, all right. We’re going to try.”

Crawford: And you had one rehearsal for this piece.

03-00:49:16 Brant: Yes.

Crawford: Would that be true of most of these works? One rehearsal?

03-00:49:20 Brant: Well, when I got to symphony orchestras that were established, the standard is four. But I didn’t get there right away.

Crawford: Yes. You’ve said that you don’t amend your scores, that your decision sticks. Pretty much.

03-00:49:36 Brant: If there’s any amending to be done, it’s done before the final score. Now, being naïve, and without any guidance, I made many miscalculations. But I fixed them all. And I learned how to do that without having to hear it played with mistakes. It’s self-education. Not a popular way to do it. But it means you can think your own thoughts. Now, maybe there aren’t any, so you can’t think them. But most people are thinking something, something.

Crawford: It’s not a question of being right or wrong.

03-00:50:17 Brant: Who’s going to say if it’s right? And for what reason?

Crawford: That’s right, [laughs] that’s right. That complicates it unnecessarily.

03-00:50:25 Brant: [laughs] Yes. Well, a composer with ideas of this kind can easily be forgotten or considered to be a pointless eccentric, because everybody knows that if you want to survive, you have to have a job, and it has to be enough to live on. Well, the ways to do that in classical music are ways that didn’t interest me at that time very much. All right.

Now, they talk about the form of a piece. And the form of it means anything. It means it’s something like a construction plan, how the thing is put together, and what its design is. Except the design is not a physical design, it’s a design in sound. Well, you’re listening to a piece of music, and you’re struck by the this and that of the form, and what it does, and you see nothing. Most of the time, if you’re like me, you stop listening after about a half a minute. You can’t remember what happened before, really. You’re thinking of something else, you look around the room, or you think, What’s going to happen this afternoon?

I’m a person with a lot of musical experience, so I thought, Well, if I can’t remember these things, what do I expect of somebody with much less experience? Sonata form that is a formality. It’s says, This happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens. Fine. One piece may need this. But how is it possible that the most admired pieces in the repertory all have

this same plan? It’s like architects wouldn’t make so dopey a mistake like that. In fact, they couldn’t. Everything is made and built to order. The buildings have to be built.

Crawford: Good point. While we are talking architecture, let’s look at Gabrieli and your thoughts. He wrote for St. Mark’s, in Venice.

03-00:52:54 Brant: He did.

Crawford: Just as you do, right? In most cases, you do that, too, don’t you?

03-00:52:57 Brant: Everybody did except— well, in the sixteenth century, it was the approved way to do it, because there were many churches, and they all had big musical establishments. The composer was the conductor. And he was expected to write music suitable for services once a week, or more than that.

Crawford: Using the resources that he had.

03-00:53:26 Brant: Well, that’s all ya got.

Crawford: Right. And isn’t that the way that you work? For instance, with Ice Field, you must have looked at the hall very carefully, and listened to the players; you knew the players, what they would do with your piece. Why five ensembles?

03-00:53:50 Brant: Because that’s the amount that are available for the performance of classical repertory.

Crawford: Right.

03-00:53:59 Brant: Well, so these are the things that really determined how I came to write spatial music. And finally, I worked out a routine. Since most of the performances are going to be in concert halls, and use symphony orchestras, I go into the hall. I’ve discussed this already with the conductor. He said, “All right, go to the hall, talk to the stage manager.” So I would do that. And the stage manager said, “Well, I don’t know what I can do for you. You’re going for some pretty peculiar things.” So I said, “Well, let’s see.” So I said, “First of all, let’s do a tour of the hall. And show me places where I can put musicians when they’re playing. And where there’s no objections, such as a fire law or a police regulation or something like that.”

Well, every stage manager knows that about his own hall. So he gave me the regular spaces. They’re mostly spaces on the stage or back there. But in the balcony, sometimes. So I said, “Now, are there any spaces besides what you’ve told me that are legal to put one player or two players or more?” And it

turns out there always are. But they’re not usually desirable places acoustically. Nevertheless, there’re spaces.

This piece was first played by the Philharmonic, in Carnegie Hall. Now the idea of arranging the stage itself and trying to find unusual positions is new. But something like this, I don’t think is ever found. They don’t object to that. They’ll arrange the stage any way you like. Now, it depends— here’s the conductor, in his usual place. Where are the other places? Perhaps in the balcony? That’s a good place spatially, because the contrast is great. And can the conductor see them? No, because he conducts with his back to the audience. They can see him.

Crawford: So you have a feeling how things will work acoustically.

03-00:56:53 Brant: So I do that first. Then I ask very particularly how many percussion players are there? It turns out they can get five or six, in special cases. So this goes up to the management office. I say, “The stage manager says I can have two more.” “That means we can’t play it very much, because it will cost us that much more. But go ahead and write it, if you want.”

It didn’t mean that my fee was going to be any higher. Sometimes they ask the question, “Well, sure, if you can find some way to pay these people, we can talk about it.” [laughs] Well, this is part of the business. I furnish the product.

Crawford: But they usually give you what you want.

03-00:58:07 Brant: Sometimes they won’t even discuss it. And the level of politeness changes very much, too. So I’ve spoken to architects, and I’ve said, “Now, is there any reason why the hall has to be built this way architecturally? Would it be possible for you to build cubby holes all over the hall, some of whom could hold two, three, four, five people without taking up a lot of space, and which you could use for certain unusual cases?” From an architectural point of view, it’s simple.

And so we went into this in some detail. I said, “Where could they be?” He said, “Where would you want them?” I said, “Well, the effects that I’ve always wanted to have, there’s the stage, and here, at a different level, higher up, are places for another group of musicians. And in fact, all around the hall, even about the audience.” I’ve found halls that would do this. From a practical or architectural standpoint, there’s no problem. They’re trained to do much more difficult things than that. But I can imagine pieces that I’ve never been able to write, where you have to have a big group there, but— I’ve actually written a piece where the string section, which is sixty players usually, are all around the audience and various different levels, as soloists.

Crawford: What is that piece?

03-00:59:59 Brant: It is Labyrinth. And nothing sounds quite like that, if you can imagine. Of course, the music has to be written in such a way that the performers hope to get guidance in some way. I don’t’ like videos or visual aids at all. I think that they should be able to play in such a way they know when they’re to start, and do the best they can, without worrying about the other parts. It makes such a difference in the sound when that’s been done.

Crawford: What does that enable a string player to do? A string player, say, at the balcony level?

03-01:00:54 Brant: They ask sometimes, “Will anybody hear me?” So the answer is yes. I’m not going to put you anyplace where everybody can’t hear you. And whatever that involves. It may be that I have to give up a spatial detail that I especially wanted to use. But number one it is practical. It’s got to go, and it’s got to go quickly. Because I don’t get more rehearsal time than other composers. And usually, a new work, when it’s rehearsed, is busy with the problems in the music itself.

Crawford: We have to change the tape here.

03-01:01:53 Brant: Yes.

[Begin Audio File 4]

04-00:00:00 Crawford: All right, let’s talk about adaptation of these huge and complicated works that are supposed to be site specific.

04-00:00:10 Brant: Site specific, I take to mean something that can only be played in one situation, and only once. Why it should be only once, I don’t know. But my piece is supposed to be both you can only play it once, and you can only play it in one situation. That’s not true of anything I’ve ever written. Now, but maybe the case of one of the most practical-sounding to-talk-about pieces is my piece Fire in the Amstel.

Crawford: Right, with the boatloads of player— one hundred flutes!— and orchestras on barges.

04-00:00:55 Brant: Yes. Well, now, that needs six freight barges. And also three brass bands, three choruses.

Crawford: Carillons.

04-00:01:16 Brant: Some of them stay in the same place, and some of them move in the boats.

Crawford: That’s the one that comes to mind that you might consider site specific. Although there are other canal cities, of course.

04-00:02:09 Brant: Sure.

Crawford: But you would never compromise that basic concept.

04-00:02:15 Brant: Well, maybe it could be. But how do you replace water by something that isn’t water? It shows how little I know about physics, I suppose.

Crawford: [laughs] Well, let’s work on that idea.

04-00:02:34 Brant: All I can tell you is that there’re risks besides that one, because out-of-doors is very dangerous to any new music. Here’s some of the things. You never know when it’s going to rain. This happened to me once, in Lincoln Center.

Wilkowski: But only a small number of your pieces are specifically meant for the outdoors. That’s another kind of myth, that all your works are written for outdoors. Not true.

04-00:03:18 Brant: I think the only one that’s specifically written for everything outdoors is that Dutch piece. And it was left up to me. They didn’t know how to do it, but they said, yes, they’ll supply everything. And the mayor wanted me to sign something that said that I would undertake not to interfere with the normal city traffic.

Crawford: They gave you the canals for an afternoon, is that right?

04-00:04:00 Brant: Yeah, and I couldn’t have a rehearsal of everything. So the rehearsals had to be indoors. And this puzzled me for a while. Then I decided that a hall originally used for services and things like that would be a good place. And— but we assembled, I got the people who were going to play in the barges. And I told them, “Now, we can’t waste time trying to find different places this morning. We’ve only got two hours. So take these arbitrary places,” and I arranged them in places where the barges would be in the water. I said, “Now, you’ve each got your own conductor who travels with you. Pay attention to him, and not to anything else. And don’t listen to anything else.” I really screamed about it. I thought that would misfire in some way, but it didn’t. They made it a point of honor to make the thing go. [pause] Now, that’s the only totally outdoor piece. And this is what I was going to tell you, it was terrible on sound. The wind was up.

Crawford: Writing for the outdoor you get ambient sounds, besides rain.

04-00:05:43 Brant: Well, a strong wind, or even a weak wind, can blow the sound away. You hear nothing. Or it suddenly disappears around a corner. So this is taking risks.

Crawford: That was a specific commission from Amsterdam, wasn’t it?

04-00:06:09 Brant: That’s what they offered me. In fact, it was suggested to them by a number of musicians who knew my music, and they said what a big thing it would be for city publicity, or national publicity. And that made an immediate impression. And I also wanted the carillons of the four biggest churches, which are all very separated. I have vertigo and terrible balance, but I said I wanted to go up there and see what it looked like, and how it worked. So I walked up these stone steps, and on the walls, I saw the names of the organists of these churches for ten centuries.

Crawford: You were talking to the carilloneurs, at that point, right?

04-00:07:11 Brant: The carilloneurs, yes, yes. And so I said, “I’d like you to play some Dutch carillon music from your tradition.” And they all said, “We don’t play it anymore. We play some of the hit tunes, not even religious music, of various churches throughout Europe.” So part of my plan was knocked down right away. And I got the same thing from the choruses. Now, they can sing anything, classical repertory of some kind, and very well. But they’d never sung the shape note music, which is what I wanted them to sing. But they said, “We can learn it.” [laughs] And it turned out they learned it.

And my then wife was able to talk in a dialect in which they were originally sung, so they gave a very creditable imitation. There was one churchyard. I decided I wanted each chorus to be in a park adjacent to a canal. And so I asked my adviser, “What about it?” He said, “Well, I don’t know. This is the traditional residence of the city prostitutes.” And so I said, “Well, is there anything in their bylaws [laughs] that prevents them from singing something out of this circumstance?” They said, “Well, that’s up to you.”

So I went with a female friend of mine to call on these ladies. We knocked on the door, and the door opens. They said, “Well, now, sir and madam, what can we do for you?” So I explained this, and they got the idea right away. Said, “We’d be honored. Just explain to us what you want done.” I said, “Nothing. Just be there. And you know, you can be in Paris for a weekend or wherever. But just so that we’re allowed to sing there, to perform the choruses.

Crawford: You don’t have any doubt but what this work will be performed there again. It belongs to Amsterdam.

04-00:09:53 Brant: Yeah.

