The Vinyl Straitjacket
In the fall of 1981, not long after the release of The Ascension, Branca and Joshua Baer formed Neutral Records: “a vehicle to get out some of the music that usually isn’t heard.”[1] One thing they wanted people to hear was Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses, Branca’s most extreme exploration of the visceral music he had he unearthed in The Ascension and Symphony No. 1. But Indeterminate Activity, while it may be one of Branca’s strongest pieces, also tends to be his problem child. (John Cage’s problem with it is only one of its problems for Branca.) The piece was also something of a dead end, taking Branca about as far as he could go, composing strictly for electric guitars. Cutting further into this jungle meant coming up with his own instruments, and his next major work would be the mallet-guitar-powered Symphony No. 2 (1982). But Indeterminate Activity stonewalled him more problematically when he took it into the recording studio: “We did a 24-track recording which has been shelved. It just does not come across […] It just seems like there are some things that absolutely refuse to get on the tape.“[2]
I’d be inclined to agree with him judging from the ROIR cassette of Symphony No. 1 – what sounds least impressive is the most visceral music, the third movement. But from listening to a cassette recording of Symphony No. 2, I’m persuaded that this music can come across outside of live performance. I hope Branca one day makes at least some of this tape generally available, because it’s the most successful recording I’ve heard of his work. The visceral sections may not be all there, but they’re almost all there – a lot more there than comparable stuff in Symphony No. 1. And the rest of Symphony No. 2 is all there, sounding as otherworldly and hallucinatory as it did live.
This improvement is at least partially due to the change in instruments: Symphony No. 2 uses mallet guitars, three-tiered variations of guitar bodies, where the strings are hammered with drumsticks (or bowed, strummed, etc.). Branca uses a couple of them in his later symphonies, but they’re the blood and bone of Symphony No. 2. “The reason I developed the mallet guitars was because I wanted to work with open strings. If I want a guitarist to play open strings, he has six strings to work with. With the mallet guitars, each instrument contained thirty to fifty open strings.”
In sound and performance technique, the mallet guitars are more like the keyboards for Symphony No. 3 than like electric guitars. Yet recording Symphony No. 3 was for Branca another exercise in futility: “The record was totally predictable to me. It was so predictable, I was shocked. It was exactly what I thought was going to get on the tape. I couldn’t believe it.” The Neutral LP is an official disappointment because it doesn’t manage to be the live Symphony No. 3. And if you heard that mother in concert, listening to the record can at times make you feel like you’re peering through the wrong end of a telescope. But the music’s subtlety and complexity is by and large intact on disk, if you listen at a healthy volume. Even the visceral impact can be partially regained if you sidle up close to your speakers. More importantly, Symphony No. 3 was improved by its transition to disc, thanks to Branca’s editing: The record is a more purposeful and effective work than what was performed in concert.[3]
Despite all his grousing about the way his music sounds on records, Branca once admitted to me that “it all gets on tape.” As Symphony No. 2 demonstrates, a tape can re-create the effect this music has live. In concert, Branca is “saturating the physical space with sound. The room starts to become a sounding box, like the body of a guitar. There are certain things, resonances, that you’re really not going to hear if the room isn’t filled.”[4] For a record to release those sounds, it has to be heard at a comparable volume: “There was a time at the Mudd Club a few years ago when we were going to play, and the curtain was drawn so nobody could see us […] The DJ put on Structure from the Ascension record and played it at a normal club volume through the PA […] And when the piece ended, the crowd applauded – they thought it was us. So you can take the records and play them on a PA at stage volume, and they’ll sound all right, they’ll sound live.”[5] I was at that set, and he’s right – I remember my surprise when I saw that no one had been playing back there.
But not many of us have that kind of sound system at home. If Branca is ever going to achieve maximum impact on disc, the music will have to be created within the studio specifically for that medium. The pieces discussed above were all intended for live performance – “that’s the one reason I have such difficulty recording the stuff. It’s not about recording at all.”[6] So far, the only work Branca has made specifically for a recording is his music for Twyla Tharp’s dance Bad Smells. It’s the Branca piece which, on disk, sounds most like itself. The catch is, it sounds more like itself than it sounds like Branca: “The entire dance was written and rehearsed before I even started writing the music. I went to a few rehearsals, then I went to see it when it was completely finished and wrote the piece.” Tharp had been working with her dancers to a tape she’s described as “a rough mix that included some of his Branca’s music, some Peter Gordon, some factory sounds […] I’d given him this horrid, scratched tape and said, ‘Now, this is the length, this is the texture and this is the feel and this is the meter, now go off and write it.’ He brought it back in a couple of weeks and it was perfect.”[7]
Judging from what she got, the sound Tharp had in mind when she commissioned Branca was not the unprecedented elemental music of Indeterminate Activity. Which must have been OK with him, still on the rebound from the relative fiasco of his recording of The Ascension, and just discovering how little of Indeterminate Activity was getting on tape. In making his score for Bad Smells, Branca tended to restrict the electric guitars to rock gestures that he knew would come across. He was probably thinking of how the rocky Spectacular Commodity sounded much better on disc than the largely unrocky Ascension did: “It doesn’t have that kind of density, it’s more closely related to conventional rock structure. So it came off best, and that’s the one people like,” he says with a resigned shrug.
Following Tharp’s game plan, he produced a six-movement score that is, on the whole, a disappointing reworking of old formulae. (It really sounds like a retrenching when you consider it slung between the explorations of Indeterminate Activity and Symphony No. 2.) But the score is still an essential part of the Branca mosaic because of its intermittent gentleness. He has an annoying tendency of neglecting the low-decibel strengths of his music – when I think of how the geigenwerk of the Symphony No. 3, which can create such unbelievable washes of sound, is just lying somewhere in storage, I want to scream. (Even Branca has confessed to me his regret over not having taken it further – maybe there’s still hope…) But in this dance score, he includes several passages of quiet timbre painting with the electric guitars, where he completely outdoes himself. They may not go much beyond Impressionistic effects, but at least they’re there, and with a captivating beauty that’s unique in his recorded music – it’s very promising for the kind of surprises he could devise if he were to create an album of guitar pieces. (He’s told me he wants to do a cover of The Beatles’ “Within You Without You”!)
The score covers a range of techniques, but it’s these gentle reflective moments that truly stand out. Despite its hot, driving intro, part one is strongest in its ending, when a lovely, high-voiced texture is released and soars on into part two. There, Branca strives for the effect of a Beethovenesque gallop, and this shimmering sound is as close as the music gets to that joyous energy. The introduction to part three is a calm cloud of sound, extraordinarily vocal sounding, as though a chorus had materialized into the music. Then Branca tops the effect by bringing back that dazzling texture and throwing it into high relief.
Part three is perhaps the most completely successful movement: a racing ascension in pitch, which climaxes in a lovely pair of cadences. All old business, but it’s done here with a new elegance and precision. Unfortunately, everything is so speeded up that the cadencing can never approach the beauty of Symphony No. 3’s conclusion. But this music wasn’t created to express itself; the last thing Branca could do was condense the ending of part two and take that extra time to develop the cadences of part three. If he’d had the opportunity to refine this piece in live performances, I suspect he could have avoided its most serious lulls. (It certainly managed to sound lively at its NYC concert premiere.) Light Field and The Spectacular Commodity had punched in some time in live gigs, and when Branca got around to recording them, he had a meticulous feeling for how long he could effectively sustain different gestures.
The commission’s restrictions eventually take their toll, and Branca’s 16’25” score is frequently tiresome and garrulous. Later in part two, the music pushes into a somewhat faster tempo, becoming timbrally more rich than ever, but from there it goes into some relatively modest chord statements and then meanders to a close. Chord-pounding creates a beautiful sense of release in The Spectacular Commodity, where the build up to it is impeccable. Here, Branca is just padding himself a mattress on Tharp’s procrustean bed.
His score sags most in its second half, despite the rather lively rockisms of part four. There are still some nuggets, most notably the breathtaking cloud of sound that arises in part five. The movement opens with a series of dissonant chords, but this hazy quiescence silences them. Its effect is unmistakably vocal, as in part three, but now the textures are heightened into something orchestral as well. Yet both qualities sound distinctly natural, like a recording of some nocturnal landscape. The music suggests a timeless suspended state, one that paradoxically seems to teem with energy and life. He’d take this sensation even further in Symphony No. 3, but not with the simplicity and calm.
