After nearly a century of being ritually smashed, set on fire, and
wielded as a phallus, the electric guitar has lost some of its subtle
mystery. The notes had seemingly all been played. Yet, on a certain
high-school evening, some Thurston Moore–loving,
prog-rock-leaning friends introduced me—a child reared on guitar
heroes of all varieties and learned in the various show-off techniques
of butt rock and bebop—to Glenn Branca’s guitar symphonies, and
the mystery was forcefully, harshly restored.
Somewhere between the scathing din of Wolf Eyes and textural
composers like
Ligeti is Glenn Branca. His guitar symphonies stand
as some the most evocative expressions of organized chaos in any art
form, and, in most cases, they sound nothing like guitars. As a part of
New York’s no-wave sound, he redefined the instrument’s scope for all
the ’90s noise rockers to reap (Sonic Youth, for one, was birthed from
Branca’s experimental loins).
So, when the Experience Music Project posted a call for musicians to
perform Hallucination City: Symphony 13 for 100 Guitars in
Seattle, I offered my services as a music-
reading guitar player.
Branca’s wife and right-hand concertmistress, Regina Bloor, e-mailed me
the sheet music for Hallucination City, a 70-minute monster
that premiered back in 2001 at the base of the World Trade Center.
Bloor also sent a comprehensive list of notes describing how I’d be
modifying the way I play, tune, string the guitar, and read notation.
In order for his music to work, Branca wants performers to unlearn
their hot licks, their tasty riffs, their Black Sabbath bar chords, and
relearn that mystery of strings plus wood plus electricity.
The first rehearsal was in the acoustically beautiful EMP Sky
Church, the second in the bleak cafeteria of the Seattle Center
Exhibition Hall. Organized like a chorale, the orchestra sat according
to sections: alto, tenor, baritone, and bass. I, along with three
others, made up the swarm-of-bees sound of alto 7. The guy on my left
told me he had played in six other Hallucination City performances, including ones in Belgium, London, and Rome. Then he
pointed out five other seasoned
Brancanites who had all traveled
here from faraway places. The alto on my right said, “I just read about
it in the paper and wanted to play with a hundred guitarists.”
It turned out that the count was more like 47—still an
impressive number of guitarists willing to spend three 10-hour days
playing a piece of avant-garde chamber music at a
$175-to-$275-per-ticket Seattle Art Museum party for zero pay. The
experience offered other rewards.
What happens when a Branca piece really gets going is a little like
hypnosis. During one informal lunchtime discussion, he talked about
listening to the sound of a pitch slowly bending over the course of an
hour and how, if you listen to it loud enough, you will endure
“hallucinations like you’ve never seen.” Indirectly, I think he was
giving us inspiration for his own music. Another time, he wandered into
the room and told the (wonderfully fantastic) conductor, John Myers, “I
don’t know what you guys are doing in here, but I’m hearing voices in
this music.”
This was the type of praise that he consistently lavished upon us
while hulking in and out of the room, unshaven, backpacked, and with
gray hair just long enough to be called “wild.” He must know that part
of the reason performers show up is to bask in his Brancaness, and
every few hours, just to satisfy us, he’d blurt out something like,
“The name of this movement is ‘Vengeance,’ and while you’re playing it
I want you all to think about how you’re going to feel on the second
Tuesday of this coming November.” Or: “You fucking nailed it!” He
wasn’t just being nice; over the course of two days, the amorphous
cloud of sound that farted out of us in the first rehearsal was somehow
sculpted into something that, even in the white-walled sobriety of the
Exhibition Hall, was like a musical high.
The day of the show, at the Olympic Sculpture Park, was the first
time Branca showed his teeth and brassy voice—not to the
performers, but to the crew: “What the fuck is going on here? Where the
fuck is the conductor going to stand? Here? On this? It should be half
this size! I mean, come on!”
By the time the show began, anxieties were quelled. Everyone had
ransacked the open bar and expensive-looking amenities at SAM’s 75th
anniversary party. Someone carved an ice sculpture of a guitar, a
diamond-encrusted guitar was auctioned off, and remote-controlled
wedding cakes zipped around the park. All of it was in utter contrast
to the performance, because, to be honest, the caste of person who
plays/listens to Branca probably isn’t the type who drops a couple
hundred bucks on a gala.
But the die-hards were there—huddled on the street, clinging
to the outside of the fence—and when the piece began, the
rowdiest applause came from those sidelines. The SAM benefactors,
meanwhile, hid across the park in a “party tent,” listening to
Euro-dance-lite tracks, waiting out Branca’s transcendent, mass
hypnosis until the “headliner,” a Neil Diamond cover band, took the
stage. That was fine by us. And from what I could tell, it’s the sort
of response that only fuels Branca’s inspiration—his MySpace page
represents him with a photo of some conservative types covering their
ears and wincing. After all these years, Branca’s still the greatest
iconoclast the guitar has ever seen, and that’s exactly why we played
our hearts out for him. 