Meteor Farm: A Spatial Concert of Ceremonies constitutes the fourth volume in Innova's The Henry Brant Collection. As with several other Brant works, this 1982 work makes up the whole disc. Composed to a commission from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, this piece is scored for every ensemble and soloist available on campus in 1982. Three conductors lead two sopranos, two choruses, each retrofitted with their own complement of saxophones or flutes, orchestra, a section of "Wall Brass," two groups of percussion, steel drums, jazz band, Javanese Gamelan, West African drummers, and a South Indian Classical Trio -- did we leave anything out?
As one can imagine from such a massed ensemble, the sound of the piece is gargantuan and gigantic. Though not all of these groups necessarily play at once the whole time; naturally the music is spread around the various forces and all manner of combinations are used; the South Indian Trio, supplemented by one percussion group and part of the orchestra, go slam bang into the jazz band in the opening minutes. The choruses wail and scream, alternating with their high flutes and saxes sounding like amplifier feedback, the West African percussion trundles away, great yawps of sound leap forward from the brass. Amid this, there are moments of repose; eerie, spacey sounding music from the orchestra and achingly beautiful passages where the gamelan coalesces with choruses singing in unison.
Throughout there are many, many moments where you hear instrumental combinations that just make your jaw drop -- you have never heard that combination of sounds before because only Brant would dare try and combine them outside of an electronic music studio. As to whether this follows a program of some kind of logic is anyone's guess, although the trajectory of events is certainly plotted out, and does, in a way, follow a kind of order, here usefully divided by Innova into 17 reference points in coherence to the divisions in Brant's score. From the instrumentation alone, one might get the sense that Meteor Farm is a sort of composite built from the perspective of a pan-African-Asian-American collision of musical events, the ultimately politically correct "symphony of the universe," but it's not like that at all. It is a "concert of ceremonies," a sort of multi-tiered assemblage of ritual music that is both cathartic and more than a little menacing, rather like the effect of walking into the middle of a Haitian Voudoun ceremony by mistake.
Brant refused to explain the title Meteor Farm to those interested in divining its meaning; in response, he simply stated, "They have to grow someplace." Brant later unsuccessfully attempted to circulate a graphic of himself falling through space along with a Rototiller; this image is included in the CD booklet. One possible correspondence that comes to mind is with H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 story "The Colour Out of Space," in which a meteor lands on a rural American farm that gradually takes over the minds and bodies of its inhabitants; perhaps Brant himself had that effect on the musicians in Middletown, CT. One must be grateful to Innova for making such ultra-provocative and challenging works of Brant available on disc. Even among Brant's worklist, so crowded with pieces made for unimaginable combinations of instruments and instrumental groups, Meteor Farm is in a class of its own -- truly spectacular, but inspiring as much fear as awe. Rather than presenting the idealized vision of the world as a blend of international cultures all hand-in-hand, he has created a daring and honest vision of it as a noisy, threatening place.
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