by Roni Sarig
While Glass was developing a reputation in more progressive circles, it wasn’t until 1976 that he broke through in the classical world. With the premiere that year of his first opera, a collaboration with scenarist Robert Wilson called Einstein on the Beach, Glass became a recognized composer uptown as well as downtown (though afterward, he was still forced to make a living driving a cab). Einstein, a four-hour theatrical piece without plot or well-defined characters, is still Glass’s most celebrated work. It took Glass’s music beyond strict minimalism, and laid the groundwork for a new, multimedia art form that would come to be known as performance art.
Over the next decade, Glass composed other theater works, including operas Satyagraha (based on the life of Gandhi) and Akhnaten, as well as film scores (Powaqqatsi, Koyaanisqatsi), dance pieces for choreographer Twyla Tharp, and even soundtracks for events (his music for the torchlighting ceremony at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles introduced his music to millions of television viewers).
Toby Marks, Banco de Gala:
I saw Powaqqatsi and I thought, “Wow, amazing.” The way the music and the images marry together in that film is quite something. I was fascinated by the repetitiveness and small changes over time – and running different arpeggios against each other to get constantly shifting patterns – I definitely took something away from that, whether it was consciously or not.
By the ‘80s, Glass’s reputation had developed to a point where CBS Records offered him a recording contract (the first composer to receive one since Aaron Copland). Subsequent records like Glassworks and Songs for Liquid Days moved Glass closer than ever to becoming an actual pop star. Liquid Days, which featured songwriting collaborations with Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, and David Byrne, is by design a rock record. In addition, he produced a record for new wave band Polyrock, and lent arrangements to both Simon and Vega on their own records.
Jim O’Rourke, Gastr del Sol:
[Glass’s music] was rock and roll to me. Complete headbanging music. People around me were listening to Rush and Metallica; to me that was the stuff that made me pump my fist in the air.
Glass’s full impact on rock has undoubtedly yet to be felt. Musical styles such as New Age, ambient, and techno have all embraced minimalist concepts in their repetition, slow development, linear structures, and layering of parts. In addition, Glass’s 1995 collaboration with electronica star Aphex Twin connects him to yet another generation of pop explorers. And with his recent trilogy of symphonies based on David Bowie’s late ‘70s work with Brian Eno – Low, Heroes, and Lodger – Glass seems to be once again looking to rock music for inspiration.
DISCOGRAPHY
Music with Changing Parts (Chatham Square 1972, Elektra Nonesuch 1994).
Solo Music (Shandar, 1972; Elektra Nonesuch, 1989).
Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths (Chatham Square, 1973; Elektra Nonesuch, 1994).
Music in Twelve Parts 1 & 2 (Elektra Nonesuch 1974; 1996).
Einstein on the Beach (1976; CBS Masterworks, 1984; Elektra Nonesuch, 1993).
Dance Nos. 163 (Tomato, 1976).
North Star (Virgin, 1977).
Glassworks (CBS, 1982).
Koyaanisqatsi (Antilles, 1982).
The Photographer (CBS, 1983).
Mishima (Elektra Nonesuch, 1985).
Satyagraha (CBS Masterworks, 1985).
Songs from Liquid Days (Columbia, 1986).
The Olympian (Columbia, 1986).
Akhnaten (CBS Masterworks, 1987).
Dancepieces (CBS Masterworks, 1987).
Powaqqatsi (Nonesuch, 1988).
Mad Rush / Metamorphosis / Wichita Vortex Sutra (CBS Masterworks, 1989).
(w/ Allen Ginsberg) Hydrogen Jukebox (Elektra Nonesuch, 1993).
The Low Symphony (Point, 1993).
Heroes Symphony (Point, 1994).
La Belle et la Bête (Nonesuch, 1995).
Symphony No. 2 (Nonesuch, 1998).
GLENN BRANCA
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth :
Branca was really interested in John Cage, but he was also completely into the Ramones. Which was heavy: equating this so-called D-U-M-B music with high-minded and intellectual ideas. I was really into that and the people I was playing with came out of that strain... When I first saw him play, it was the most ferocious, incredibly transcendent, rampaging guitar thing I had ever seen. It was uplifting, completely unlike anything I’d ever heard. A lot of it sounded like what I always imagined would be great to play someday, but he was already doing it.
Though the idea of a punk composer sounds strange, a quick glance at the history of classical music proves it inevitable. Composers like George Gershwin once used jazz to capture a contemporary mood in their pieces. And going back as far as composers existed, the “low” folk music of the common people was always primary source material for adaptation and appropriation.
Born in 1948, Glenn Branca was among the first generation raised on rock music. Like many rock musicians, Branca’s main source of training and education came from listening to the radio, and later from working in a record store. By introducing the sonic barrage of electric guitars and noise rock into a formal art-music setting, Glenn Branca has created a place for himself as one of the most vital composers currently active.
