The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas, presented the world premiere of Henry Brant's glorious new composition, Ice Field, in Davies Symphony Hall on December 12, 13, 14 and 15. The music was commissioned by Other Minds with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation's Multi-Arts Production Fund. Conductor and orchestra performed magnificently. The composer himself played the extempore organ part, drawing on the organ's most atypical sounds as well as its clear and ever-present directionality. Brant is famous for his spatial compositions—Mark Swed once called him as "the Einstein of music," in reference to his investigations of space and time—and Ice Field is an effective and convincing demonstration of the composer's mastery of directionality and separation as musical resources. Brant himself considers it his most successful spatial utilization of the forces of the orchestra (without adding soloists and/or other groups of instruments or voices). The double reeds (two oboes, English horn, two bassoons, contra) are located in the gallery above the stage, stage left side. The flutes and clarinets (doubling piccolos and Eb clarinets) are to the audience's right in the extreme reaches of the second balcony; a percussionist playing xylophone and glockenspiel is located in the analogous position, audience's left. In the first balcony the orchestral brass and a jazz drummer are located, to the audience's left and catty-cornered from the double reeds. On the floor of the hall, half-way back and to the audience's right, are low percussion instruments (bass drums, bass steel drums, gongs), played by two people. On stage are the strings, two harps, two pianos and timpani, carefully placed so that they may function either as a whole or as further directional resources—the strings are in one place, the pianos and harps in another, ditto the timpani.

Brant's mastery of the antiphonal potential of such an arrangement is legendary, and the delight of both audience and performers in the resulting play of sound is so palpable that "Henry Brant, ‘spatial composer,’" has all but obscured other aspects of his art. His music is not only delightful—it is humorous, clever, even hilarious, and completely professional in its craftsmanship. Such is the distrust of all of these attributes today that Brant’s music, in many circles, elicits a knee-jerk response. Something so enjoyable, so engaging, and so well-crafted cannot possibly be "serious." Even his most sympathetic critics (not to mention his unsympathetic ones) give the impression that this music is a good joke, thank you very much, and now on to something more "profound," if you please.

I have known the composer for twenty-three years and have been involved in the premieres of several of his pieces (some of them commissioned by organizations with which I am affiliated). I have traveled to Europe and many places in the United States to hear his music, and I have interviewed him extensively. I have even composed two pieces based on his stated principles of spatial separation (one before I even met the man, the other as a deliberate homage on his eighty-fifth birthday). I attended one of the rehearsals of Ice Field and three of the performances, and I have studied the score. In other words, I take him and his music very seriously—indeed, his art is at least as serious as it is entertaining. It is as complex and multifaceted as the work of any living composer. It is informed by ideas and musical considerations which are rich and meaningful.In short, he is no "one-issue" artist, as I hope the following discussion of three distinctly non-spatial aspects of Ice Field will show.

First, Brant is one of a long line of composers who has sought to expand the notion of counterpoint. The imitative contrapuntal mastery of J. S. Bach has cast a long shadow, and there are composers galore who have tried to compete with his legacy. There is also, however, a distinguished group of composers that has tried to go in a different direction, that of "non-imitative" counterpoint, of which Ernst Toch wrote so eloquently. From Berlioz's masterful combination of two male choruses in The Damnation of Faust and Wagner's famous layering of several melodic ideas in the prelude to Die Meistersinger, through the remarkable free counterpoint of Ives, the young Lou Harrison and others, to the layered electronic collages of any number of living composers—there is a long and vital history of
alternative contrapuntal music. Brant's spatial arrangement in Ice Field, far from being a gimmick, is the vehicle for a radical new kind of counterpoint—not only a counterpoint of groups and timbres, but a counterpoint of styles. He has cultivated stylistic counterpoint in many works—mariachi music against conquistador marches in 500: Hidden Hemisphere, African drumming against quasi-Stravinsky in Meteor Farm, and big band jazz against lots of different things in Ice Field. He modestly attributes this idea to Charles Ives, in his pioneering masterpiece The Unanswered Question. But Brant's exhaustive exploitation
of this conception, in a series of large-scale pieces, far outstrips his model. Ives dreamed of such music, but Henry Brant actually has written it.

At first the listener may find pleasure in "following the bouncing ball" of sound as it shuttles about the hall. But if one takes the effort to relax the ears (so to speak) and hear not directionality but simultaneity, one finds oneself in the middle of a complexity all the more remarkable because of its complete clarity and comprehensibility. And this is not all. There
are canons that turn into harmonic density (i.e., melodies which become their own accompaniment), there are pseudo-imitative games between individual instruments that sound like conversations—on several different levels a remarkable contrapuntal imagination is at work.

