Visions in Space : Henry Brant's Multimedia Experiments with Spatial Music

Throughout his seventy-year career in music Henry Brant engaged in a significant relationship with (audio-)visual media: he orchestrated Hollywood and non-Hollywood film scores by composers such as Aaron Copland, Douglas Moore, Virgil Thomson and Alex North; he scored about twenty documentaries and experimental films as well as two feature films. The limited literature on Brant tends to draw a divide between his as yet under-investigated “commercial” activity in film and the experimental thread of his production, i.e. “spatial” (or "antiphonal") music, which he undertook since the early 1950s. A survey of Brant’s papers housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, CH) reveals, however, that the composer’s engagement with audiovisual media cannot be downgraded to a mere side activity. On the one hand, composing and orchestrating for films constituted a testbed for Brant’s research on timbre, impacting his lifetime project, the orchestration handbook “Textures and Timbres” (2009). On the other, Brant included audiovisual media such as film and other discreet visual events (projected slides, light design, fireworks) in at least six completed works and in five ambitious unfinished projects, covering a four-decade time span from the 1950s to the 1990s. By overviewing Brant’s durable interest for visuals and highlighting his collaborations with filmmakers and visual artists, I shall illustrate that the musically-controlled combination of visual elements was instrumental to Brant’s research on spatial “counterpoint,” adding a layer of “silent rhythm” to his compositions. Brant’s idiosyncratic approach to notions such as synesthesia and synchronism, his aversion for linear narratives, continuity editing and close-ups in films, his prioritizing unamplified live sound over recording and amplification technologies, ultimately converged toward a phonocentric, ecological critique of bourgeois audio-visual culture and its implied subjectivism. My argument is that Brant’s maverick contribution to musical multimedia practice prompts us to pinpoint space as the minimal element that allows a multimedia work to exist, regardless of the supposed semantic/syntactical emerging from the intertwining of the work’s media constituents (music, visuals, performance). By subduing meaning to spatial relations, Brant aimed to debunk the conventions of spectatorship in the concert hall/movie theater without at the same time embracing (post-)modernist notions of multimedia immersivity.