On today’s date in 2001, the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas gave the first performance of a new work by the American composer Henry Brant. The new piece was entitled “Ice Field,” and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002, the year Brant turned 89.

The Pulitzer Prize was a major acknowledgment of five decades of work as one of America’s great experimental composers. In the 1950s, when he turned 40, Brant became fascinated with the possibilities inherent in spatial music—music that positioned various groups of performers in all the corners of performing space. Moreover, he felt his music should reflect a wide variety of musical styles as well. As Brant put it: “I had come to feel that single-style music… could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit.”

A 1984 composition entitled “Western Springs” is scored for a spatial ensemble of two orchestras, two choruses, and two jazz combos, comprising a grand total of about 200 musicians. Brant cites as his major model the earlier American composer Charles Ives, but also credits the experience of hearing in Paris a modern performance of the massive Requiem Mass of the extravagant French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz, who way back in the 19th century positioned an orchestra, brass choirs, and vocalists around a vast cathedral for a unique “surround sound” experience.