Howard Who?

Earlier this year I wrote about a work by Glenn Branca that was a powerfully forceful experience, especially for a venue as anemic to the popular music canon as the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Yet they rocked 100 electric guitars in a performance of a Branca symphony.

Unfortunately for us, the symphony was we heard that night, his 13th, was completely rewritten from the original when he started to rethink the possibilities for the unconventional orchestra. So the original was basically a lost experiment, the score probably locked away like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But luckily for us someone bothered to record the work at a pretty high quality. And it was recently featured on this blog:

The Clock That Went Backwards: Glenn Branca - 2001-06-13 - WTC, New York

Check it out now before it’s gone. As far as comparing this and the work we ended up hearing, it’s definitely texturally the same, but the composition here seems more transparent. Perhaps it was the Disney Hall’s acoustics, but there it seemed a bit more muddled and the drum part was often lost amid 100 guitars. Since Branca wasn’t sure what this ensemble would sound like (nor did anyone for that matter), it makes sense that the music features clearer simpler elements. But structurally it seems similar if not the same (edit: other than the fact that he divided it into 4 movements for the later piece, I meant the music uses the same escalating repetition).

Does anyone know when the official Branca recording of Symphony 13 will come out?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 4:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical 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.