Henry Brant
Henry Brant (born
September 15,
1913) is a highly significant
California-based composer of
art music based on spatialization and limited
aleatory. Brant is credited as the inventor of contemporary spatial music; i.e., music where players or groups of players are distributed over a large performance space, or asked to move about within the space. Brant is best known for his compositions "Verticals Ascending" (conceptually based on the architecture of the
Watts Towers in
Los Angeles) and "Horizontals Extending". Brant won the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in
2002 for his composition
Ice Field.
Brant was born in Montreal in Canada and studied first at the McGill Conservatorium (1926-29) and then in New York City (1929-34). He later taught at Columbia University, the Juilliard School and Bennington College. Brant lives in Santa Barbara, California.