“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor”
In July of 1981, Branca gathered together the largest group of musicians he’d ever worked with. Fifteen players joined him at the Performing Garage in New York City, to premiere his new work, the Symphony No. 1.[1] Branca says he decided to call it that because “it seemed like a total absurdity to use that term.” It’s hard to argue with that – a packed crowd in a downtown performance space with a wall of blasting amplifiers, just another evening at the symphony fer shur. But deploying that word gave Branca resonances beyond self-deprecation and/or art-baiting. Too much of the listening had been refracted by the entertainment ethic of the clubs, so it was time to galvanize everyone’s attention with the new episode of Shock Theater: “I suppose it was a way of creating an event that would be more than just the concert […] Using that name became part of the piece, part of the whole idea of it, because it was going to affect the way people heard the music.” The catch is, that kind of pressure flows both ways. Using that name raised the ante for Branca as a composer – not because he was trying to squeeze on line between Brahms and Bruckner, but because he was presuming to tell everybody to really listen. And when you do that, you’d better have something for us to hear.
The gravity and the levity of Branca’s name game is beautifully summed up by the opening of the Symphony No. 1: “I based the first movement on the sound of my fan, which I listened to during the summer. I suppose what I was listening to at the time was harmonic activity. But I wasn’t thinking about that – I was just basing the piece on what I was hearing […] It was in a constant state of change, always developing, and depending on my concentration, it could develop in any number of ways.”[2] Branca’s symphony starts with a single tone, and he forges the fan sound by gradually bringing in one strumming electric guitar after another, inexorably building up a major chord that glows with the strange dense textures of the guitars. Then Wischerth lets loose on his powerhouse drums, and this rush of sound is propelled into a final thrilling shout (one that’s especially nifty for Branca’s fake-out faint at a decrescendo.)
The fan, Branca claims, “isn’t the first time I’ve had various aural hallucinations which I’ve made an attempt to get down on paper as a piece of music. But this was the first time I tried to get as close as possible to what I was actually hearing.”[3] Perhaps because he approached this movement as a rather deliberate re-creation, it seems more… real? May be familiar is a better word. The intro of Symphony No. 1 is wild because Branca does his filling in with much weirder goodies than Wagner ever dreamed of. But the first movement of his Symphony No. 3 is a lot wilder, because its goodies are a lot weirder, and they don’t dance to anyone else’s choreography. The new keyboards and unique tunings of Symphony No. 3 unleashed a sound so complex and rich that Branca could take almost twenty minutes before letting Wischerth go, and still not come off as long winded. Here Wischerth shows up after less than ten minutes, and it’s not a moment too soon.
In its second movement, Symphony No. 1 starts to induce hallucination, and it’s a lot more interesting than the description of hallucination which preceded it. Against the steady pulse, Branca creates a collage where instruments jump into the action, reiterate specific gestures, and drop out again, until they eventually pile up in a mighty traffic-jam finale. It’s a constantly metallic, constantly busy music that has been quite reasonably likened to a gamelan or the percussion music of Henry Cowell or John Cage.[4] But the most probable precedent being reflected here, I would guess, is Terry Riley’s In C.
Of course, this chunk of Symphony No. 1 is more conservative than Riley’s epoch-making piece is, because Branca controls which instruments are sounding when, cuing in the entrances of the musicians. And the gestures he collages are non-allusive and relatively simple rhythmically, so this music never approaches the anarchic heterogeneity of Charles Ives. But Branca is still dealing with non-intentionality, and in an extreme as potently radical as the best work of Riley and Ives. This part of his symphony becomes a radioactive version of what John Cage fondly calls “the mud of Ives”;[5] its hallucinatory density discharges a galaxy of unique sounds – vocal, industrial, orchestral… (I haven’t heard “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” in there yet, but I’m still listening.)
In the third movement, Branca attempts “to make a field of sound as deep and physical as possible.”[6] Now he’s taking to a new extreme one of his own innovations, the astounding visceral intensity of The Ascension. This movement is radically different from any other music in Symphony No. 1 – from any other music, period. Alas, it’s also the music that comes across least successfully on the ROIR cassette of the symphony. It reaches optimum effect on a Walkman at 10, but it’s still too disembodied for the real thing. If you know what this music can do and want to feel that experience again, a Walkman can bring to life the most powerful moments, such as the sudden acceleration about halfway through. But if you don’t know this music, I don’t see how the tape can bring it to you. Going just on this recording, the movement is an entirely different to aesthetic event: a ghostly ride on a whirlwind of guitars – which is not without its own beauty. A somewhat long-winded ride perhaps; but when you hear this music live, you become that whirlwind, and you don’t care if the ride never stops.
Musicians slam at oil drums with 2x4s to beat out the opening phrases of the fourth movement. It’s the most intense moment of Symphony No. 1, a perfect topper to the other three movements (at least on cassette – live, the third movement was probably unstoppable). From here, Branca erects the most exciting passage in the entire symphony: Whirring guitars fill in the violent percussion, other polyrhythmic instrumental industrialisms join in, dollops of Wischerth’s drumming are introduced – (Branca’s?) shouting, dimly audible in the fray, is the perfect fillip. The rhythms become more ferocious as some fiendish guitar noises start to take over, but then Branca unexpectedly reins in the din and starts to end the peace. “Now, in some pieces, I like very obvious, definitive endings. I wouldn’t say they’re tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a sense of humor about them, they’re so obviously endings.”[7] Symphony No. 1 really has a pig-out, triumphantly resurrecting the opening chord, mightier than ever, until the celebration spends itself and the chord collapses, trailing arcs of amplifier feedback, back into a single tone.
