The humor that is present on nearly every page of this uproarious chamber work flows naturally from the spirit of Canadian-born American composer Henry Brant (his parents were Americans living in Montreal), but there is a social and historical reason for its presence, particularly in music of the first couple of decades of his career.

Brant, who was born in 1913 and educated at Montreal's McGill Conservatorium, the New York Institute of Musical Art and the Juilliard School, started his career in the 1930s. Although the decade or so of high experimentalism of the 1920s was then ringing in the ears of students of his generation, the leaders of that musical revolution had, by and large, drawn back from their most radical work in the 1930s.

But Brant observed that you could still get away with strong dissonance and other forms of musical radicalism if you made it part of a joke, satirizing street and popular music and indulging in fake nostalgia.

When Brant wrote this work in 1949 he indulged in his penchant for strange, even bizarre, orchestration. He was only a couple of years away from finding the most definitive element of his own style and his major historical contribution to the art, the spatial element. His interest in sonority for its own sake, his exposure as a teacher and class ensemble conductor to music of Ives and Gabrieli, and his experience of a performance of Berlioz's Requiem alerted him to the possibilities of making spatial separation a key element in musical structure, and he became the leading pioneer of that idea.

The scoring of this work, whose instrumentation has shifted over the years. In its most definitive form, a recording made for 1994 release by Newport Classics, Brant's unwillingness to sit by and listen to others play his music resulted in him adding a new part to the score for himself to play glockenspiel, xylophone, cowbell, and keyboard mouth organ.

The music is a bright, even garish, depiction of festivities of the Catholic observance of All Souls Day, Nov. 2 (usually), or The Day of the Dead as it is known in Mexico. It is in six movements, and takes nearly sixteen minutes to play.

The Overture begins with a hilarious and very busy opening texture, circus-like in character, and metamorphoses into a near-tango among numerous parodied styles. Questions, though, is a delicate work with a chorale-like texture that turns into a Blues. Intermittent Explosions must depict firecrackers, which burst in staccato chords against a trivial dance-tune harmonized in humorous "wrong-note" style. The orchestration here strongly hints at Mexican music at times. Outside and Inside is another pensive movement, making its mark by contrasting two textures harshly. Wheels, naturally, bustles and turns, while the Finale mock-innocently skips its way to the conclusion.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide