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Home > Composers Datebook > Charles Ives and Henry Brant


	Podcast:		Composers Datebook
	Episode:		Charles Ives and Henry Brant
	Category:		Health
	Duration:		00:01:59
	Publish Date:		2018-06-16 00:00:00
	Description:		The American composer Henry Brant was famous for his avant-garde “spatial” music—works that require groups of musicians stationed at various points around a performance space. But hard-core film music buffs might also know Brant as the master orchestrator of other composers’ scores for some big Hollywood productions in the 1960s. On today’s date in 1995, Brant conducted the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa, Canada, in the premiere of one of his orchestrations—in this case, a symphonic version of the “Concord” Piano Sonata of Charles Ives, first published in 1920. In the long preface to his Sonata, Ives wrote: “The [Sonata] is an attempt to present [an] impression of the spirit of transcendentalism… associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts… undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality… found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.” Henry Brant had been profoundly influenced by Ives’s music long before he got to know the “Concord” Sonata, but when he did, Brant set to work orchestrating it. “I sensed that here, potentially, was a tremendous orchestral piece,” Brant wrote. “It seemed to me that the complete Sonata, in a symphonic orchestration, might well become the ‘Great American Symphony’ that we had been seeking for years… What better way to honor Ives.”
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