Symphonies of iron

The only reason I still bother with this world is because I love music and I want people to listen to music. Other than that, this fucking world is a waste of time.
(Glenn Branca)

Glenn Branca is one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the influences of the avant-garde (American minimalism) and rock (the no wave scene, post-punk). Bringing electric guitars into the heart of the avant-garde must not have been simple, and bringing the avant-garde so brazenly into the world of the electric guitar can't have been easy to accept either. The sonic universe recreated by Branca is essentially a derivative of no wave and noise-rock, fused with the repetitions of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, and with the walls of sound built by La Monte Young. Into this already unusual chimera, Branca had the nerve to insert the thoroughly classical concept of the symphony, taking a truly unprecedented step forward.

Branca reached the peak of his art in his long compositions that slow down and speed up, in his tragic guitar explosions, in his cathartic chaos that becomes the soundtrack to the author's inner torment, in his extreme noise that skirts the edge of a secular spirituality, conjuring vivid apocalyptic visions running from “The Ascension” (1981) through to the third movement of the first symphony, the percussiveness of the second, the mysticism of the third, the colossal adventure of the sixth — which evolves the ideas of his early work — all the way to the unstoppable violence of symphonies 8, 10 and 13.

Glenn Branca is one of the few reasons not to kill yourself
(Steve Albini)

Branca's symphonies are the realm of guitars played in alternate tunings, of modified and hyper-amplified instruments, of deafening volumes such as no one had ever dared use before, of a technique that might horrify a purist of the instrument, since it is secondary to the sonic impact the work must have on the audience. It is precisely this devastating impact of the symphonies on the listener, literally assaulted by unimaginable volumes, that makes the live experience unforgettable.
A young conservatory musician, guitarist Gisbert Watty, recalls: “I remember attending one of Branca's symphonies in Dusseldorf, one of those full of guitars where the decibels exceed those of a jet engine running. I remember I didn't like it, but it was an experience that struck me deeply and made me think a lot, so much so that I remember every detail of that evening perfectly.” Composer John Adams tells us: “Earplugs weren't simply recommended, they were essential.” Regardless of personal taste, the live experience of Branca's symphonies remains unforgettable.

Branca made me tremble
(John Cage)

The link to classical music that the word "symphony" might suggest is minimal, at least in the symphonies for amplified guitars. It's therefore not possible to think of Branca as a rock composer moving closer to classical music, as some exponents of progressive rock did, for instance. Branca always remains firmly within the world of rock as shaped by the avant-garde, in part following the path of the Velvet Underground, stretching post-punk sonorities to their absolute limit to arrive at extremely long instrumental pieces, often running past twenty minutes, effectively becoming a godfather figure to various post-punk-noise bands (Swans, Sonic Youth) and much of instrumental post-rock (Godspeed You! Black Emperor). His compositions could therefore be described as post-punk (post-)minimalist symphonies.
Volume is a fundamental element, indeed the primary means of communicating with the listener. Branca transforms minimalism, giving it a power it had never even imagined possessing until then — in a word, he turns minimalism into maximalism. Before venturing into his long series of symphonies, he already showed crystal-clear intent with his debut “The Ascension” (1981). From that point on, Branca's ambition would drive him to follow through to the very end of the path he had just begun.
The damning accusation of fascism that John Cage leveled after attending one of his symphonies — probably prompted by the almost military rhythm of certain movements — doesn't really hold up, even if the sheer scale of sound achieved might suggest a Nietzschean idea of music, at times even revealing an affinity with certain worlds described by Wagner (Branca's favorite classical composer). The idea of an “army” of guitars must have been forming in his mind for some time. From this came the long season of the symphonies, an ambitious project pursued with sheer stubbornness, never compromising, in the conviction that in art all that matters is daring more, always pushing further.

The more outrageous the music got, the more the audience grew. I realized I could do whatever I wanted
(Glenn Branca)

The symphonies can be divided into two types: the more innovative ones for guitar and amplified instruments, and the more traditional ones for symphony orchestra. To date there are sixteen symphonies, plus the long ballet composition "The World Upside Down" (1992), which, although not officially included in the symphony series, effectively belongs to it. Unfortunately not all the recordings are available, but all the symphonies have been performed live. The unamplified ones in particular have been performed by prestigious orchestras such as the London Sinfonietta, the Minnesota Opera Orchestra, the Graz Orchestra and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. It's likely that the symphonies never officially released will be made available posthumously in the coming years.

Symphony No. 1, "Tonal Plexus". For thirteen guitars, keyboards, brass and percussion.
Recorded in New York on July 18-19, 1981, released in 1983.

The first symphony, recorded live in July 1981 at New York's Performing Garage, is Branca's very first attempt at tackling the idea of symphonic music for electric guitars. It's divided into four long movements and features thirteen guitarists, including the two Sonic Youth members, Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore. The result is the creation of overwhelming walls of sound that build and grow minute by minute, as in the first movement, constructed on an E Major chord that swells further and further with the help of trumpets and horns, reaching its end in a devastating, impetuous finale. The structure is very simple and repetitive. It's hard to find any real connection to classical symphonies, though at certain points it seems to reach a kind of positive intensity that could recall the majestic sonorities of Wagner.
The second movement is decidedly more noise-driven, while the third (seventeen minutes), still in E Major, is an oppressive wall of sound indebted to La Monte Young, probably the natural evolution of "The Ascension", achieving a remarkable sense of tragedy and claustrophobia, particularly in the percussive finale, which turns into a descent into hell with no chance of salvation.
The fourth movement is nothing more than a reworking of "You Got Me", a track born out of Branca's early years with Theoretical Girls. Pounding and obsessive, with a violent, constant repetition, it builds up to the long horn-driven finale that echoes the first movement.

Symphony No.2 – "The Peak Of The Sacred" (1982). For eleven modified guitars, bass, bass drums, metal percussion and drums.
Recorded on May 14, 1982 at St. Mark's Church in New York, released in 1992.

Branca's second symphony brings the idea of a post-punk symphony into sharper focus, and could be described as his tribal symphony or his percussion symphony, relentlessly impetuous and charged with energy. Branca would proudly say: "There wasn't a single real guitar in the piece, except for the bass," because every guitarist played modified guitars rigged so that each of them could play three at once. Percussion becomes dominant thanks to the collaboration of the eccentric drummer Stefan Weisser (Z'ev), who in those years was creating extreme, cacophonous sounds with metal percussion (on his 1980 debut album "Salts Of Heavy Metal" and especially on "Elemental Music" in 1981). There's a static epic quality running through the whole symphony, as in the first movement, "Slow Mass" (twenty-two minutes), which opens with drums struck with extreme violence, then continues in an unstoppable, almost military-paced acceleration that could serve as an instruction manual for much of the post-rock to come.
The second movement – "Radioactive Poltergeist Kitchen" (nineteen minutes) – is, for its first half, a great piece of musique concrète and industrial music that would fit perfectly on one of the early Einstürzende Neubauten records, before the arrival of the guitars leads to a kind of metallurgical symphony where the notes of the detuned guitars and the chaos of metallic noise in the background constantly alternate.
The third movement – "Melodrama And Nuclear Physics In The Global Theater" (eighteen minutes) – is the one most closely tied to La Monte Young's wall of sound, built entirely on anomalous timbres and deafening volumes. From the fourteen-minute mark, the hammering percussion radically shifts register, charging up with tension and anguish. The fourth movement, "Sacred Field" (11 minutes), is the most aggressive and repeats ideas already heard in the previous movements.

Symphony No.3 – Gloria (1983). For modified harpsichords, bass, drums.
Recorded on January 16, 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, released in 1983.

Branca's third symphony marks a double turning point: on one hand it veers toward a tragic, sumptuous symphonism, on the other it opens up to an ambient dimension through the use of modified harpsichords (this time there are no guitars), which lend an almost sacred quality to his noise-making. The first movement (22 minutes) is ambient music stretched to the breaking point, at least up to the fifteen-minute mark, always charged with tension in a major key, a prelude to the final crescendo where the drums set the pace. It's a typically maximalist explosion of sound that combines a will to power with distinctly modern anxieties. The second movement (18 minutes) is one of the darkest of his career, an inextricable sonic magma of primordial chaos that reaches genuinely dramatic moments. It's probably the most mature symphony Branca had made up to that point. There's a kind of religiosity for secular listeners in these notes that the American composer had never achieved before, as if the mystical Popol Vuh were playing with an orchestra of electric guitars.

Symphony n. 4 "Physics", performed in Zurich in May 1983. For four guitars, bass, drums and keyboards.

Considered one of the lost symphonies, Symphony No. 4 was fortuitously rediscovered thanks to the invaluable British archivist Will Prentice, who found a bootleg audience recording in his archive and handed it over to Reg Bloor, Branca's wife and founder of the Systems Neutralizers label. The recording was in terrible condition, so Systems Neutralizers launched a fundraiser that raised 4,449 dollars from 90 backers, enough to attempt a restoration. Today the result of this historic restoration is the only surviving document of the piece, one that still lets us feel the power of Glenn Branca's guitar orchestras.

