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.
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