SONIC TRANSPORTS: GLENN BRANCA ESSAY, PART 15

Anakalypsis Now

John Cage says, “One of the things I dislike most about European music is the presence of climaxes, and what I see in Branca, as in Wagner, is a sustained climax.”[1] If anything, Branca is an even bigger climax-monger than Wagner was. But I think his real spiritual ancestor in this regard is Anton Bruckner, whose symphonic climaxes stare right into the apocalypse – or more precisely the anakalypsis, “revealing the sacred object.”[2] Like certain of Bruckner’s symphonies, Branca’s music can sometimes pinch for me a peculiar twinge of revelation, the experience of something making itself known.[3]

Cage’s problem with the device of climax is that it’s exclusionary: It implies “that what is not it, is not climactic,” and so instead of opening up your attention, the climax constricts it. But this situation isn’t confined only to aesthetics: The closer you are to orgasm, the less concerned you are with anything else. Your attention has narrowed, but you’re also excluding your ego, along with the name, rank, and service number which have been assigned it. I don’t believe that this fundamental biological sensation is wicked in itself, or that experiencing it makes us more thick-skinned and uncomprehending. To deny that you have it, that we all share it, is to cut yourself off from its deconditioning potential.[4]

And to miss out on some jolly good fun too. If there’s one way in which Branca is the perfect Wagnerite, it’s in the eroticism of the sustained, sometimes multiple climaxes in his music. Frankly, I’m delighted by his forays into aural sex. The music itself is of course spectacular, but even if it wasn’t, I’d be impressed simply by his decision to incorporate it into his composition. Eroticism is a welcome component in any work of art, and I’m particularly pleased to hear it in music, where it’s too seldom found. But the music’s eroticism isn’t only in Branca’s sexual allusions; it’s part and parcel of the music’s characteristic feeling of desire. And that desire is the quintessential Romantic desire, the longing to be freed of everything, to experience some form of transpersonal consciousness. Branca’s music expresses this desire – and realizes it and makes it freely conscious – with all the extremity of orgasm. This guy doesn’t just want you to listen, he wants your ears, your head, your body, your ass – and he wants you to take his, until we’ve all disappeared into something greater than ourselves.

Branca’s sound may be a wall-of-sound sound, but if you face that wall, it reveals itself as a fantastic archway, the gaping mouth of an enormous hornlike shell, yawning vertiginously, infinitely back in the never-ending logarithmic spiral of the harmonic series. The saying goes, “If your head is in the clouds, keep your feet on the ground; if your feet are on the ground, keep your head in the clouds.” Branca’s visionary music explores and reflects and celebrates the mathematical organization of matter and energy. In their structures and their sound, his hallucinatory works follow the shape of life. He’s singing the song of the earth.

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 are from this interview.

2. Chris Cutler, File Under Popular. London: November, 1985, p. 107.

3. Thinking about Branca’s ensemble as an instrument on which he can improvise also reminds me of Bruckner, who was quite successful as an improviser on the organ. The image of Bruckner, lost in the ecstasies of performance, is very Branca-esque. But there’s no real influence here, because Branca wasn’t that familiar with the Bruckner symphonies when he wrote those pieces. He was familiar, however, with the music of Olivier Messiaen, who composed the four “symphonic meditations” for orchestra (originally for organ!), which he entitled The Ascension – of which the final movement, scored solely for strings, is subtitled “Prayer of Christ ascending to the Father.” Messiaen is also fond of massive crescendi and climaxes. Come to think of it, both he and Bruckner also go in for the hammer-blow effect, whether it’s certain Brucknerian scherzo movements (particularly that of his Symphony No. 9), or Saint Francis receiving the stigmata in Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise.

4. “Blue” Gene Tyranny says that the “accumulating, pyramiding structures that build and suddenly collapse and start again” of his Country Boy Country Dog Variations express “a form that, realized in material, can be oppressive, but when realized in time, such as in the building of feeling in sex, show that abstractions have to be traced back to their original experiential roots.”

5. Which includes, as Branca observed to Mark Dery in High Performance (No. 29, 1985, p. 51), “the masturbatory aspects of the guitar and a bunch of men up there, scraping guitars with their hands.”

Links to:

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

For more on Glenn Branca and Anton Bruckner, see:

More Cool Sites To Visit! – Music

For more on Anton Bruckner, see: