Ice Field: Spatial Narratives for Large and Small Orchestral Groups
HENRY DREYFUSS BRANT
BORN: September 15, 1913. Montreal, Quebec
DIED: April 26, 2008. Santa Barbara, Ca
COMPOSED: Ice Field: Spatial Narratives for Large and Small Orchestral Groups was commissioned for Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony by Other Minds (a San Francisco-based organization devoted to the music of pathbreaking composers), with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Multi-Arts Production Fund. The work was completed in Santa Barbara in June 2001
WORLD PREMIERE: December 2001 Pan-American Mavericks performances. Michael Tilson Thomas and Brad Lubman conducted, with the composer on the organ
INSTRUMENTATION: 3 piccolos (all doubling flutes), 3 oboes (second and third doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (third doubling E-flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns (plus a 5th to play in unison with the 1st, if available, and a 6th to play in unison with the 3rd), 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (5 of them), xylophone, glockenspiel, 3 gongs, 2 bass steel-drums, 3 orchestral bass drums, a drum set (consisting of snare drum, pedaled bass drum, pedaled hi-hat cymbals, 5 tom-toms, 2 large suspended cymbals, large cowbell, and large Chinese block), a large pipe organ with a 32-foot stop (and preferably a 64-foot stop as well), 2 harps, 2 pianos, and strings. 2 conductors are required to coordinate the instrumental forces, which are arranged on the stage and at specific places around the hall
DURATION: About 20 mins
THE BACKSTORY: When you boil a piece of music down to its essentials, what you have are pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Nearly every piece every composer has ever written, at least in the Western tradition, is simply an elaboration of those three properties—that is, unless the composer is Henry Dreyfuss Brant (1913-2008)—or one of those who have followed his example. For Brant, music has a fourth dimension: space. In his creative universe, where a piece sounds is a fundamental aspect of how a piece sounds. Brant elaborated in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian: “With me, space is not a convention, with the audience in one place and the artists in another. To me, space is an expressive device. I put some of the instruments in different parts of the hall to make certain elements with music more expressive and intense. The way I do it, space is part of the composing plan. If you change the space in a piece of mine, it’s no different than changing the notes or the rhythms in someone else’s piece.”
He wasn’t always a spatial composer, but even from the beginning he showed clear signs of being a maverick. Even as a child he created homemade instruments and composed works for them. He received a thorough musical education at the Montreal Conservatory, the Institute of Musical Arts in New York, and the Juilliard Graduate School, all the while continuing his experiments with unusual or “found” objects (as in his 1932 composition Five and Dime, for E-flat clarinet, piano, and kitchen hardware) and with deploying multiple members of the same instrumental family in a single piece (as in his 1931 Angels and Devils, a concerto for three piccolos, five standard flutes, and two alto flutes).
But by the early 1950s, Brant, who by that time was distinguished enough to have served on the composition and orchestration faculties of Columbia University and the Juilliard School (a long stint at Bennington College, from 1957 to 1980, still lay ahead), found himself drawn increasingly to the idea of space. He was strongly attracted to the idea of writing an abundance of contrapuntal lines but found that the ear couldn’t really sort them out when they started to approach a dozen simultaneous parts. Space, he thought, might help clarify things. There were precedents in Western composition, to be sure. Monteverdi and his contemporaries made telling use of the acoustics of the San Marco Basilica in Venice by dispersing their performers throughout the space. Berlioz, Mahler, and Ives all provided specific directives about the locations of performers in certain of their works, and many in the audience can probably recall examples from the standard symphonic repertory in which offstage instruments are used effectively, as the distant trumpet in Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3. Operagoers are accustomed to hearing the sounds of secondary ensembles waft in from afar—military parades, ballroom orchestras, chanting monks—but, apart from the three orchestras that overlap in Don Giovanni, the effects are rarely all that astonishing. In most of these cases, spatial separation amounts to only a gesture—an interesting and sometimes commanding touch, but hardly a factor in motivating how the piece works.