“Gloria”
The Symphony No. 3 uses six keyboard instruments designed by Branca and built by David Quinlan; together, they encompass the intervals of the first seven octaves of the harmonic series. Five of them are like harpsichords, with picks that pluck the strings when the keys are depressed; the sixth has small leather wheels, turned by a motor, which rub the strings.[1] Each of the keyboards has a bar that goes across the middle nodes of the strings. Pressing a key attacks the string on one side of the bar; pick-ups amplify the partials released as the other section of the string vibrates. And to make things even more lively for Symphony No. 3, Branca included a bass, three mallet guitars, and the drums of the one and only Stephan Wischerth.
Branca dedicated Symphony No. 3 to Dane Rudhyar, in part to acknowledge his explication of the harmonic series in The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. But Branca also found a second, equally potent idea in Rudhyar’s book. Rudhyar had drawn an uncanny bead on what Branca had been doing for years, in “his idea of resonance and his ideas of pleromas of sound; he speaks about this all through the book,” says Branca. “It was the first time I came across anyone who talked about what I was hearing, and talked about it in a way that seemed far advanced of anything that I had thought about it. Certainly the idea of it being not just a physical phenomenon, but part of a psychic phenomenon, was something that for me had been vaguely back there. And he articulated it.”
Rudhyar defines a pleroma as “the interaction and interpenetration of a multiplicity of relationships.”[2] “Differentiated vibratory entities,” each with its own character and complexity, interact “to release a particular aspect of the resonance inherent in the whole of the musical space.” Pleromas “have musical meaning in the total resonance they induce […] not only in the ears of a listener but in his or her psyche – far more than in the component notes and their precise frequencies.” Meaning the event you hear is more than the ‘objective’ sum of its parts. A pleroma “has its own principle of organization, which determines the tone of the pleroma […] Each of the particularized and limited pleromas has its own character, and its holistic emanation (tone) is meant by the composer (consciously or not) to fulfill a particular need. The need may be personal, social, or cultural, or it may be transpersonal – the need for the psychic transformation of the composer or the listeners in a concert-hall or ritualized situation.”
Branca’s earlier pieces had approached these visionary qualities, but his Symphony No. 3 articulates them more clearly and intensely than anything he’d done before. His symphony surveys a multitude of chords, but those chords aren’t just chords anymore; most are richer and weirder than any chords anybody’s played or heard, ever. Sometimes Branca holds on to one and twists it into a wild rhythmic dense or a visceral gale or waves of cadences. With the scale of Symphony No. 3, these plateaus take on the aspect of individual movements, but fundamentally they’re steps taken in a never-ending progression: Branca’s long hard climb toward pleroma-composing.
For the first half of Side One, just under eleven minutes, Symphony No. 3 moves through three dozen pleromas, ascending through extraordinary panoramas of sound. The first six, Branca explains, “were randomly determined: I simply sat at the keyboard and put my hands anywhere I wanted. Then I made a number of random tapes from that and chose the sections I liked. It wasn’t mathematically pure ‘randomness’ – I did have ideas about moving in a certain kind of opposition, there were compositional ideas in my mind when I was improvising. With the improvised chords, there’s a silence between every single chord. Then there’s another silence and you hear the triad, and after that triad there’s never a stop in the chord series, there’s never a silence or a space. […] We’re no longer perceiving specific chord changes, we’re just hearing the entrance of tone.” This triad is a premeditated dazzler, sounded with a weight and fullness unheard to that point – the only reasonable way to announce the first step in Symphony No. 3’s representation of the harmonic series. Its orchestral, almost organlike resonance is the first flexing of the new keyboards’ muscles, and after this reminder of the music’s capacity to be monumental, Symphony No. 3 never looks back. Instead, Branca immediately tops himself, and in the next pleroma you can hear high ringing tones, a surrealistic blend of violin and bell timbres, shimmering above the rest of the music. These sounds can be heard at various moments throughout Symphony No. 3. No musician is directly playing them, they’re just there, arising from the interaction of the instruments. (Sitting in the balcony at BAM, you could hear them flitting over your head like insects attracted by light, flurrying with no overt relation to the rhythmic activity on the stage below.)