This bubble bursts with the abrupt return of the chords; after all, Tharp wasn’t really interested in that sort of stuff: “Bad Smells is about the fact that no two people can get together […] There’s not even the possibility that they’ll get close enough to even begin to grow together, let alone develop and mature together.”[8] Her choreographing of this idea is like Samuel Beckett’s Play as staged by George Miller: The spotlight and stationary speakers are accelerated into a video camera and wordless, post-apocalyptic dancers. The lurid and brutal dancing largely ignores the delicacies in Branca’s score, although there is a wonderful moment when one of the men casts a slack-jawed glance upward, searching for the lovely bell-like guitar tones that momentarily grace part five.[9]
Of course, no one has to hold a gun to Branca’s head to get him to use lurid and brutal materials. It’s what he does with them which makes his music so special. But here he doesn’t do more than take a wallow – especially in part six, where the score exploits abrasiveness rather than transcends it. There’s a malodorous suggestion of audience-baiting here, excessive even for Tharp’s program. If David Byrne created a Tharp score where he makes polite use of multiple guitar chords, then Branca will cook her up some guitar music that’s as impolite as possible. His Symphony No. 3 was Real Long and the loudest thing I’d ever heard him do, which on one level was his statement that The Bad Boy Of The Clubs hadn’t been tamed by his commission. With this piece, the length was predetermined, and Branca could have no control over the volume at which it would be played. (It’s to Tharp’s credit that, when she brought this dance to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she may not have played the tape LOUD, but she did play it Pretty Loud.) So he put the effrontery into the gestures themselves, stabbing at loud dissonant chords over and over again. And to add insult to injury, he saved it for the end: a little something to remember me by, folks!
The unpredictable jolts of the chords and the occasional pauses in the drumming make it impossible to get any sense of where – if anywhere – the music is headed. Wischerth’s stream of drumbeats gives no hint of a meter; the chords briefly punctuate it into a metric element, packaging out the pulsations into a 6, then 8, then 10, but even this minor stability disappears as the chords become more random-sounding. That’s why the finale is so ornery, because the chords never suggest that they’ll change or go somewhere. The music never ends, it just stops. In effect Branca has raised the shadow of his never-ending conclusions to Light Field and The Spectacular Commodity. Eventually the feeling becomes pretty nasty, especially in the context of Tharp’s choreography. Which is what disappoints me most about this score – baiting people is even easier than entertaining them; it’s also less interesting.
FOOTNOTES
1. Andy Paterson, “Glenn Branca” in Impulse No. 9, Spring 1982, p. 28. (The first Neutral releases were the bands Sonic Youth, Y Pants, and Red Decade.)
2. Glasses tend to be half-empty to Glenn – I’ll bet there’s actually some tremendous stuff on that recording.
3. Besides demonstrating how much of Branca’s sound can get onto vinyl, the record of Symphony No. 3 smashes another cliché: The music can be very porous. The drama of side two’s visceral passages could suffer from the distraction of ambient sounds, but the timbres and polyrhythms of side one’s pleromas are quite close to a lot of random natural and technological sound – it’s surprising how accommodating this music is to the sounds of insects or traffic or voices or planes.
4. David Orr, “Glenn Branca” in Terminal!, December 1985, p. 7.
5. Orr, “Glenn Branca,” p. 7.
6. Mark Dery, “Sometimes I Wished My Fist Was a Sledgehammer” in High Performance, No. 29, Spring 1985, page 53.
7. “Twyla Tharp” in New York Beat, January 1984, p. 20. (The tape also included music by Kraftwerk, David Byrne, and Grandmaster Flash.)
8. New York Beat, p. 20.
9. I’d trade all of Bad Smells for any excerpt from Elisa Monte’s dances Pigs and Fishes (choreographed to Structure and Lesson No. 1) or White Dragon (choreographed to Dissonance): They’re far more interesting and a whole lot hotter than Tharp’s gimmicky piece; closer to the spirit of Branca’s music too.
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 5
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 