Symphony No. 4 marks the return of guitars after the experiments with modified harpsichords on the Third. Among the guitarists are Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore. In some ways it's the most minimalist of the symphonies, pared down to a few sonic elements that grow in volume and power as the minutes pass. The alternate guitar tunings certainly always produce anomalous sounds never heard in the work of conventional guitarists, and this is one of the key reasons Branca's work remains so compelling. The harmonic sequences are strange, born out of Branca's studies of harmony, one of his lifelong obsessions: this isn't simply rock pushed to an extreme, or noise cranked up loud, but rather a highly personal body of research lying behind an apparent chaos.

Still, that alone isn't enough to reach the apotheosis of the long finales of the four movements, the result of extended build-ups lasting several minutes, starting from simple sustained notes (the opening of the first movement) with a Wagnerian intensity (Wagner being Branca's favorite composer), gradually absorbing energy minute after minute and turning into a primordial chaos of unprecedented violence. The second movement sits somewhere between the aggression of certain tracks on "The Ascension" and the percussion work of "Symphony No. 2". The third movement runs twenty-three minutes and, after a particularly static opening, takes on hypnotic qualities, first through a slow pulse repeated from the four-minute mark, then through frequent successive chord changes and, in the finale, through the usual addition of percussion. Finally, the fourth movement is an embryo of one of the movements of "Symphony No. 5", particularly violent, a magnificent offspring of all the No Wave culture Branca was steeped in.

The discovery of this recording is truly a godsend for all Glenn Branca fans, but more broadly for anyone who loves the true, unwritten history of rock. "Symphony No. 4" thus becomes a precious archaeological document of that borderland where minimalism, No Wave, contemporary composition and experimental rock end up blurring together, while the electric guitar finally stops being merely a rock instrument and becomes pure sonic matter.

Symphony No.5 – "Describing Planes Of An Expanding Hypersphere" (1984). For guitars, modified harpsichord, keyboard, violin, bass, drums.
Recorded in New York in November 1984, released in 1995.

The fifth symphony marks the return of the guitars. This time the movements are shorter, and revisit the post-punk soul (second movement), attempting to search for cosmic sonorities, as if Tangerine Dream had abandoned synthesizers for guitars (first movement), also finding a middle ground in the fifth movement, split into three parts. That said, without the sixth movement the symphony would lose much of its appeal, since it's there that Branca packs in his greatest power, with alien guitar sounds tragically and magnificently evoking the horrid cosmic spaces of composer Ligeti.

Symphony No.6 – “Devil Choirs At The Gates Of Heaven” (1989). For ten guitars, bass and drums.
Recorded in New York in 1989, released in 1993.

Branca's sixth symphony is one of the most adventurous in his catalogue. Here he celebrates his no wave soul, bringing the insights and experiences of his early years as a musician to their fullest evolution, paring the ensemble down to guitars alone (ten of them, admittedly), bass and drums. Unlike the earlier symphonies, where the movements built slowly but inexorably, here everything is given immediately, with the drums bursting in forcefully right from the start, without the usual wait for the piece to develop. This kind of rock band, reinforced by an unusual number of guitars, takes us straight to the roots of rock with the first movement, sixteen minutes caught between post-punk and no wave, with a schizophrenic momentum. Even though the movements feel more disconnected from one another, this doesn't diminish the sheer power of their impact.
From the hammering rhythms of the third movement (a movement that, live, must have seriously threatened listeners' eardrums) to the repetitive new wave fugue of the fourth (close to certain sonorities of “The Ascension”), to the new version of cosmic symphonic music in the second (an evolution of the finale of the fifth symphony, with even more pronounced nods to Ligeti), everything here renders Branca's ideas at their fullest.
The fifth movement is once again the most complex (sixteen minutes). Starting from a base similar to the first movement, it's devastated by furious walls of sound that act as a catharsis for the putrescent corpse of rock'n'roll.

Symphony No.7 (1989). For symphony orchestra.
Recorded in Graz in 1989, released in 2010.

In 1989 Branca attempted a path that must have seemed stimulating to him, but certainly not comfortable. He recorded his first symphony for classical orchestra, with no use of guitars or amplified instruments whatsoever. The five movements show a clear ambivalence between two of the twentieth century's greatest influences. On one side, the overwhelming pull of American minimalism from Philip Glass in the first, second and fifth movements; on the other, that of film music (third and fourth movements), almost a quotation of the classic string-driven soundtracks of 1950s-60s American cinema.
The second movement (twelve minutes), whose title gives away its intentions (“Freeform”), is the most complex and ambitious, something of a middle ground between the two major influences. It starts as a playful holding pattern that almost calligraphically recalls Glass, before taking on more epic and pompous tones, still built on continuous post-minimalist repetitions. If, on one hand, Branca's seventh symphony is admirable for the composer's courage in venturing into terrain not particularly suited to him, showing real versatility, on the other it could also be called the least representative of his musical poetics.

Symphonies No.8 & 10 – “The Mysteries” (1992,1994). For the Glenn Branca Ensemble (guitar-bass-drums sextet).
Recorded in New York in 1992 and 1994 respectively, released in 1994.

The eighth and tenth symphonies, though recorded at different times (1992 and 1994), are essentially a continuation of one another, and were accordingly released together. With the eighth symphony Branca returns to the extreme power of the guitars, perhaps reaching his most massive walls of sound. If there's one movement that can stand as the absolute definition of the word maximalism, it can only be the first movement (“The Passion”): nineteen relentless, unyielding minutes of guitars screaming out, at insane volume, Branca's fears in the face of the passions of humankind. It's absolute power that celebrates and revels in itself, while at the same time becoming a harrowing requiem that collapses into a deafening, unparalleled roar.
The second movement (“Spiritual Anarchy”, another nineteen minutes) is more percussive, bordering on the tribal, but doesn't stray far from the massive violence that precedes it. The eighth symphony is certainly the maximalist symphony par excellence: for those lucky enough to hear it live, the experience must have been somewhere between traumatic and cathartic.
The tenth symphony is no less intense, with sharper guitar chords that are, if anything, even more lacerating on listeners' eardrums. The first movement, “The Final Problem”, follows in the footsteps of the eighth symphony with guitars so high-pitched they recall shoegaze sonorities, while the second, with its telling title (“The Horror”), opens up to unheard-of feedback and distortion, unleashing an exhausting sonic vortex in which the guitars, rather than playing, seem to scream out a tangible horror from the very first notes.

Symphony No.9 – “L'eve Future”. For symphony orchestra and choir.
Recorded at the Berlin Festival of the Arts on July 13, 1993, released in 1995.

Composing eight symphonies in ten years is already a great achievement, but taking on the number nine — a magic number given what Beethoven's ninth symphony has meant for humanity — must have been daunting, to say the least. Perhaps with that comparison in mind, Branca changed tack, once again turning to a symphony orchestra (as in the seventh symphony), this time adding a choir.
Performed by the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, the symphony is not conducted by Branca himself but by conductor Christian Van Borries. Having abandoned the (post-)minimalist influences of Glass, Branca composed “L'eve Future”, an extremely long single movement (forty-seven minutes) that amounts to a huge experiment in atonal symphony, certainly more personal and mature than the seventh symphony. The long minutes drift on constantly without ever varying, in search of an imminent explosion of sound that never arrives. Everything is stasis, with no crescendos or accelerations — a novelty for Branca, who built much of his career on precisely those two elements.
The second part (“Freeform”) is an alternate, though very similar, version of the movement of the same name from the seventh symphony.

Symphony No.13 – “Hallucination City” (2008). For one hundred guitars.
Recorded on February 28, 2008 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, released in 2016.

If “The Ascension” was Glenn Branca's founding manifesto and that of maximalism, symphony No.13 is his testament, as well as a lifelong dream finally realized. It will go down in history as the Symphony of a Hundred Guitars (actually eighty guitars and twenty basses), and fate decreed that it would be the last one Branca released in his lifetime (No.11, 12, 14, 15 and 16 are expected to be released at some later point). “Hallucination City” could not have been a better testament for Branca, bringing together every insight of his career, from the sheer power of sound to the unstoppable marching momentum of his most successful compositions, effortlessly surpassing even symphony No.8, which up to that point had seemed an insurmountable limit.
The first movement thus bears a programmatic title (“March”, nineteen minutes) and, in its grandeur and variability, combines the guitar onslaughts of certain pieces from “The Ascension” with typical Branca-esque maximalism. Movements like “Chant” (twenty-one minutes), “Drive” and especially the finale of “Vengeance” are instead pure energy, walls of sound that reach heights hard to even imagine — essentially a genuine assault on the listener. In short, Branca's dream realized in every single aspect.

Branca's last symphony is No.16, “Orgasm”, once again for a hundred guitars, basses and drums. Not yet available on CD, it can be partly heard in YouTube videos of his live performance in Paris in 2015.

Glenn Branca died prematurely on May 15, 2018, from throat cancer. He was 69 years old.

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