Glenn Branca’s performances are known for being loud — very loud. The last time his ensemble performed his “Symphony No. 12,” in 2000 at the Anchorage, a now shuttered venue located at the Brooklyn Bridge, the ceiling literally began to collapse. “There were flakes of paint falling onto the audience,” Branca said during a recent phone conversation. “It’s not going to be like that [this time].”But it’s almost impossible to imagine how it could be any other way. On May 16, a group of 10 guitarists will perform a number of Branca compositions, including “Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (The Mysteries)” and the aforementioned “Symphony No. 12 (Tonal Sexus),” at the Masonic Hall in Manhattan as part of the Red Bull Music Academy’s annual residency in New York City. “I don’t really like to go back. I like to go forward,” he said. “I would rather have had them commission a new piece of music. But this is what they wanted to do, and that’s cool. This is good music and people should hear it. Most of this stuff was only heard in Europe. I have certain pieces that have never even been performed in New York.”This is odd, considering that Branca’s music is very much connected to the city, and specifically the crossover between the art and music that was happening in downtown New York in the late 1970s and early ’80s. It was a time when a painter like Jean-Michel Basquiat could be painting canvases, tagging walls, and playing in bands at the same time and nobody would question it. It was almost expected. Branca began as a guitarist in Theoretical Girls, a crucial part of the “no wave” scene with groups such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. (The artist Dan Graham booked the Theoretical Girls’ first performance at Franklin Furnace.) Clearly influenced by punk music, whose remnants were still hanging around, these groups were as equally invested in music as they were in what was happening with avant-garde sonic exploration through the work of people like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. Performances were just as often at galleries such as Artists Space, The Kitchen, and White Columns as at the city’s many clubs. Soon enough, Branca was composing pieces on his own that were based around small clusters of guitarists and combined the theoretical pursuits of the avant-garde with the ferocity of punk music. “The Ascension” (1981), with a striking cover by Branca’s friend Robert Longo, was his most popular early album, and featured Lee Renaldo on guitar. Renaldo, of course, would go on to be a core member of Sonic Youth, who are often credited with transforming Branca’s sound into something more palatable and commercial.As his understudies moved in one direction, Branca moved in another. His pieces became larger, more interesting and complex. He began composing symphonies, mainly based around guitars (some built specifically for the performances). By 1983, he was moving away from his early work, composing pieces for harpsichord in between his guitar experiments. “Starting around 1986, I started getting orchestral commissions,” Branca said. “That was really very interesting to me and something I’d always wanted to do. Throughout most of the late-1980s, and most of the 1990s, the music I wrote was for a conventional symphony orchestra. And very often it would get heard once in Europe and then nobody would hear it again.”Branca had moved on, but people didn’t always realize. “A lot of people thought I dropped off the face of the earth,” he recalled. “In fact, I was writing my ass off. I was holed up in my studio continuously writing my music. But in New York, I wasn’t gigging around, playing the clubs. Every once in a while I would get a commission for a guitar piece, so I would write one. But my main interest wasn’t in guitar music at the time. I wanted to see how I could incorporate some of the ideas I was working on with orchestras into the guitar ensemble.”“Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (The Mysteries)” was the product of this period, and was originally a commission, the first in 1992 and the second in 1994. “Symphony No. 12 (Tonal Sexus)” represented another return to guitar work. (The apex of his guitar work up to this point is “Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City),” written for 100 guitars and first performed at World Trade Center Plaza in June of 2001.) It was around this time that Branca met his wife, the guitarist Reg Bloor, who has become an integral part of his ensemble and an important collaborator.“We’ve been together for about 17 years now,” Branca said. “When we do the 100-guitar piece, for instance, she’s the concertmaster. She takes care of dealing with the musicians, questions they have about the parts, and any other questions they have. She basically takes care of all the dirty work that a conductor doesn’t deal with.” For the performance at the Masonic Hall, Bloor will be performing along with guitarists such as Randy Randall (No Age), Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (Liturgy), and others. Branca said that he rewrote some of the pieces, but aside from that has nothing to do with the planning of the Red Bull show, leaving the performance in the hands of Bloor and John Myers, a member of his ensemble who will be conducting the piece.Despite the influence Branca has had on both popular and avant-garde music, and a recent surge of renewed recognition, his mind is on other things. He was writing a memoir that he thinks won’t get past the lawyers of a major publisher without resulting in him getting sued for defamation, but has stopped for the moment while he’s writing music. He laughed when I asked him about a video that supposedly shows him crashing last year’s opening of the new Whitney Museum of American Art, telling me that he had a few drinks that night and sometimes he “gets a little giddy.” He’s more interested in talking about Mozart and Bruckner, and the way harmony has changed over time. But when I asked Branca if he feels aligned with those composers, he scoffed. “I don’t write in any particular style or system or key. I don’t even think of my music as 12-tone. It’s just whatever the fuck I want to do.”
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