Brant: Kingdom Come & Macinations

Album review

Played here by the Oakland Symphony Orchestra (Gerhard Samuel, conductor), and the Oakland Youth Orchestra (Robert Hughes, conductor) with Henry Brant on organ. Kingdom Come is a truly zany, tragi-comic and outrageous musical social commentary in the tradition of Brant's compositions that explore spatial distribution as a musical parameter. The stage orchestra is of normal symphonic instrumentation, but the instrumentation of the balcony orchestra is that of a circus band with slide clarinets, slide trumpets, slide whistles, sirens, klaxons, buzzers, electric bells, ratchets, air-compressors "and a soprano who impersonates a psychotic Valkyrie" (Brant). Thus the two orchestras function, or rather dysfunction as pathological states or beings -- the stage (symphonic) orchestra "celebrates life in the human pressure cooker" by playing stridently, in high tension and "expresses its anxieties in long frenzied phrases"; the mechanistic, compulsive balcony (circus) orchestra is the other side of this crazed, violent interchange. The scenario is predicted by the double meaning of the piece's title -- a society on speed mouths the Lord's Prayer ("Thy kingdom come ...") in hope of a peaceful existence, but their "circuits (are) blown to Kingdom Come" (the American slang expression) and eventually that's the fate of the whole scene. In "Machinations," all the instruments (timpani, chimes, zylophone, glockenspiel, organ, Eb flute, ceramic flute, double ocarina, double flageolet and harp) are played by the composer, and it is an example of Brant's "instant composing." The improvisations are expressively wild and free and the vari-speed manipulations are wonderfully disorienting.

© "Blue" Gene Tyranny /TiVo