Henry Brant's post-1945 compositions exemplify an expansive diversity of style, genre, form, texture, and timbre. From one composition to the next, and even within individual compositions, Brant employed a diverse range of musical devices. The resulting music possesses a purposeful lack of continuity, which challenges conventional modes of music discourse and thwarts efforts to support overarching conclusions. Although the existing scholarship on Brant's music focuses exclusively on his use of spatial dispersion of ensemble groups, the purpose of this dissertation is to find a strand of continuity beyond the spatial element that serves to unify Brant's mature output and clarify his unique compositional identity.

Brant's sketches reveal a common thread running through his mature works. For each composition, Brant uses a highly compartmentalized text-based planning system in which he lists the parameters for a series of musical blocks in a notebook, transfers them to separate cards, and then either composes each block and arranges them in score format ("prose-report composition"), or summarizes the parameters as instructions for improvising performers ("instant composition"). The sectional nature of these compositional processes manifests itself in the structure of the music. Each composition takes the form of a series of overlapping modular units. Each unit may contain a number of subunits, which form accumulating textures, canonic voice entrances, melody and accompaniment, alternations between two or more textures, or a series of related gestures. Overlapping units and subunits may coordinate in time, or relate in an approximate manner in which subsequent units/subunits enter on cue and proceed in a different tempo and/or meter. These structural elements serve to unify Brant's mature output and clarify his unique compositional identity in the absence of traditional commonalities.