Henry Brant Santa Barbara, CA Henry Brant, America's pioneer practitioner of 20th century spatial music, began to compose at the age of eight. In 1929 he moved to New York, where for 20 years he composed and conducted for radio, films, ballet, and jazz groups, while composing experimentally for the concert hall. From 1947 to 1955 he taught orchestration and conducted ensembles at the Juilliard School and Columbia University. He taught composition at Bennington College from 1957 to 1980, presenting premieres of works by living composers every year. In 1950, Brant began to write spatial music, in which the planned positioning of the performers throughout the hall and on stage is an essential factor in the composing scheme. This procedure takes as its point of departure the ideas of Charles Ives. In 1950 Brant wrote that "single-style music ... could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit." Brant's catalog of works in the years since includes nearly 100 spatial works, each for a different instrumentation and each requiring a different deployment in the performance space. Brant's spatial music has been widely performed and recorded in the U.S. and Europe. Beginning in the 1980s, Brant's spatial music started exploring wider areas and larger performing forces. For example, "Orbits" (1979) was scored for 80 trombones and organ; "Fire on the Amstel" (1984) for four boatloads of 25 flutes each, four jazz drummers, four church carillons, three brass bands, and four street organs — all on a three-hour procession through the canals in Amsterdam's center. In 2002, Brant won the Pulitzer Prize for his composition "Ice Field." Santa Cruz, CA New Music Works of Santa Cruz conceived the "Quantum Leaps" concert series to celebrate American music of the last 100 years. The series offered a historical context to the musical world in which we live by featuring five major works written between 1900 and 2000. The final concert of this series included the premiere of the Continental Harmony commission, Henry Brant's "Glossary." learn more about this project

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Continental Harmony was a leadership initiative of the American Composers Forum and the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional funding provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, and Marshall Field's Project Imagine with support from the Target Foundation. "));