The Mutability Canto
What I found incredible about the Symphony No. 5 at its NYC premiere was its relatively anemic sound. Equally incredible was the fact that, toward the end of two weeks of performances, after much experimenting with the mix and the positioning of the speakers, Branca was getting some of the most potent results I’ve ever heard. And with these refinements, the symphony’s character changed drastically.
Branca gave thirteen performances at a large space known simply by its address, 512 West 19 Street.[1] At the premiere, the first movement, a descent into progressively lower registers, sounded merely formulaic. In reality, it was a fantastic reinvention of a postromantic adagio, charged with feeling, particularly toward its climax – that’s when the music was at its richest (= loudest), giving off brass, bassoons, soundtrack voices, even bagpipes this time. But its Mahlerian quality didn’t come clean until the far end of the 512 concert. A few months later, Symphony No. 5 had its last NYC airing at the club Irving Plaza, and the first movement just laid there like a wet pancake. That’s what can happen when you have 90 minutes of this kind of music, and you’re given only a few hours for a sound check. The good news is that Fortune’s wheel turns even during a gig: The visceral nosedive of the fourth movement blossomed spectacularly that night.
The second and third movements were just as mercurial. In the second Branca sounds over a dozen pleromas, socking out each one in a specific pulse before going on to the next. Each pleroma is different, but they all fall within a single, surrealistic timbral idiom, as though he were ringing one enormous bell after another. Coming after the dark first movement, the message was “Shut up and let’s dance!” And at the premiere, people will bopping in their seats. That night, both this and the third movement were mega-rock – boulder ‘n roll (especially the ass-kicking third, where a lot of the musicians went just plain apeshit). Later in the run, however, with the enrichment of the sound, this avalanche became less dancelike, almost stately: an obligatory symphonic minuet! The third movement also evolved into something less rocky and more scherzo-like – and at Irving Plaza, it opened out into a classic Branca gallop, one of his finest too, joyous and unstoppable.
To a degree, these transformations are my subjective responses: At Irving Plaza, the second movement sounded less rocky than ever to me, but afterwards I spotted Barbara Ess gleefully telling some friends, “People were dancing!” It’s tough to be objective about a music as profoundly mutable as Branca’s is. The mutability exists in its hallucinatory, open-ended sounds, but there’s also its capacity to release unconscious, deconditioned responses from listeners: “The music has the potential to generate a negative response from someone to feel bad at the same time it can make someone next to them feel good. That’s part of what’s interesting about the music. It has the potential to inspire what a person wants.”[2]
Another unpredictable factor in the music is Branca himself, the changes he undergoes from night to night: “I’ve set it up in such a way that I can kind of listen to the music a lot more […] A lot of the structures are open, which means I can develop them or not develop them, if I want. The more I listen, the more I can see what direction it’s starting to go in. This leaves the possibility for the music to evolve spontaneously.” And just to keep himself honest, he increases the music’s volatility by including events outside his control. The first movement of Symphony No. 5 has a Haydnesque surprise that would have awakened any snoozer within a five mile radius of Esterhaza: Instead of playing the drums, Stephan Wischerth stands off to one side, partially hidden, and at a fair distance into the movement, he slams a piece of metal with a sledgehammer – and you literally reel in your seat. (The hammer keeps that unsettling edge whenever it’s used in the movement; it always catches you off-guard, clanking with no overt relationship to the music’s descent.)
Everywhere Branca has taken Symphony No. 5, he’s scrunched his anvil from the space or its environs. At 512 the prospecting worked out great: A slab of metal was discovered in a corner of the room, and it gave what Branca felt was the best clank he’d ever gotten. But that anvil could be used only in that space; other gigs had to have their own. In Detroit it was a cast-iron manhole cover, and when Wischerth walloped it, it broke. And it kept on breaking the more he walloped it, until by the end of the movement he was striking out at any shard still big enough to hit.[3] In Philadelphia they used a metal brick of some kind; it did fine, but the sledgehammer broke, and so Wischerth was reduced to hitting it with the stick. Wasn’t quite the same…
The indeterminate anvil of Symphony No. 5 is a libation: Branca’s acknowledgement of the instability of sound, the integrity of space, and the limits of his own control. He’ll benefit by keeping this idea close to heart: If he’s to stay fresh and original as a composer, he needs to include materials that are free of his intentions, even if some performances wind up collapsing. He should be wary of the Brancayreuth trip – a permanent performance space would become a prison if he didn’t ruthlessly counterbalance its security. In the meantime, Branca has his hands full trying to counterbalance the peculiarities of the different spaces he plays. I think it was doubly hard for him to get the richest sound out of Symphony No. 5 because of all its electric guitars.[4] They make available sharp, biting attacks that he could never get from the lush, full sounding keyboards of Symphony No. 3. But the guitars also give him fewer open strings, making the music less hallucinatory, more earthbound. To my ears, Symphony No. 5 can sound surprisingly thin compared to Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3; but compared to most other musics, Symphony No. 5, heard at any venue, is like being caught in a meteor shower.
