Word: brant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...piece was Henry Brant's Orbits, subtitled "a spatial ritual." After Conductor Gerhard Samuel's final beat of the baton, the composer rose from his seat at the organ to acknowledge a standing ovation...
Veteran Avant-Gardist Brant, 65, has long believed space is as important an element in composition as pitch or time values. In such works as Prevailing Winds (1974), for woodwind quintet, or the orchestral piece Antiphony One (1963), which requires five conductors, he deployed musicians all over the boxes, balconies and aisles of the hall instead of clustering them solely onstage. Greater complexity and expressiveness are his aim. "It's easier on the nervous system to have the music spaced," he says, "because you don't get it in a compact blast-you get it fragmented from different...
...most ambitious formations yet. Many of the performers belonged to a San Francisco trombone choir called the Bay Bones. Reinforcements included the entire trombone sections of the San Francisco and Oakland Symphonies and the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. One musician came all the way from Florida. Brant's music is fairly frequently played by major ensembles, but he has no illusions about the practicality of a work for 80 trombones. "I think no further than the first performance," he says. "Probably when Berlioz wrote his Requiem, which needs four brass bands, it didn't appear practicable either...
...recent years Brant, who teaches at Bennington College in Vermont, has sought wider spaces for his music than concert halls afford by going outdoors. In 1972 his The Immortal Conflict positioned instrumental groups on various balconies and plazas at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Traffic noise and a thunderstorm made the results "ludicrous," Brant admits. Undaunted, he merely drew the moral that any bold experimenter would have. "The thunderclap," he says, "showed me the scale that sound would have to be on to be heard...
...real star of Cat and Mouse, though, is Lelouch. He has taken a vi brant hand to his material, lacing the action with playful flashbacks and trompe l'oeil effects that wittily complicate the narrative's central puzzle. There is even a brief and hilariously titled film-within-the-film that parodies Cat and Mouse's own detective genre. If, in the end, the movie is far longer on charm than thrills, it is simply because the director refuses to hype any of the scary elements of the story. Much to his credit, Claude Lelouch would rather...