In their variety and beauty, the 36 Steps that begin Symphony No. 3 completely eclipse any other Branca recording. Then he gets to number 37, and completely eclipses everything he’s just played. The music has reached the 32nd harmonic, “which is very high up,” comments Branca. “I then come back down again by a different means. Instead of doing those chords backwards, I simply start introducing basically all of the tones of the series, which I have in the first seven octaves, until we’re getting quite a few harmonics all sounding at the same time. I also let everything that’s supposed to exist in the high range come in, so on our way down we collect everything that was there before. And I slowly bring it back down in range, sliding the range down, rather than breaking things up in a chord-series fashion.” This pleroma is sustained for a little over twelve minutes, and in that time its character continuously changes. It begins life as a Disneyland anvil forest, high and metallic and pointillistic. He sticks with this new landscape, letting us get familiar with an atmosphere he so obviously loves. And his enthusiasm is totally infectious, because this passage is genuinely charming. (An adjective not ordinarily loved at his music, but you gotta call them like you see them.) In its glistening spirit and its strange geographical quality, the only music that compares to it is the finale of Eskimo. Unlike The Residents, however, there is no distance or role-playing; Branca feels this and wants to sing it, and that he can and does is truly wonderful.
As this pleroma continues to burn, its timbres become more vocal, with crescendoing tones somehow wrapped in echo. Branca lets the drumming of the keyboards gradually slow down, and as the lines pull apart, various sustained tones arise. If sound was matter, I’d say he was putting it under a microscope and letting us enter one of its atoms. Weird voices in a range of registers appear and vanish in an ever-expanding world until Branca brings in the bass. It’s just one oscillating tone, more a registral presence than a musical line, but he rivets your attention with it. As much as I love the introduction of the ascending bass line in the first movement of Symphony No. 2, I find this moment even more amazing: with simpler materials, he achieves virtually the same sensation of beauty and wonder. (And at BAM, you didn’t just hear that bass, you felt it, vibrating in your sternum.)
And once you’re held fast, Stefan Wischerth comes rolling in, buoyed by an organlike timbre and weight in the pleroma. His drumming becomes a celebration of the sound, a rhythmic elaboration of what Rudhyar calls the pleroma’s tone. There’s a genuine sublimity to this passage: Branca’s is the only music I’ve heard which can express the energy and engagement and joy released in certain works by Beethoven. Since Beethoven, concert music never again touched that nerve so cleanly – there’s always been some additional element of ambiguity or posturing. Branca has reinvented that sensation, rivaling Beethoven’s intensity and purity of conviction without imitating The Master’s sound.
Branca can however lapse into an unBeethovenlike logorrhea if he isn’t careful. Fortunately, none of Symphony No. 3’s verbosity made it on to the record – and by this particular point into the piece, Branca’s sense of timing was at its most precise and expressive. Wischerth toboggans through an ecstatic kaleidoscope of phantom brass and buzzing factories, and when it’s time, Branca smoothly brings us out, building up the harmonic complexity and fading down the drums. As the pleroma grows more dissonant and dense, it becomes even more hallucinatory, discharging rubbings and low scrapings and auto horns and the remote textures of old soundtracks. (Play this chunk of Symphony No. 3 cold for people and ask them what they’re listening to – you’ll get some very interesting responses.) The density finally collapses into a clot of squalling auto-horn voices, and then into silence. “The very, very last sustained chord,” says Branca, “is actually similar to one of the first chords, because I simply pulled a few things out randomly, and let whatever chord that happened to exist now exist at the end.”
A lot of these final sounds, considered conventionally, are ugly, but if there’s anything that’s unconventional, it’s this music. There’s no sensation of traveling from something joyous to something creepy in this transition from consonance to dissonance. Branca holds onto these sounds as intently as he held onto their predecessor, their origin, and he binds them to that pleasure and enthusiasm. His music is an attempt to free us from our limited, conditioned responses to sound, and the visceral passages of Side Two run wondrously amok with this idea.
Side Two begins with a series of rapid changes, going through 18 different pleromas in less than five minutes. From the fifth on, Branca hits at and then withdraws a visceral intensity, and these opening gestures are the music most compromised by being on disc: They’re a shade too subtle and restrained to work on vinyl. Off and on in the next ten pleromas, the record gives you the sound of flying in an airplane (vintage World War Two; there’s a wonderful movie soundtrack tint to it). But it never feels like it. Similarly, the sixteenth pleroma is like a recording of great gongs being struck wildly and an enormous hall – hearing that music live was being in that hall. But Pleroma 19 is an out and out roller coaster, wild enough to largely survive the canning process. Dancing on the roar of that wind are all sorts of gestures and noises, some of which sound amazingly like animal cries. Then Branca jacks up the volume and REALLY lets you have it, and even on disk it’s a shocker. You’re sucked into that gale in a superb visceral topple, all the more beautiful for Wischerth’s frenzied accompaniment.
