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Max Brand: “Stormy Sea” (1963)
From the album In Memoriam — Max Brand (1999)
Max Brand (1896-1980) was a classically-trained Austrian composer who late in life became an isolated pioneer of electronic music. He is not to be confused with the American author of the same name.
After military service in World War I, Brand studied composition with Franz Schreker and Alois Hába in Berlin. After returning to Vienna in 1924, he heard a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Wind Quintet, Op. 26, which inspired Brand to begin composing with the twelve-tone technique. He was the first composer outside of Schoenberg’s circle to do so.
The premiere of Brand’s Zeitoper Maschinist Hopkins (Hopkins the Engineer) in 1929 was a huge success, and the work was favorably compared to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.
In the early 1930s, Brand founded the Mimoplastisches Theater für Ballett and worked on music for experimental films, including a award-winning score for a film interpretation of Heinrich von Kleist’s early 19th-century play Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug). (This version should not be confused with the 1937 UFA version, for which Wolfgang Zeller provided the music.)
In anticipation of the coming annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Brand fled Vienna in 1937, arriving in New York in 1940 by way of Rio de Janeiro, where he met up with Heitor Villa-Lobos.
In the United States, Brand continued his involvement with music theater. His “scenic oratorio” The Gate was premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in 1944. Brand became an American citizen in 1945. Frustrated with the difficulty of obtaining performances of his music, Brand took an interest in electronic sound production around 1956. In the late 50s he set up a private electronic studio in New York with the technical assistance of Robert Moog. The unique apparatus that emerged over the course of a 10-year development (1957-67) represents one of Moog’s earliest original contributions to synthesizer technology. Known as the Max-Brand-Synthesizer, it is kept today in Max Brand Archive of the Vienna City Library.
Brand returned to Austria in 1975, but his studio equipment was badly damaged during transport. He died in 1980. His studio remains a center of activity for the Viennese electronic music scene.
Brand’s electronic work is diverse, ranging from the bruitist early work Notturno brasileiro (1959-60), which was perhaps an hommage to Villa-Lobos, to The Astronauts: an Epic in Electronics (1961), “a veritable paean to technological achievement” that featured recordings of the voice of John Glenn, to electronic accompaniments to advertisements reminiscent of Raymond Scott’s commercial work, to a commissioned piece meant to accompany a theatrical performance of Eugene Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, which Brand ultimately withdrew. ”Stormy Sea” is one of three pieces Brand composed for a multimedia presentation in New York in 1963.
Played 140 time(s).
May 14, 2010, 9:37am