Crawford: Let’s talk a bit about recording, also an acoustic problem with all kinds of amplification.

04-00:10:05 Brant: Well, I think I should go into this in a somewhat different way, because it goes to the visions of anybody’s music, not just mine. You ask the average Western musician something about the harmonic series and he’ll know what you’re talking about. And yet no sound in Western music could exist if it weren’t for this acoustic series, which is a fact every time music is played. And the thing about recorded music of any kind is that it disturbs the balance, the acoustic, the physical tonal balance of the constituents of the sound. And this bothers me a good deal. It substitutes a kind of acoustics that’s entirely different. It’s made in a different way, vibrates in a different way. And it would be worthwhile if you could find the time sometime to get a book on acoustics, musical acoustics, and read about these things, which every musician should learn in music school, and none of them know about it.

Crawford: We don’t seem to know much about acoustics, do we? Our halls always have to be redone.

04-00:11:41 Brant: You can play any note I’ve written without knowing about acoustics, but acoustics is the basis of it all. So I’ll explain a little bit of it. What you hear as a single tone, let’s say in a musical situation, is in reality more than that. It’s a complexity of many different tones sounding at once. But at different levels of volume. You only hear one of them. And you say that’s the pitch of that note. But every once in a while, you say, “Well, what is that other stuff? Isn’t there some other stuff?” Yes, well, there is, but the dynamics of it are self-adjusting. What the human ear apparatus is able to pick up are only certain notes of a certain pitch. Because actually, it’s the byproduct notes that you hear, not the original notes. The original note is always way lower in pitch.

Now, the way it works is, you hear one note. And immediately, a lot of byproduct notes start sounding to you, actually a little bit apart. And if you have some way of eliminating those byproduct notes, as they’re called, upper partials or harmonic partials, then you hear nothing. And this phenomenon was known to musicians fairly well up until the eighteenth century or something like that. Now, I think acoustically speaking, what’s called sine tone was discovered as a practical matter in the late nineteenth century. It’s a way to produce a tone in which the pitch is very clear, but it doesn’t generate anything. There’s no sound. And that is the trouble in a physics lab. It has no motion, it just stays there. And it’s clear, it’s always in tune. It does not react at all to anything that the performer tries to do with it. And that’s the sine tone.

Now, electronic music uses only the sine tone, because it means you can get a sound of any pitch absolutely fixed. And you can try the most abstruse musical designs on it, and it’ll give you just what you ask. And my own theory, which I hope will be medically or physiologically investigated, is that this sound not only conveys very little to the human mechanism, which needs elaboration and extraneous elements in it that are not even related to the original, it needs all that for us to accept it as a musical sound at all.

Electronic music consists of taking tones made in this manner, and adding artificial upper partials, other sine tones, and which produce artificial overtones of the right pitch. But of course, the process is so different from the process in real life. Audiences and listeners pick this up very readily. They’ll say, “There’s something the matter with that. That’s recorded.” There are some composers who write only electronic music, and you can’t deny their music, even if you hear what you don’t want to hear, it’s so clear. But they control everything that goes into it. And one method of recording which I’ve had a painful experience with works like this. You record in a very small room.

04-00:17:32 Brant: It’s a soundproof room, like a padded cell. And only the symphonic pitches are recorded. The others are floated out. So they played, and I went, “What’s that? I didn’t write that.” They said, “Don’t worry. What did you want?” So I described what I wanted. “I want more of this, and this or that.” And they said, “Sure. How’s this?” “Well, it’s closer to it.” But they can answer any question you want, if you can express it in terms of quantities of upper partials or whatever the language is.

Crawford: You’re talking about sound engineers. The manipulators of the sound.

04-00:18:27 Brant: Yes, yes. And they consider, of course, that what they do is much superior to the old-fashioned, out-of-date kind of sound. Well, another thing that is equally important is, some composers have thought, We can use this new electronic sound for something special, combined with the acoustic music. It doesn’t combine. Nothing mixes worse. I’m just completing a book on the subject. My premise is that you cannot combine electronic and non-electronic sound, because it distorts both.