As a teenager in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Branca rejected classical guitar lessons and opted to play in rock bands. Initially interested in mainstream rock, his experiences in the late ‘60s, while studying acting at Emerson College in Boston, broadened his perspectives. Exposure to experimental theater revealed new ways to incorporate music into stage pieces and led Branca to the avant-garde work of John Cage and the Fluxus composers, whose music was often theatrical by design. Soon after, he took a job in a record store, where he was exposed to a wide variety of sounds, from ‘70s glitter rock to the 19th-century Romantic composers. Inspired in equal parts by Roxy Music, Gustav Mahler, and new composers like Philip Glass, Branca made no distinction between high and low music. “As far as I was concerned, what the Who was doing was just as important as what Penderecki was doing,” he says. “But at the same time, Penderecki was no less accessible to me than the Beatles. It was just music that worked for me.”
In 1975, Branca formed his own experimental company, the Bastard Theater, which enabled him to pursue acting, directing, and playwriting, as well as composing and performing his own theater music. When he heard about New York’s downtown art scene, where punk poets like Patti Smith and minimalist composers mingled with the experimental theater world, Branca moved there in 1976. Soon he was hanging around rock clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, and – on a whim – he decided to start his own band. Theoretical Girls featured Branca on guitar, co-songwriters Jeffrey Lohn and Margaret Deuys switching off on bass and keyboards, and drummer Wharton Tiers (who would later become Sonic Youth’s producer). With their jagged guitar noise, Theoretical Girls fell in with the no wave scene of bands like DNA and Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
After releasing one single, U.S. Millie, Branca formed a second band, the Static, to pursue his own musical ideas exclusively. The trio featured Barbara Ess, a visual artist and Branca’s longtime girlfriend, and drummer Christine Hahn (who later played in CKM with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). In Static songs like Inspirez Expirez, his first extended instrumental, and The Spectacular Commodity, featuring a dense cluster of E notes, Branca began to explore more conceptual music.
At Max’s in 1979, Branca presented Instrumental with Six Guitars, his first work as a composer. Featuring 12 minutes of minor intervals layered over each other to create a dense wall of noise, the repetitious music was clearly influenced by minimalism, though the guitar roar was all rock. Branca realized that working as a composer rather than in a rock band was a better way to express his highly dramatic themes. At the risk of sounding pretentious, Branca decided to call his extended sonic explorations “symphonies.”
But while Branca made a conceptual leap into the w
orld of art music, his material retained most of its rock roots. To maintain rhythm, Branca used a drummer and bassist, and to bolster the sound density he recruited a “guitar army” of up to a dozen musicians. Among the earliest members of his group was future Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo (his bandmate Thurston Moore would soon follow). A bit later, Page Hamilton of Helmet joined the ensemble. Branca retained a theatrical element in his music by conducting in a very physical, dramatic style – writhing on the floor and flailing his arms madly – which he believed evoked better responses from the musicians.
David Byrne:
I thought Branca’s guitar orchestra performances were amazing. Very powerful and thrilling. It wasn’t as loud as people said, it was more the immensity of the sound than the volume. At some point I tried to get elements of that kind of sound into what I was doing, though I wasn’t very successful.
Tuning individual guitars to a single note, Branca created intervals and chords by using a number of differently tuned guitars – 11 in all for Symphony No. 1. It’s easy to imagine the horror with which Branca, accompanied by performance artist Z’ev’s industrial percussion, was greeted in classical music circles. Branca, however, offered more than just exercises in how to clear a room. While exploring the possibilities of guitar tunings and layering at extreme volumes, Branca began to hear phantom tones within the sheets of sound. He discovered that the guitars could produce natural effects that sounded like horns or choirs.
Page Hamilton, Helmet:
Symphony Number 6 was a real sonic distorted guitar thing. Double strumming brought out different harmonics in the instruments. Live you hear all those guitars and all those harmonics popping out and it sounds sometimes like trumpet and also like voices. You definitely hear choirs. Being on stage with that is unreal.
In the early ‘80s, Branca began to investigate acoustic phenomena and focused on the harmonic series, the string of notes (the root and overtones) that make up each musical tone. He began writing microtonal music, which uses tones that fall between the notes in the traditional 12-tone system. “People talk about the music of the 21st century. Well, this is it,” Branca says. “It’s going to be micro-tonal music, without a doubt.” To accentuate the acoustic traits of microtones, Branca needed to create new instruments such as a mallet-struck guitar (for better resonance) and electric harpsichord (essentially guitars made into keyboards), as well as guitars refretted to play the harmonic series.
Branca became so obsessed with the mathematics of music that he began to lose interest in composing. Nonetheless, in 1983 his explorations bore fruit with Symphony No. 3. Subtitled, Music for the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series, the piece attempted to amplify the sounds that occur naturally (though inaudibly) in nature. “At the time I saw the harmonic series as something that existed in nature, so I wanted to see, ‘How did nature write music?’” he says. “Shouldn’t it sound like chaos? And out of chaos comes order. The harmonic series is an infinite series, and it’s also an infinite mind fuck.”
After leaving influential downtown New York label 99 Records, which released his first recordings, Branca formed Neutral Records to release Symphony No. 3. During its brief life, Neutral released the debuts by both the Swans and Sonic Youth, as well as other post-no wave groups. Through these groups, younger bands were exposed to Branca’s unconventional guitar tunings and dense guitar layering.
