Henry Brant Collection
Documents on Henry Brant's "Textures and Timbres: An Orchestrator's Handbook"
Shortly before he died in 2008, Henry Brant completed the manuscript for Textures and Timbres: An Orchestrator's Handbook, which was published by Carl Fischer in New York in 2009. Until now, the Paul Sacher Foundation has kept a few notes for an orchestration book written from 1956 onwards. Extensive additions to the collection have now revealed that Henry Brant had already drawn up plans for such a handbook as early as the mid-1940s and had more specifically worked on the manuscript in the 1950s and 1960s. Around 1,200 pages of notes and drafts for this book project have survived from this period.
Brant earned his living in New York from the 1930s onwards, notably by composing for radio and film, and quickly gained a reputation as an excellent orchestrator. For example, his orchestration of Charles Ives' Concord Sonata, which he worked on for thirty years before completing it in 1995, proves that he did not regard this as routine work but as art in its own right.
From 1945, Brant taught composition and orchestration, first at Columbia University, then at the Juilliard School and finally at Bennington College until 1980. His teaching activities not only left their mark in the handbook; almost 100 pages of notes from his lessons with students have also been preserved, allowing for conclusions to be drawn regarding the genesis of the manuscript, as the composer also annotated some of these notes. Furthermore, around 500 pages of Henry Brant's drafts from the 1980s have been preserved; these precede the book's preparation through two revisions (approx. 850 pages) for publication in 1994. However, the final editing and printing did not begin until 2004, as evidenced by some 660 pages of documents. The documentation on the book project, totalling over 3,000 pages, reveals the changes in Henry Brant's understanding of an orchestration handbook over the course of sixty years.
Further information about the collection and contact to the curator Florian Besthorn