SONIC TRANSPORTS: GLENN BRANCA ESSAY, PART 1

“You can hear everything in a different way”

When a friend of mine returned from the 1982 New Music America Festival in Chicago, I asked him if he’d heard Glenn Branca’s ensemble. He said he’d missed the performance, but that John Cage had heard it and was dismayed by it, accusing the music of being “fascistic” and “evil.” That incident achieved a fair amount of notoriety, and by now it’s become something of an axiom, Cage Sez Branca “Fascist” – which doesn’t explain anything to anybody. And I’d like an explanation, because I find it very puzzling that someone as sharp as Cage should attack something as wonderful as this music. The only primary source I’ve come across for this flap is a cassette with an interview Cage gave the day after he heard Branca.[1] I’ll give some quotes from that, but first check out what Cage told a Chicago reporter almost two weeks after he taped that interview:

Branca had me shaking. I found myself responding in ways that brought me back to my ego. My feelings were disturbed. I recalled a piece composed by La Monte Young that was a recording at highest volume of a gong scraping on cement. But there had been a change. The gong is no longer a thing but a performance group. It was hard to take the conducting and the willingness on the part of 1,200 people to experience the same thing. I found in myself the willingness to connect the music with evil – with power. I don’t want such a power in my life.

Since I was concerned, I asked the people who were talking to me what they thought. I was brought back to my senses because a number of people said they were exhilarated by the music. One said he heard sounds he had never heard before. Ben Johnston said it was like looking through a microphone at a world I’ve never seen. One Belgian critic felt this was the next step, the seed of the 21st century.[2]

That’s a lot milder than his comments on the cassette, which only confirms what I was told by Peter Gena, co-director of the festival: “Unfortunately, people, the press, etc., blew the whole Cage-Branca thing way out of proportion. John actually felt that, a few days later, he may have acted too hastily. He changed his mind somewhat after talking to a few people and getting various other reactions.”[3] So the first thing to keep in mind is that The Axiom is in reality barely a hypothesis. As to how Cage’s hypothesis arose, my hypothesis is that he focused his attention on a single aspect of the performance and missed its essential character. That’s why I’m bothering to lift the teapot lid on this brouhaha, because it raises issues that actually help clarify the most attractive and important qualities of Branca’s music.

Cage’s objections centered on the situation of Branca bending an ensemble of musicians to his will:

I felt negatively about what seemed to me to be the political implications. I wouldn’t want to live in a society like that, in which someone would be requiring other people to do such an intense thing together […] I don’t think that the image of that power and intention and determination would make a society that I would want to continue living in […] If it was something political, it would resemble fascism […] I much prefer the thinking of Thoreau, of anarchy, of freedom from such intention.

Cage believes that something has gone wrong when musicians are gathered together solely to obey someone else, or when an audience is relentlessly manipulated by someone else. The denial of character and freedom strikes Cage as an unwholesome situation, and of course he’s right. After a certain point, it’s not interesting to sit still for a group of musicians all slaving away just to articulate one person’s thesis – that’s why Concert Music BC (Before Cage) can become so tiresome. Concert Music AC (Alongside Cage), when written with such a narrowness of purpose, eventually seems frustratingly thin and self-defeating, besides being reactionary. Why not seek out new musical methods for releasing character, and benefit from how it can alter composer, musician, and audience to experience freedom more meaningfully in their daily life?

That night in Chicago, Cage saw ten electric guitarists and one drummer reduced to a single super-instrument on which Branca banged away – sometimes following a predetermined course, sometimes improvising, always buffeting the audience with a gale of sound. And what Cage saw was most definitely there. But what Branca takes away with one hand, he gives back with the other, and this balance eluded Cage when he heard Branca’s music for the first (and only?) time. According to the NMA festival program, Branca played an excerpt from his Symphony No. 2. You can almost see the hackles bristling on Cage: Symphony! Europe! Orchestra as Army – ‘Greetings: March or Die.’ Perhaps Cage would have been more attuned to what was happening in the music if it had been represented correctly. What Branca actually played was Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses.[4]

