Everything about Glenn Branca screams New York City, so it makes sense that his magnum opus, Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City), was first performed at One World Trade Center--before September 11, 2001. Taking the composer's signature sound--an intense, propulsive exploration of rhythm, dynamics, harmonics, dissonance, density, and sheer volume, carried out with an arsenal of rock instrumentation—Hallucination City was composed for an ensemble of 100 musicians. The original impetus for the piece emerged when The Mission For The Year 2000 in Paris invited Branca to create a Y2K composition for 2,000 guitars. The composer found the endeavor logistically untenable, but the idea of a composition for a veritable army of guitarists persisted, finally taking shape as Hallucination City for the comparatively modest corps of 80 guitarists, 20 bassists, and one drummer. The first incarnation of the piece was realized on Branca's home turf at the World Trade Center on June 13, 2001, and the final, reconfigured version of the work premiered at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in New Jersey earlier this year.
Despite this provenance, the performance of Branca's Hallucination City last month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles felt site-specific--as if, nearly three years after its opening, Frank Gehry's undulating, stainless steel-skinned flower at the intersection of First and Grand had finally met its spectacular musical match. The pairing of Branca and Gehry belongs in an important tradition of avant-garde music unleashed in groundbreaking architectural spaces. Edgard Varèse composed his pioneering tape composition Poème Electronique for the Philips Pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. Xenakis, who abandoned his architectural career for music--largely due to conflict with Le Corbusier over the pavilion's design--was commissioned to create a work for the opening of Paris' Centre Pompidou, designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. That composition, La Légende d'Eer (1977-78), unfolds like glistening, dissonant electronic confetti--like Varèse's Poeme Electronique, it stands not only as a major achievement in electronic music, but also as a work that managed to challenge, if not equal, the overwhelming power of its intended architectural context. Whether or not the audience enjoyed the battle, in either case, is another question.
The occasion for the West Coast premiere of Branca's Hallucination City was its inclusion in "Minimalist Jukebox," a surprisingly diverse three-week program celebrating the most significant, if still-contentious movement in post-war music, with performances of works by now-canonized composers Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and festival organizer John Adams, as well as underappreciated examples by Louis Andriessen and David Lang. The appearance of Hallucination City, even in this context, seemed like a dare to the Disney's season ticket holders. Typically, the Disney relegates contemporary avant-garde to the REDCAT Theater in the building's basement. (With tickets for Branca's symphony available for a measly $10, it looked as if the REDCAT audience has snuck upstairs for the evening. And why not?) Of all the so-called minimalists on the bill, Branca maintains the closest tie to the unbridled energy--not to mention the instrumentation and sheer volume--of rock music, which is not the usual Disney Concert Hall fare. Branca played in Theoretical Girls and The Static--significant bands that helped define the No Wave period centered in downtown New York in the late 1970s--before moving into, ahem, "serious" music for ensembles and symphonies. Even in its most modest realizations, Branca's music is not for the faint of heart. On this particular night, for example, ushers distributed earplugs to the audience entering the hall.
While the final tally of musicians performing Hallucination City fell at least a dozen individuals short of the advertised number, the symphony was extraordinarily loud. I initially took the precaution of wearing the earplugs, but removed them halfway through the first of four movements, finding the higher sound dynamics far too diminished with the protection: I wanted to be overtaken by the sound. (Even without the earplugs, I experienced the rumble of the symphony's bass team in my gut as much as in my head.) In signature Branca fashion, the music built up quickly as the guitarists joined the fray in small squadrons, increasing in volume and intensity, repeatedly pushing beyond every perceptible threshold. Loudness became relative, with the musicians escalating in lock-groove toward an auditory sublime. While Branca is certainly best known for convening assemblies of electric guitars, his incorporation of drums and percussion has always provided much of the propulsive--if unheralded--force and rhythmic thrust in his music, beginning with his breakthrough early 1980s compositions such as Lesson #1, Dissonance, and The Ascension. Here, the controlled cacophony was anchored--and clarified--by the insistent backbeat provided by renowned drummer Virgil Moorefield, who more than held his own against 80-plus guitars and basses.
Over the course of four movements--"March," "Anthem," "Drive," and "Vengeance"--the accumulating sound registered as pure affect, at times suggesting an immense swarm of buzzsaws or an avalanche of cascading sheet metal. Indeed, the extraordinary harmonics caused by the phalanx of musicians armed with electric instruments justified the phantasmal title Hallucination City. Shiny on the outside, the wooden, hull-like interior of the Disney Hall was transformed into the warm belly of one massive, resonating guitar.
Hallucination or not, the militarized movements of the symphony suggested a guitar army at war, assembled from 85 weekend warriors milling around Hollywood Guitar Center—a volunteer army, as the musicians were not paid for the discount performance. At least they got to dress themselves: individuals ranged from fuzzy, burned-out longhairs in sunglasses to sleek, tattooed Nu Metal shredders. Ex-Minutemen bass deity Mike Watt, flying the flannel (as usual), heeded Branca's call to arms, as did five women who stood out in an otherwise masculinized mass ritual. From classic Fender Stratocaster to candy-coated Ibanez (and everything stringed in-between) the instruments were as diverse as their masters; in unison, the unlikely army became a thunderous, well-oiled machine.
And despite the aural intensity of the performance, its visual impact was surprisingly powerful, enjoyable, and—perhaps—necessary for the success of the work. It's worth mentioning that Branca's interest in music developed out of a Richard Foreman-inspired, self-defined "Bastard Theater," and his enactment of performative spectacle reached its apotheosis with Hallucination City. In the end, it was only a brief disappointment that the notoriously disheveled composer was not at the podium conducting the work; on this night Branca sat off to the side of the stage while his longtime associate (and seasoned post-punk guitarist) John Myers led the guitar army to the Promised Land. Myers' performance was enthralling: he guided the troops with a highly aerobic dance routine, using his entire body and an arsenal of facial expressions to take the music to the breaking point before ending each escalating movement like a brakeman on a train racing toward the cliff. When the piece ended, the roar of the crowd felt relatively quiet in relation to the buzzing, gut-churning din that had filled Gehry's hall for the past hour. But, by the look on Branca's face, the performance was nothing short of a success. Hallucination City may not have completely brought the house down, but it sure did rattle its foundations.
New York Foundation for the Arts, nyfa.org, April 19, 2006