A Raucous but Rigorous Experiment

Composer Glenn Branca has written for various kinds of instruments as well as full orchestra. But with a reputation that loudly precedes him, his name primarily suggests one thing: the sound of many electric guitars played loudly, with a primal drive that blends Minimalism and rock energies.

That describes his last concert hall appearance in Los Angeles in 1985. Branca filled UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall with the clamorous--yet arguably entrancing--wall of sound created by 10 wailing guitarists in his Symphony No. 5. The epic Branca-esque guitar effect was also heard in June in New York City. He enlisted 100 guitarists for Symphony No. 13 (“Hallucination City”), the opening event of an outdoor summer performance series there, conducting the ensemble in his usual flamboyant style--tousled hair flowing, limbs flailing in a whirling dervish-like display.

When Branca returns to Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday, the focus will still be on unusual guitar sounds, but not in multiples of 100. This time, Branca will perform on his unique, self-crafted “harmonics” guitar in a duet with his wife, Reg Bloor, playing a standard, and standardly tuned, guitar. It’s the final entry of a summer music series at the MAK Center’s Schindler House.

Two weeks ago, Branca and Bloor perched in their densely packed living-working space in New York’s SoHo district. It’s a fittingly art-centric neighborhood on Mercer Street, surrounded by galleries and the nearby SoHo Guggenheim. Since the 1980s, Branca’s music has found support in the art world, the fringe rock scene and the contemporary classical/new music scene. But he doesn’t fit well into any of those categories.

How did he become undefinable? “I just wanted to do stuff that I thought sounded cool,” Branca says. “I heard a hard rock sound that wasn’t necessarily hooked into conventional chord structures and conventional rhythms. I knew so much more could be done, because I was also into jazz and into new music and into contemporary classical music, and I didn’t really separate these things in my mind. I could put on a Who record one minute and Mahler the next minute, and I didn’t differentiate them. I loved them both.

“I liked the idea of not so much crossing over or fusing the styles, but not paying attention to stylistic restrictions whatsoever. I wanted to make what I thought of as a cool rock sound, one which was rigorous and engaged the mind, one which was, for me, exciting to listen to.”

Branca was born in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1948, and studied theater at Boston’s Emerson College. After he graduated in the early ‘70s, he did experimental theater and played in rock bands in the Boston area. It was the bands that most fueled his imagination. “I discovered very quickly that where theater now lived, where it still had life, was on the rock stage,” he says.

By the late ‘70s, though, the basics of rock didn’t satisfy Branca either. His instrument-tinkering experiments began then, as did his multiple guitar works, which he staged with himself as the highly theatrical and eccentric conductor. His work was picked up by the Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre. He contributed to the soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s film “The Belly of an Architect” (1987) and pieces for the Bang on a Can new music festival in New York. By the late ‘80s, Branca got the opportunity to delve into more conventional composing, for full orchestra and chamber ensembles. By then, he had six guitar “symphonies” under his belt. His first orchestral piece, Symphony No. 7 (1989), was performed by the Graz Festival Orchestra in Austria; his 11th was performed at the Holland Festival by a Dutch orchestra, and his Symphony No. 9, performed by the Polish National Radio Orchestra, was recorded in 1995 by Philip Glass’s Point label. “Movement Within,” a short piece for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, appeared on the ensemble’s album “Renegade Heaven” last year.

Writing for orchestra, Branca says, is “the ideal form, as far as working with lots of voices and lots of different timbres. That’s the problem with the guitar. I have one timbre, that’s it. End of story. So the chords just can’t be as interesting.”

All along, he has continued to tinker on his own with the harmonics guitar. The sound is almost ethereal, consisting of ghostly high-frequency vibrations, called harmonics, rather than conventional guitar tones. A movable bridge--as in the Japanese koto --combined with a technique of playing on the “wrong” side of the bridge and sound-transmitting pickups placed on both ends of the instrument instead of just the bottom make for a surreal palette of sound.

“It wasn’t possible to write for this instrument because it was too volatile,” he says--the sound couldn’t be predicted. He used it as a textural instrument in various pieces, including Symphony No. 5. More recently, he reinvestigated this guitar, creating one model by cutting two cheap guitars in half and reassembling them as a two-headed instrument.

Beyond the oddity of its look and function, though, Branca says, “I started to think of it as a meditative instrument. As you’re playing it, you’re directly interfacing with the whole resonant gestalt of the string itself, as far as these harmonics go. They’re all interconnected. Sometimes, if you hit a harmonic in a certain way, you hear a lot of harmonics spiraling off of it.”

So far, Branca and Bloor have performed with the harmonics guitar only once, in London. The Schindler house performance, like that one, will be improvised, and will lean toward the rock spectrum--the subhead of the event is “Loud Music for Unusual Electric Guitars.” As Branca says, “I like the idea of taking this in a rock direction--I mean, the way I think of rock.”

The London gig was as an opening act for the alternative rock band Sonic Youth in its “Goodbye 20th Century” program at the Royal Festival Hall. Sonic Youth guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, not incidentally, are early alums of Branca’s ‘80s all-guitar ensembles. The “20th Century” project matched rock and pop groups with contemporary composers such as John Cage, James Tenney and Steve Reich, and took the band into a realm usually occupied by classical ensembles.

Branca seems surprised by Moore’s immersion in serious new music, and its distance from the rock ethos. “He criticized me for not being ‘rock’ enough. He [now has] left me behind. They got booed in London.”

When was the last time Branca got booed?

“I never got booed,” he says, a bit disingenuously.

“Maybe once,” Bloor adds with a laugh. “You wouldn’t be able to hear it, anyway.”

But, says Branca, if rock fans have a hard time adjusting to the music of Cage or Tenney, the classical music world is just as close-minded. “I want to write for the orchestra, and I’m a total leper,” he says. “Every single orchestral commission I’ve gotten has come from outside the [mainstream classical] music scene. But as far as the actual orchestral scene goes, the place where orchestras actually live, I do not exist on the face of the Earth. That’s hard to believe, because you would think that they would want some new blood.”

Branca believes that orchestras are on a self-destructive path. “It’s going to become a museum system. It’s going to be like the Gagaku Orchestra in Japan,” he says, likening the standard repertory to ancient court music--”playing [music that is] only played by academics for academics. Once movie soundtracks stop using orchestral music, that’s the end. They’re more aware of this than anyone, but they still don’t want outsiders.

“The thing is, everyone is afraid of modern music, because they think that modern music exists for the purpose of destroying the past, that modern composers want the entire past to be thrown away. Why can’t we live together? I don’t know any modern composer who doesn’t like any good music, from any period, from any style.”

And then there is the matter of the stigma surrounding Branca’s antics, sonically and onstage. “I know for a fact that people in the straight music scene are familiar with what I do,” he says. “I’m just considered to be kind of a wild man or something. People are afraid of me. They think I’m crazy. They think I’m some kind of a monster or something. Everyone has the same reaction after they meet me--’He’s not the crazy monster I thought he was.’ “I can understand it,” he says of his dangerous reputation. “But, you know, I’m a performer.” *