Crawford: But in terms of recording, for instance, we don’t hear Gabrieli the way in which it was intended.

04-00:19:34 Brant: Yes, we can. I discussed this with Leopold Stokowski. He said he went to Venice, trying to find out what the Gabrieli sound was. First thing that happened, they said, “We don’t play that old music anymore. No. It’s not interesting to anybody.” And then he tried again. “Well, it’s been so long. Oh, nobody plays that stuff anymore. And it wouldn’t be safe for people to hear it

performed in the church. You don’t know what’s going to happen, what’s going to fall down.”

Crawford: I think people are very keen to hear sixteenth-century music.

04-00:20:26 Brant: Well, he didn’t give up. He finally got official permission. But he was to take responsibility for anything that went wrong, or that went against the city code or this or that, but he did it. And he said he found out something right away, that in that space, San Marco Church, no matter where he put the players, without any amplification, everything sounded and everything combined and was clear. And such were the acoustics of that—probably accidentally—that it has an absolutely perfect response. And on top of that, some recording company decided to record it by conventional methods. Oh! I suppose there are businesses in which the amount of performance insanity is equal to that, but I can’t think of one.

Crawford: [laughs] How much does recording degrade your work?

04-00:22:06 Brant: Well, if I listened, if I took seriously the stuff that the recording people do— but you never even notice it. They try all kinds of things. Now, I thought maybe it wouldn’t be completely impossible, if they recorded each group separately, on a separate track, and then combined them in some sort of average way. That’s a little better. But no recording company that I know is willing to undertake it. New World did an excellent recording of a piece of mine for four groups, brass groups. And they released it. I thought, Well, that’s the best I’ve ever heard. You know, there’re only four groups, but it’s pretty complicated. They managed to give each one a slightly different timbre, different tone quality. But later on, the piece was recorded, and a bunch of bright young nitwit engineers got hold of it, and they combined the two tapes into one. So there was no separation at all.

Crawford: What about the recording of Ice Field.

04-00:23:37

Wilkowski: It’s not released commercially, because you have to come up with thirty- thousand dollars to pay the San Francisco Symphony. And who has that kinda dough?

Crawford: The Pulitzer won’t help you with that?

04-00:23:49 Brant: Yeah, you can get it for thirty grand.

Crawford: For thirty grand, you can have this. Well, what’s your impression of the recording?

04-00:23:58 Brant: Oh, of that piece? Oh. So I’ve been talking about the wrong piece.

Crawford: I was asking you in general, but you might apply that to the piece.

04-00:24:09 Brant: Well, it’s surprising in that recording that so much of it is intelligible at all. Yes, you can hear the difference between strings and brass, something like that, but it’s on a crude level. Nevertheless, it’s better than— These are supposed to be some of the most experienced and gifted acoustical recorders in the business. Well, [laughs] what else can I tell you?

Crawford: What are your thoughts about the piece? What’s new?

Brant: Well, it has certain things that I wanted to do in previous pieces. One of them was to have everybody in the strings, sixty of them, playing something different, but with the addition of a little refinement of not having any direction at all, and being directed as though it’s your show; play it just the way you want.

Crawford: What kind of notation did you give?

04-00:25:42 Brant: Conventional. I wrote four things for the viola section only, for instance. And eight for the first fiddle. I said, “Don’t try to keep together. And if you want to play with a lot of vibrato and big bow, go ahead and do it; if you want to play this way, do that.” And all you have to do is know when to start and to stop. Stop when you hear the percussion play. Everybody could do that.

Crawford: Well, that must be a very new horizon for instrumentalists. Your players liked this.

04-00:26:33 Brant: They did, and they said, “You know, if we could do this all the time!” [laughs]

Crawford: You’ve made a wonderful life for musicians, who, as you say, sit bored in the pit most of the time.

04-00:26:49 Brant: Only one said, “But I’m used to playing something that’s in front of me. I wouldn’t know what to play.” But then, [laughs] when he heard what the others did, he said, “I can do that, too.”