Second, Brant's music is unlike any music I have heard with regard to its syntax. Ice Field is remarkably free of development in any conventional meaning of the word. It does not recapitulate themes. It does not even recapitulate orchestral textures, something almost every orchestral composer does of necessity during tutti passages. (Brant does not write
tuttis—there is not even one tutti chord in the entire piece). Rather, there are a series of fourteen rhetorical passages which present a thematic conception as one would present a topic for debate. The presented conception is considered from several points of view (directions, combinations) and brought to some sort of conclusion after which the composer moves on. The form, then, is ABCDEFGHIJKLMN. I do not know of another example of this form in the entire history of music.

In the hands of a lesser composer such a scheme would probably be incoherent. With Brant, however, nothing could be farther from the truth. Events unfold with the naturalness of a good tale told by a master storyteller, or a good series of related tales, in the manner of the Arabian Nights. It's not for nothing that the complete title of this work is Ice Field: Spatial Narratives for Large and Small Orchestral Groups. And just as stories have moments which require elaboration, and other moments which are concise for reasons of wit or dramatic effect, Ice Field has very long sections, very short sections, and many other durations in between. Its proportions are as original as all of the other aspects of the work.

Third, I would like to propose that Brant's mature music in general, and this piece in particular, is an excellent example of what can be called musical ecology. I began to pick up on this aspect of his work from certain of his titles—Meteor Farm, Dormant Craters, Desert
Forests, and now Ice Field—all references to natural phenomena. The extensive text to Meteor Farm is a series of reported meteor sightings from scientific periodicals interlarded with UFO sightings taken from tabloid journals ("imaginary natural phenomena," so to speak). Then in the late 1980s came his astonishing double bass concerto entitled Ghost Nets, an up-front protest of the practice of harvesting vast numbers of tuna and other large fish in the Pacific while leaving whole schools of smaller species to perish, trapped in the giant webs to which the title alludes. The composer has often stated that his titles "have nothing to do with the work itself," and has continued to claim this about the title of the work
under discussion, while relating the story of his trip to Europe as a 12-year old boy, drifting in wonder through the gorgeous but surely terrifying icebergs of the North Atlantic. It's just what a 12-year old boy would love most—real and present danger, but viewed from a
(relatively) safe position where its unique beauty is safely manifested.

Let me suggest that Henry Brant is a composer with deep convictions about the beauty of the natural world and the urgency of its preservation. While he does not talk about this much, he has a series of excellent pieces which relate directly to this point. And he has told us up front that this concern has been with him for most (if not all) of his eighty-eight years.
How does all of this present itself in Ice Field? Again, allow me to return to a past experience with a particular piece. I started to notice something about his music, which no one seems to have discussed, while Clare Heldrich and I were preparing the second performance of Dormant Craters, which took place in the mid-nineties at the Manhattan School of Music. The little musical episodes, the groups of percussion instruments, the individual timbres emphasized from time to time—these slowly took on the aspects of musical characters. I imagined them at the time as animals. Not animals you would find in the zoo, and certainly not domestic animals, but imaginary animals, living their lives out in peace, occasionally threatening each other, perhaps even making meals out of each other, but, biological necessity notwithstanding, peacefully coexisting.

Let me suggest that this is an excellent way to think about Ice Field. That's not a group of double reeds up here and a couple of bass pans over there. Rather, the eight groups (counting the organist and the solo percussionists as "groups") and their various subsets are characters in an imaginary opera of the mind. They are not people and they are not animals, but they are living entities which are allowed to live out their natural lifespan and interact with each other. Their particular group stories are unique, as are their interactions. They are not forced to fit into large-scale patterns. They are separated so that they are revealed for their own particular excellence but also for their safety (no submerging the individual into the collective mass here). And what makes this all possible? SPACE! We all need space to feel comfortable, we need space to breathe, we need space so that we can function democratically and respect each other. Space is beautiful, space is liberating. And space is necessary to life.

This gets us back to what the composer is most famous for. In an increasingly crowded world, where more and more people compete in smaller and smaller places for part of the ever-shrinking pie, perhaps the music of Henry Brant shows us another way of doing things. Give everybody some room and let the music begin! Of course it will not be the music we are used to hearing, but that is a good and necessary thing.

Neely Bruce
nbruce@wesleyan.edu
telephone (860) 685-2578
FAX (860) 685-2651