Performing Arts

American avant-garde composer Henry Brant, who died April 26 at 94, was famous for compositions widely spacing separate groups of performers.

FILE 1999/The Associated Press

Henry Brant was an adventurous American composer best known for his spatial music.

He created one of his more extravagant spatial works, Prisons of the Mind, for the opening season of

the Meyerson Symphony Center.

Premiered in April 1990, it called for 314 performers scattered around the hall, even in the reverberance chambers hidden behind grilles at the front and upper sides of the room.

Led by the late James Rives Jones, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's resident conductor, the piece divided the DSO in two and added two brass bands, two steel-drum bands and two additional bands of winds, saxophones, brass and percussion.

"It was quite an extravaganza," recalls Victor Marshall, the DSO's veteran artistic administrator.

"We had steel bands up in the reverb chambers. We used some ensembles from UNT.

"We had sort of struck up a relationship with Brant. Jim Jones had conducted a couple of his works in the old Discovery Series at the Majestic Theatre."

Hard to imagine the DSO doing anything so daring these days.

The title alludes to the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose Imaginary Prisons engravings supposedly inspired architect I.M. Pei's design for the Meyerson lobbies.

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