Crawford: So you were satisfied with the playing?

04-00:27:03 Brant: Oh, yeah, of the level of playing was first class. And the level of cooperation was, too, because they’re used to playing supposedly unusual music.

Crawford: Have you worked with, to your satisfaction, with the major symphony orchestras in California, since you chose California as your home?

04-00:27:25 Brant: Los Angeles and San Francisco. I think that’s all in California.

Wilkowski: UC San Diego, but they’re not major. Santa Cruz, a symphony orchestra with a season, but it’s not major status. Western Strings was done with UC San Diego. And then, of course, Oakland. But that was when [Gerhard] Samuel was the conductor, he was a very good conductor. He played all kind of things, and pieces of mine, and got very good results. But then, his attitude toward this was very different from most conductors.

Crawford: How so?

04-00:28:23 Brant: Well, of course I’d explain, then he’d say, “Well, what’s that? Okay, we got to learn how to do it.”

Crawford: So was he the most open to the kind of work you’re doing, that you’ve done?

04-00:28:43 Brant: Stokowski, too. The very fact that they played it showed that they were willing to undertake these unconventional ways of getting sound.

Crawford: William Kraft, the Los Angeles new music concerts.

04-00:29:14 Brant: He was one of the conductors of a piece of mine that they played. He was the assistant conductor at that time. I know him quite well. He was a student of mine at Columbia.

Crawford: You’ve chosen California as your home. How has that been as a composing environment for you?

04-00:29:43 Brant: I don’t ask much. Just some way to make a living, and I write music. And I’ve found that it’s not impossible here. As well as other places.

Crawford: Yes.

04-00:30:00 Brant: No, since I was here, I felt, hell, the world really needs [help], and what kind of music is in tune with it?.

Crawford: What subjects would you still like to write about?

04-00:30:49 Brant: Well, in a general way, I don’t think any subject which is reflected in human experience is beyond the potential of what Western music can express. And

no doubt there are other ways, other kinds of music that express levels that go even beyond that. It seems to me absurd to be writing over and over again about the trouble that Hamlet had. Instead of trying to get simpler and simpler—which to me, means stupider and stupider—use what resources exist, to the maximum. I was going to write something in which the main subject was—the name of it was going to be Tsunami Requiem. I’m still interested in the idea, but I don’t know whether it’s timely or not, or whether it should be timely not. And I’d like to answer a few questions of that kind before I figure it out more closely. Also, who wants it? I can think of a lot of people who are indifferent, who are quite indifferent to something like that.

Crawford: It’s an intriguing idea. Why not?

04-00:32:48 Brant: I’m for doing it. I think, though, that perhaps it should be for an unusual space. It’s a little hard to imagine doing something like that in Carnegie Hall. Of course, I’m told if something is really first class, you can do it in a closet. Well, maybe you can’t. But then you have to have the ability to do something like that in a closet.

Crawford: [laughs] How do you begin?

04-00:33:24

Brant: Usually, I make a draft of such things, giving the main features of— mechanical and musical and poetic. And I stop there, because no performances are going to need the same things, in any case. It’s mostly funds. It’s the same answer that you’d have to give most anybody who was trying a new venture in either the arts or sciences. Oh, architects have it worse than this. They can spend twenty years developing the funds for their new structure, and nothing happens. And finally it happens, and there it is. They write their masterpieces, and what do they do in between? Odds and ends.

I think their attitude is much less unrealistic than the musician, because I’ve spoken to a few. And they regard those things as the facts of life. And that includes the limited longevity of architects and composers. Of course, if I were doing this in the year 1406, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d know that spiritually, there’d be no problem. And even the unfavorable outcome of what I’ve called religionists of contrary views, everybody was so used to the idea. At least the conception. [laughs] Are you writing this down?

Crawford: No, I’m just writing words for the transcribers. Just to be sure that they’re understood. Well, we’re at one-and-a-half hours, so we probably should end for today. Thank you very much.

[End of Interview]