Branca designed Indeterminate Activity to generate resultant tones so densely as “to be actually creating masses, and obviously this would have to be happening randomly. I couldn’t possibly have any control over it. All I could do was create a context for it to happen more often and more clearly. I was trying to bring this activity more into the foreground.” In playing the piece, the musicians sacrifice a large amount of self-determination for the opportunity to create music that has a fundamental independence from the egos of performers and composer. The most important artist who works in this same vein is John Cage, whose overriding concern has been to compose a music that’s free of his own tastes and memory. He’s achieved this in some pieces by giving the musicians varying performance freedoms; in other works, their job is to play the notated pitches. In either case, the musicians are obliged to follow scrupulously the instructions in his scores. But Cage can’t be accused of any triumph of his will, because the scores have been created with a non-intentional methodology, one that establishes parameters according to the results of chance operations. If the piece is realized successfully, the players also experience a release of no-mindedness – as does anyone who listens attentively to the music.

Indeterminate Activity works to achieve the same kind of release. It’s also a textbook example of Cage’s definition of experimental music: “an act the outcome of which is unknown.”[5] Part of its openness involves sections where the musicians enjoy some freedom of choice. “There are improvisational elements in the music: sections where I don’t specify exactly what note the musician has to play,” says Branca. “But that isn’t what I meant by indeterminate.” What he meant was the unleashing of acoustic phenomena that he could neither predict nor control.

The music of Indeterminate Activity is greater than the sum of the musicians’ parts. Branca erects aggregates of sound which seethe with harmonic and rhythmic activity – miniature worlds of overtones, beating, phasing, resultant tones, and who knows what else. This unprecedented music can become so rich and heady that it will open up literally into hallucination. And then his thunderously loud, intensely theatrical performances paradoxically release a strange, unexpected intimacy: You’re left alone inside the music, free to direct your attention where you will and to define for yourself what you’re experiencing.

That’s a long way away from compelling “1,200 people to experience the same thing,” yet all a hep cat like Cage saw that night was intentionality, and acted with an overwhelming power and intensity. That intentionality didn’t exist to the extent which Cage initially supposed, but the power sure as hell did. Cage legitimately insists that the volume didn’t disturb him – he can appreciate loud things, and has managed to raise the roof with some of his own pieces. Yet he said, “My knees were weak last night, after that experience. I had trouble standing, at the same time that I didn’t want to sit down.” I think what through Cage for a loop was not the volume but what was done at that volume: the very qualities that make Indeterminate Activity an exhilarating, mind-boggling blast, its visceral evocations of forward movement and ascent, of being spun and stretched.

The first time I heard Branca’s music was at a performance of Indeterminate Activity. I was standing right by the stage, and after it was over I glanced behind me: Was the crowd still there? Was anyone still in the city? They were there, and they looked just like the audience at “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks’ The Producers. I’m sure I was as open-mouthed as they were; we were all stunned by what had just happened. It simply didn’t square with anything we were used to experiencing or responding to. There was some brief, tentative applause from maybe a half-dozen people, and I threw in a clap or two myself – not so much because I felt I had liked it, but because I already knew I had to hear it again.

The music’s visceral flourishes represent a deliberate attempt to engage the listener on a non-intellectual level, a non-aesthetic level – on a gut level. The music seems to become something more than music: It’s a physical entity so unusual and so pervasive that you, like Branca onstage, can respond meaningfully only in an intuitive, unconditioned way. This may not be everyone’s cup of TNT, which is fine. But that’s no reason to assume that Branca is trying to terrify you into submission. The freedom in his music, its non-intentionality, depends completely on the listener’s willingness to take an active role. Branca once told an interviewer that, after “working with loud rock music, I became interested in volume itself.”

Q: You mean how scary it can become?

Branca: No! I mean the volume itself can be used as a compositional device.[6]

He goes on to discuss how volume can alter pitch and timbre, and how it can make available sounds that normally elude us. It’s precisely these alterations and revelations which demand an audience that’s willing to contribute to the music. And that’s why some people get nothing out of it: They don’t know how to listen if the music isn’t doing everything for them. Worse, some of us are so used to hearing conventionally that we refuse to admit the sounds hovering on the brink of perception. Which is a problem that greatly concerns Cage: “A very interesting sound might occur, but the ego wouldn’t even hear it because it didn’t fit its notion of likes and dislikes, its ideas and feelings. It becomes not only insensitive but, if you persist in annoying it, it will then put cotton in its ears. So if it isn’t sufficiently insensitive to the outside, it will cut itself off from possible experience.”[7] Branca was riding the same train when I spoke to him:

In my music, I was hearing things through the whole range, all the way from the bass up to the soprano and beyond […] I don’t know what it is. I’ve started thinking that what I’m hearing is simply a timbre, a timbral texture we’re not used to hearing. I think we’re hearing it all the time, in everything we listen to. But our ears are trained to put things in their places; that’s the way the mind works. It files away all the definitions of certain impulses, and when you get the impulse, it pulls out that definition and only that definition. We’re completely restricted to our own mental limitations, but there is so much more to hear than anyone could realize. I think our minds literally create a situation in which we do not hear some things that are going on […] We are physically capable of experiencing much more than we let ourselves experience […] Once you come to hear in a different way, you can hear everything in a different way. Not just my music; every other music – every other sound, getting into the whole Cageian point of view. You can perceive everything differently, potentially.

Branca was once asked if he was being ironic when he chose to represent the sound of an electric fan in one movement of his Symphony No. 1. His answer was the plain truth: “I think you’re underestimating the sound of the fan.”[8] When he and Barbara Ess edited the fascinating anthology record Just Another Asshole #5, they made sure to include several pieces that were essentially snippets of random environmental sounds.[9] Cage’s influence here is obvious, but these are more than just homages. It’s the recognition that no music has any greater claim on our attention than sound itself; that music is not better than sound; that the distinction between the two depends on how you listen, rather than on what you’re hearing.

At the conclusion of the cassette interview, Cage makes a beautiful statement: “To be able to move one’s attention from one point to another, without feeling that one had left something important behind, is the feeling which I enjoy having and which I hope to give to others. So that each person can place his attention originally rather than in a compelled way or in a constrained way. So that each person is in charge of himself.” Branca’s music points toward and encourages the attitude that Cage rightly values. I remember walking in Manhattan and being startled by a loud harsh noise that suddenly began screeching down at the end of the street, on the opposite corner. It repeatedly erupted into life, wailed away at a certain plateau, and then stopped dead. Everyone on its side of the street was crossing over to my side, trying to get away from it, and I found myself spontaneously heading toward it: a man with a power saw, slicing a large metal awning. I became fascinated by how attractive and rich the sound was, especially from its bouncing between the buildings of the narrow street, and hung around for the entire bifurcation.

I’ve caught myself in the same response with similar events, such as trucks delivering fuel, or the subways when they take certain curves. Every city dweller is exposed to such stimuli, and it’s a pleasure not to feel like a victim when they come along. There’s a real potential for healing in Branca’s assimilation of these disparaged sounds. He liberates them and offers us an opportunity to free ourselves from our conditioned negative responses. His music first invites the automatic responses and then purifies them, melting down fear into awe, distilling the joy within disturbed feelings. It can leave you with the understanding that that kernel resides within your confused responses in all situations, just as Branca insists that the music releases sounds that are hidden within all sounds. The strength and confidence and, yes, serenity which his music encourages can actually equip us not to be afraid.

FOOTNOTES

1. Chicago 82 – A Dip in the Lake. See Branca Discography in this book. All other quotations attributed to John Cage in this section, unless otherwise noted, are from this interview.

2. Thomas Willis, “Cheers, Mayor Byrne: You Are in Music History Books” in Chicago Sun-Times, 18 July 1982, Show Section, p. 20.

3. Letter from Peter Gena to the author, November 1982.

4. This gaffe is also one of the ironies that seem to infest Branca’s work: would that Branca had performed some of the Symphony No. 2 – there’s a serenity to its kaleidoscopic first movement, an Impressionist’s sense of wonder, which might well have appealed to Cage.

5. John Cage, “Experimental Music: Doctrine” in Silence. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961, p. 13.

6. Craig Bromberg, “Glenn Branca” in East Village Eye, February 1984, p. 14.

7. Nicole V. Gagné and Tracy Caras, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982, p. 79.

8. Bromberg, “Glenn Branca,” p. 14.

9. Bobby G, ”Excerpt from Times Sq. Show Audio”; Peggy Katz, “Grand Central Station”; Martha Wilson, [untitled]; Isa Genzken, “Salutations Roma.”

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 2

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on Glenn Branca, see:

Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers

Music: Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters