Dem Bones

A spaced-out premiere

The scene at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco was vaguely surreal. In the pews was an audience of 1,500, sedate as any churchgoers. Ranged about them in a huge semicircle was a gleaming array of 80 trombonists, as if a parade had lost its way and sought sanctuary.

But when the music began, the sound was a far cry from Sousa. Separated by staccato commentaries from the cathedral's pipe organ, densely dissonant sonorities clashed and blended over the listeners' heads. Full-throated blares, splintery muted phrases, the crooning tones of the soprano trombone, the rumble of its contrabass relative--all seemed to accelerate in a circular motion, spinning into the cathedral's 190-ft. cupola like an earthly echo of the music of the spheres.

The 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 sources."

The premiere of Orbits was one of his 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. But he wrote it, and it got played."

In 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."

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