Howard Who?

 For the Angelenos that wanted to feel something a la Crash, they would have done well to attend a concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall tonight. And what they would have felt is their eardrums implode, the ground beneath them throttling them forward through space time, and caffeine as injected directly into the brains through the air in the form of sound waves that came from 100 guitar amps which were fed by 100 guitars struming and picking the notes of one Glenn Branca.

 This was a performance of Branca’s 13th Symphony. And that seemed an appropriate number given the music’s apocalyptic nature. With the subtitle “Hallucination City,” the piece feels like going to war. The titles of the various movements (March, Anthem, Drive, Vengeance) are like some war propaganda gone horribly wrong. Branca himself insisted in the pre-concert talk that it is a political statement although for what cause he wouldn’t say. And the piece was premiered on June 13, 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York City. Three months later, we all know what happened. As much as Branca denies that his music had nothing to do with the events of September 2001, you really have to wonder….doth he protest too much?

 Village Voice’s Kyle Gann was there in NY at the time and wrote this comment (which was featured in our program notes), “Starting at a deafening level, the work got louder almost throughout, and - after a stasis of a few minutes that could have signaled an ending - suddenly burst into tensely rising chromatic scales.” As funny as that sounds, that is really the whole point of the piece. Branca says that the dynamic range was what eventually psyched him about writing a piece for an ensemble of 100 guitars (or to be exact 80 guitars, 20 basses, and a drum set).

 The timbre of the group was less important, but that turned out to be more interesting. Because there were 20 instruments parts (8 altos, 6 tenors, 2 baritones, and 4 bass), that the harmonics were all over the place in polytonal fashion and created various electronic humming that at times made one feel like they were inside the heart of a busy beehive. The melodic elements (if you could call anything in it that) were few and far between and far less interesting than the pure sound and dynamic level generated.

 The piece was wholly revised from its premiere, which was a one-movement 62 minute piece. The new version is divided into four movements like a classical symphony, and the movements are in order: March, Anthem, Drive, Vengeance. That last one makes me laugh because it has an action movie vibe. March starts off with a tritone in the basses and goes one for 30 minutes until it resolves into a perfect fifth. Anthem featured a lot of rising whole tone scales with a minor third thrown in, and it was the shortest movement. Drive was the most “melodic” movement, featuring some weird guitar syncopations over the insistently, well, driving drum part. Vengeance featured the most interesting use of dynamics, starting at what could be called piano and then gradually building the parts into a crescendo and then back to piano and then back to quadruple forte.

 It was a huge crowd (far more than for the Reich piece). I kept thinking why anyone outside of pretty hardcore fans would want to see and heart this music. A few people left early, but most everyone stayed. It probably also helped that many in the audience were there to cheer a friend on stage…so the rock sensibility was wafting in the air. After a while, it almost became an endurance test…are you artsy enough to withstand it? On top of that, earplugs were provided for protection from the onslaught, but few that I saw were wearing them, again perhaps as a sign that we are now watching art to prove to ourselves that we are hardcore enough. It was like the musical equivalent of going to see a horror movie (I’m thinking of things like “Saw” and “Hostel”) where it would be much more pleasant to turn your head away but then you’d feel the slight shame that you couldn’t handle watching a little itty bitty horror movie…wuss.

 Similar stuff has been going on in prog rock for a while now. Just last year Orthrelm produced a one movement 45 minute piece that sounds like THIS.

 And for those of you who went to see last week’s performance of Riley’s In C, this was almost like the demon evil brother of that. It really gave pause to how we use the word minimalism. If anything, this was maximalism (which usually referes to something completely different), but it was the perfect antidote to some of the more “safe” performances we’ve been getting. If putting 100 guitars on stage gets people more pumped than say strings, winds, brass, and percussion, then let’s start writing those pieces. If the audiences want loud confrontational music with a beat, then let’s figure out a way to make that artistically feasible.

 I mean, we are Los Angeles after all. Our riots don’t happen in the concert hall….they happen in the streets.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music, Pop Music, Minimalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.