Branca based the opening of the fourth movement on a chunk of his Theoretical Girls song “You Got “Me”; it’s also the apotheosis of the sledgehammer-swinging Dissonance. More heavily metallic tactics would find their way into his later symphonies: Z’ev’s participation in Symphony No. 2; the sledgehammer of the first movement of Symphony No. 5. When queried about his penchant for this sort of thing, Branca said, “I found myself sitting at the kitchen table, and sometimes I wished my fist was a sledgehammer, and I found it working into one of my pieces. It’s as simple as that.”[8] Which leads us to something he calls “an emotional structure [… that] keeps finding its way into the work.”
In the finale of Symphony No. 5, the emotional structure is stated pure and simple. Branca’s sledgehammer fist begins as a chord sounded by four guitars, bass, and Clavinet. He cues in each instrument of the chord, usually starting with a surprising tentativeness, straining to hear it as fully as he can, waiting for his own inner cue to touch it again. The other musicians (on two keyboards, Harmonics Guitar, and mallet guitar) slowly raise up a cloud of sound as Branca works the chord, pounding it faster and faster until he’s whipped it into one vibrating mass. He slows back into individuated statements, and then suddenly brings the chord into monumental life, jacking up the volume and filling it in with Wischerth’s drums. Branca keeps on hammering the chord as Wischerth splits off into his own pulse, and the ensemble separates out with a wind-tunnel roar. Then Branca drops the chord and gets emotional with the roar, extending it into an achingly long upward glissando. When you think it has to have reached its limit, he crescendos some more; then the bambamming of the chord resumes, only now conducted by Wischerth – it’s his chance to get emotional (and I’ve seen him go a little nutz at this juncture). The ensemble finally collapses into one mighty mallet wielded by Branca: He jerks his double fists high over his head, wobbles precariously, and then crashes them down below his knees. He strikes blow after teetering below until he just can’t go any further period. Then he stops and walks off, and Symphony No. 5 is over.
Branca resists intellectualizing about the emotional structure; but in the lyrics of “You Got Me,” I think you can read some of its ideational side: “You got me / you got me / fragility / temporality / got a holda me / got a knife on me.” Beyond that, all he’ll say is that it’s “an intuitive process […] like pounding your fist on a table, then sighing and laying your head in your arms, then jerking up and pounding the table again.” Taken literally, he’s describing a very frustrated child. In his essay “Running Through the World Like an Open Razor,” the central ideas are the ego’s struggles against limitations and the childishness of adulthood: “We are limited. We are limitations.”[9] He writes that we survive in a chaotic, unknowable reality by dealing with only the limited things we create. “We are children who think we’ve grown up because […] we can do all the things grown-ups are supposed to do […] We are nothing but babies who can read and write and ‘think’ in abstract terms and get fat and wrinkled.”
One problem with such an attitude toward limitation is that its effect can be, well, limiting. “Razor” can become rather tiresome in this regard, insofar as Branca seems indignant that we have to sleep, eat, and shit. It’s typical of him that he can spiral down into a philosophical phunk like this, and at the same time insist on “the idea that there are no limitations.” Constantly colliding within Branca is his emotional and spiritual refusal to accept undeniable intellectual and physical realities – an irresistible Yes hammering away at an immovable No. The emotional structure is a seismic portrait of that contradiction, which periodically emerges in his music as a sonic tidal wave.
Since the Symphony No. 1, Branca’s music has led him into highly involved areas of mathematics – which, like any intense technical study, can lead to unexpected reversals in consciousness. “You go so far in something, and then it comes back to the zero again. It always happens like that,” he once told me. “My opinion is this: Everything is right and everything is wrong; everything is yes and everything is no; everything is continuous and everything is not – all at once. […] Every idea is its opposite. It is not either negative or positive, it is no one thing; it is both.” I think he’s in a wonderful position to free himself from the pain of limitation as he becomes more attentive to the unique qualities and ramifications of his music. In the meantime, he and his music move through the world on a razor’s edge between limitation and liberation. One afternoon, he offhandedly remarked to me, “I have one foot in the Bowery and the other foot in Heaven,” and I knew he was speaking literally.
FOOTNOTES
1. It was also his most ambitious line-up of instruments: nine unison-tone guitars (i.e., all tuned to the same pitch – four in soprano range, one alto, two tenor, one baritone, and one bass), four octave guitars (two strings at one pitch, the next two an octave higher, the last two another octave higher), three steel-wire guitars (in place of regular guitar strings), electric piano, electric organ, two trumpets, euphonium, French horn, saxophone, drums, and percussion.
2. Craig Bromberg, “Glenn Branca” in East Village Eye, February 1984, p. 14.
3. Bromberg, “Glenn Branca,” p. 14.
4. John Pareles in his liner notes to the ROIR cassette of Symphony No. 1, and John Rockwell in The New York Times, 19 July 1981, respectively.
5. John Cage, “Two Statements on Ives” in A Year from Monday. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, p. 42.
6. Bromberg, “Glenn Branca,” p. 14.
7. John Howell, “Glenn Branca” in Live, No. 6/7, 1982, p. 8.
8. Mark Dery, “Sometimes I Wished My Fist Was a Sledgehammer” in High Performance, No. 29, Spring 1985, p. 53.
9. Glenn Branca, “Running Through the World Like an Open Razor” in Just Another Asshole #6. Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca, eds. New York, 1983, p. 25. (All other quotes are from this text.)
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 7
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 