Branca then sounds too fast, low-registered roars, a pair of lacerating blows louder than anything else going on, and for a moment it sounds like the music is revving up for a further leap into the void. Instead, he tears at more of them, splitting open the visceral rush for a quite loud but very thinly textured pleroma, one short enough to keep you unsure if the ride has really ended. The next one is quieter, but he doesn’t let you off the hook yet; wickedly, he plays with the dynamics, feinting at crescendi like a kid toying with the volume knob. He finally backs off, sounding one lone voice, and after all that activity it really grabs your attention. It also works beautifully in contrast with the next pleroma, which harmonically and timbrally has a peculiarly jazzy edge to it. A fleeting splash of Wischerth’s drums reinforces this bizarre image, but before you can begin to scrutinize it, you’re pulled through more activity, only to be halted by the return of the roars. They come one after another, faster and faster, and Branca’s insistence melts down these harsh and startling sounds into giant autoharps, brushing a frantic dance pulse around Wischerth’s driving beat.[3]
Branca seamlessly rolls out of this ecstatic dance and into a crescendoing pleroma that crackles with Wischerth’s hot drumming. The first part of the second section goes through ten pleromas, with the fourth a standout, quiet and environmental, like a sound you’d hear late at night – two distant trucks driving down a highway? rock music blasting from a faraway radio? He slowly fades this one out as he sounds other pleromas, creating a lovely multi-intentioned music. The tenth is a knockout, relatively quiet but very dense and active, filled with cross rhythms and dissonant harmonies and strange hallucinatory events. But even here you can sense his defensiveness over quieting down, because he’s using it more dramatically than musically – it’s a set-up, so we can be doubly shocked by a sudden roar. Yes, they’re back, and in a fear atmosphere where pleromas become the turmoil left in the wake of each roar: Some are recoils, with very busy sirenlike tones and crescendoed drumrolls; others are lone oscillating voices, like distant alarms signaling an approaching invader. All, memorably, are thin enough for you to hear some of the detail of each roar’s aftershock.
Branca caps this third section by bringing the fear to life: The roars come raining down in a torrent, louder than ever. He stays with this for more than a full minute and works that ol’ white magic on it. A moment ago that gesture was a lurid menace, yet now when it’s multiplied insanely, it becomes incredibly beautiful, a cascade of sound unlike anything you’ve ever heard. This unimaginable moment is the only thing that could climax all that had gone on before. It’s also the transcendental side of Branca’s emotional structure: If you completely, totally, truly hammer that table, both the table and you disappear – “Knock and the door shall be opened.” After the sound has stopped, the air still seems to vibrate with energy. Even on disk, the effect is, in every sense of the word, fantastic.
Branca-wise, too much is rarely enough, and Symphony No. 3 takes one last turn, an epilogue where Branca keeps on restating a simple cadence. With each question and answer he redistributes the weight and voices of the pleromas, stretching their durations to create some of the richest and most memorable timbre painting of the entire piece. Everything’s kaleidoscopically there: bells, static, harmonicas, factories, voices (solo and choral), horns (French and auto). Curiously, this was one of the hardest passages for Branca to realize properly in performance: Either he’d rush through it, or he’d handle the cadences so tentatively that he’d undercut their impact. With the final concert (the performance on the record), he was sufficiently relaxed and on top of things to think about nothing but sculpting the radiance and calm of each individual swing of the pendulum. In the penultimate pair he extends the first’s inhalation until the music threatens to hyperventilate and flip over backwards into another visceral seizure. But Branca takes in this enormous breath only to let it out more beautifully than ever. He really extinguishes that flame and concludes with a zoom in on a last, brief, quiet pair – a dying ember where the question is momentarily restated only to go out into the answer, and take us along with it.
FOOTNOTES
1. This instrument, dubbed a “geigenwerk” by Quinlan, can create quiet, haunting clouds of color. For the performances of Symphony No. 3, also Branca used it convocationally, having it played as the last audience members entered. At the last two performances, it was also the backdrop for his readings from The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music.
2. Dane Rudhyar, The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music. Boulder: Shambhala, 1982, pp. 139–140, 142, 145.
3. It’s dance music all right: The gentleman conducting a BAM was sure enough doing the Branca Twist to it.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 11
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on Glenn Branca, see:
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers
Music Lecture: The Secret of 20th-Century American Music
Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…
Music: SFCR Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 