SANTA BARBARA — "In my head, I understand it all right, but the rest of me has just got the shakes."
Henry Brant is standing in his frontyard late Monday afternoon. The 88-year-old composer, dressed, as usual, in color-coordinated sweats and a visor, has spent the day digesting this news: After years of laboring in the shadows of contemporary music, his most recently premiered commission, "Ice Field," won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for music.
His wife, Kathy Wilkowski, standing next to him, shakes her head. "We've gotten more phone calls today than we have all year," she says.
And the phone keeps ringing as Brant and Wilkowski move inside the house, which is also Brant's studio. His primary response to the Pulitzer is simple: Maybe it will be a portal to an easier creative future.
"It was given to a piece that is by no means an easygoing, conventional piece, " he says, "I regard it as an encouragement to keep going the way that I go."
Brant's "way" is what he calls "spatial music": works designed to be performed by musicians scattered around a concert hall, rather than just on stage. "Ice Field," premiered by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony in December, put some players on stage but also distributed them in various balconies and around seating areas. Brant himself sat at the hall's pipe organ, playing a few improvisational passages at key moments in the 20-minute work.
Categorically immersive, "Ice Field" weaves together jazz, dissonant Modernism, comical sound effects and even lovely melodies. With sound coming from all directions, the listener is inside the music, in a way that is utterly different from the way concert hall music usually sounds.
Charles Amirkhanian, director of San Francisco's Other Minds festival, which commissioned "Ice Field," says Pulitzer recognition was far overdue for "the experimental wing of American music. I sat next to one of the jurors Monday night at a concert, and he said, 'When you listen to the recording with the score in front of you, it just pops out as one of the most brilliant and entertaining and wacky inventions.'"
"You get something with space music that isn't attainable any other way," Brant has said. For one thing, dispersing musicians allows his eclecticism freer rein: Complex music that might be too dense coming from the focused source of a stage opens up when it's spread around the hall.
It's curious, Brant says, that "nobody" else is interested in it. "I have the comfort of knowing that I have no rivals."
From Brant's perspective, this is just the way music ought to be.
"It is a big thing," he says, "because music cannot exist without space. It's a whole big subject of where the sound goes, and that it [usually is] artificially constrained is one of the surprises of the last 50 years."
Expectedly, Brant has had his champions, detractors and those who straddle the fence, intrigued if not entirely convinced of his vision. The New York Times review of "Ice Field" said that the work "lies somewhere between precision planning and controlled chaos, a mixture of smart bombs and dumb ones."
Brant was born in Montreal in 1913, and he lived on the East Coast for most of his life, teaching at Juilliard, Columbia and Bennington College from 1957 to 1980.
Besides teaching, he has also played jazz, wrote radio music and worked as an orchestrator-composer for film. All of it shows up in his serious music, he says.
"I've had advantages which few composers have had in the 20th century, because of the commercial work I've done. In films, all they said was 'our budget is such. You can have this much for music.' They don't tell you what the instruments are to be or what they shouldn't be."
He left teaching and his other pursuits behind when he moved to Santa Barbara in 1981. He and Wilkowski live in a woodsy Craftsman house on the city's west side, but this is hardly retirement for Brant. He has written a steady flow of new works in recent years.
It was nearly half a century ago that Brant discovered space. The concept goes back to Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli and early Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi. Charles Ives--one of Brant's heroes--also used it. His occasional compatriots in the field now include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Elliott Carter.
For Brant, the epiphany came in the form of the chamber piece "Antiphony 1" in 1953, when he separated five groups of musicians around a performance hall in New York, and got just the sort of three-dimensional sound he wanted.