To take up the slack, Branca relies on loudness. Each movement of Symphony No. 5 gets louder, and it sounded to me like the plateaus of loudness increased over the course of the symphony. I asked him if all seven movements were scored like the fifth one, in an expanding shape that indicated a crescendo. He said no, with at least one of them “there’s no reason for it to get louder, but it just keeps getting louder.” The reason may be that the movements are usually the most exciting and beautiful when they’re at their loudest; the guitars seem to require intense amplification to release more of the sound that makes his music so special.
The fifth movement is a perfect example. In fact, it’s an excellent cross-section of the entire symphony – of the composer too, for that matter: It’s audacious and completely original; it’s also long-winded and didactic; and it can become transcendentally beautiful. Branca opens by soloing on his Harmonics Guitar, a six-foot-long slab with strings, played with a slide bar and a pick; a mic is positioned to pick up only the partials, not the fundamentals that are strummed. As he plays, harmonics are sounded in increasing density and richness, until they fill the space in a mysterious, shimmering haze. (Another beauty of his solo is that it’s a duo: Branca’s playing is shaded with metallic washes from Wischerth’s quiet, near-subliminal cymbal-beating.)
Branca attaches great importance to this movement, making it the focus of his program notes for Symphony No. 5; it’s everybody’s chance to realize that “the language of number is music.”[5] The problem is, this intervallic interlude seems hopelessly out of place in the middle of his volcanic symphony. He always plays this movement immediately after an intermission, which ironically makes matters worse. Where he to go right into it from the fourth movement, you’d be compelled to recognize his argument that this ice fuels the fire that fuels the symphony; that the shape of the harmonic series is The Idea that underlies all sonic structures. As an independent piece, perhaps played with some of his other short works, this movement could be even more persuasive. Coming after the intermission, however, it tends to leave audiences wondering, ‘When’s the music going to start again?’
As the movement traces the rise and fall of the score’s beehive shapes, it becomes a series of descents and ascensions, generating cadencing effects at the vertical poles between hives. Later, as the density increases, cadences also occur at the poles within hives. Some of these poles are very attractive, harmonically and timbrally, especially with the steady increase in volume. The last pole brings in the entire ensemble – it’s EXTREMELY LOUD and absolutely breathtaking, a miniature universe of sound. Branca swells out this pleroma, striving for the emotional release promised by the movement’s austerity. You could see it on him at the climax: Down on one knee before the Harmonics Guitar, strumming into a frenzy. Yet none of the 512 gigs I saw had a completely successful finale for this movement. Branca couldn’t sustain that intensity or push it into something equally compelling – it would just dissipate into stridency. In a curious replay of his struggles with the end of Symphony No. 3, it was only at his last performance that he really brought it all home. At Irving Plaza, he held the last Big Loud longer than ever, and it flowered into a series of exfoliating musics. According to Branca, this transformation was a harmonic shift that occurs solely from the interaction of the huge amount of amplified partials: “There’s a battle going on, basically, between which modes are going to be dominant […] One mode became dominant, and all of the pieces just fell into place in relationship to that one mode.” The pleroma was simply unearthly: a million silver anvils, which slowly flattened out and suddenly imploded into a vocal unison.
FOOTNOTES
1. Now the home of NYC’s perennial new-music performance space, The Kitchen.
2. Craig Bromberg, “Glenn Branca” in East Village Eye, February 1984, p. 15.
3. As usual, the audience remained enthusiastic: Afterwards, somebody came up to Wischerth with a fragment of the manhole and had him autograph it.
4. Symphony No. 5 uses two keyboards built for Symphony No. 3, a retuned Hohner clavinet, an electric organ that’s been completely rewired, mallet guitar, Harmonics Guitar, bass, five electric guitars, and drums, natch.
5. Branca’s program notes to his Symphony No. 5.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 14
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 