Sean O’Hagen, High Llamas:
I’m very disinterested in guitar-based music, it constantly lets people down. Whenever music starts to get interesting and experimental there’s always a conservative rock-based movement to drag it back to year zero. But Branca held my confidence in guitars over the years. He was one of the people that redefined a tainted instrument, as far as I was concerned.
Branca continues to use electric guitars in his compositions, though by 1985 he had begun writing for orchestral instruments as well (which required him, at 37, to learn to read music). Branca has also moved away from microtones toward a tonal style more focused on structure. His Symphony No. 8 (1992), while composed for eight guitars, is clearly more melodic and dynamic than earlier guitar symphonies, as are his operatic and choral pieces. Now past 50, and able to boast commissions from Twyla Tharp’s dance company and the 1992 World Expo in Seville, Branca is reintegrating his rock past with a more traditionally classical present. In the journey from punk clubs to symphony halls, Branca introduced rock esthetics into concert music and classical techniques into guitar noise. In doing so, he helped to further break down the artificial lines separating popular from art music.
DISCOGRAPHY
Lesson #1 (99, 1980); a debut EP showing Branca in transition toward composition.
The Ascension (99, 1981); another transitional piece, which unlike much of his later work, comes across well on record.
Music for the Dance “Bad Smells” (Giorno Poetry Systems, 1982); this Branca piece appears alongside work by John Giorno on the album Who You Staring At?
Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus) (ROIR, 1983); composed in 1981, Branca’s first guitar symphony explores his “emotional structure.”
Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) (Neutral, 1983; Atavistic, 1993); Branca’s creative breakthrough, his first to explore microtones in the harmonic series.
Music for Peter Greenaway’s Film “The Belly of an Architect” (Factory [UK], 1987); Branca’s first piece to appear on record that uses orchestral instruments.
Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven) (Blast First, 1989; Atavistic, 1993); a piece for 10 guitarists (including Helmet’s Page Hamilton).
The World Upside Down (Les Disques du Crepuscule [Belgium], 1992; Atavistic, 1993); a full symphonic work in seven movements.
Symphony No. 2 (The Peak of the Sacred) (Atavistic, 1992); written a decade before its release, Branca’s second symphonic work features percussionist Z’ev as well as his guitar army.
Symphony Nos. 8 & 10 (The Mysteries) (Atavistic, 1992); written in 1992 and ‘94 respectively, these guitar symphonies explore life and death.
Symphony No. 9 (L’eve future) (Point Music, 1995); a work for orchestra and voices, Branca’s first release on Philip Glass’s label.
Songs ‘77-‘79 (The Static & Theoretical Girls) (Atavistic, 1996); a collection of recordings from Branca’s early No Wave bands.
Symphony No. 5 (Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere) (Atavistic, 1996); a guitar symphony from 1984.
Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (Newtone, 1996); a lost recording from 1986 released for the first time.
INTERNATIONAL POP UNDERGROUND
As musical term, pop generally refers to popular music, all the stuff (rock, country, jazz, adult contemporary, etc.) that’s not considered classical. Taken more literally, pop means popular, the stuff on the radio, on MTV, in the Top 40. But pop has another connotation, one more difficult to pinpoint. This is the sense in which we’re going to use it in this chapter.
As a concept, Pop (with a capital P), can draw from many genres. Whether or not a particular piece of music is Pop doesn’t depend on how many people hear it or how many copies it sells. Rather, it depends on sounds and attitudes and production styles. In this sense, an immensely popular band like Pearl Jam is not Pop, while an obscurity such as the Vaselines most definitely is Pop. And an undeniably creative musician like Jimi Hendrix is not Pop, while the Beatles surely are.
While Pop incorporates styles from all over, it retains an essential spirit. Pop is colorful, innocent, and melodic. It’s not willfully noisy, gloomy, or rambling. Pop combines the song traditions of vaudeville, cabaret, Tin Pan Alley, English dance halls, Motown, bubblegum, and easy listening with the classic studio techniques of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Jeff Lynne. It ties Cole Porter to the Cardigans, the Monkees to Stereolab.
The two elements that each of the artists in this chapter share is that they are all:
(1) pop; and
(2) not popular in the United States.
Beyond that, they differ in styles, time period, nationality, language, and relative levels of success. Some were, in fact, immensely popular in other countries (Serge Gainsbourg, Scott Walker), but didn’t translate well to American audiences. Others, like Big Star, had just about all the elements for popularity except luck and circumstance. Still others, such as Van Dyke Parks, were just too far out to connect in the mainstream, no matter how hard their label tried. A group like the Young Marble Giants, meanwhile, didn’t stick around long enough to cross over. And some groups, like Beat Happening (who coined the term “International Pop Underground,” which I’ve appropriated for my own purposes here), were too concerned with creating their own definition of what it meant to be a pop group to care much whether the mainstream took notice.
Calvin Johnson, Beat Happening:
[The International Pop Underground] was the idea that there were people who were interested in pop music and making records all over the place, connected through the mail or through records. It was just a wide umbrella that wasn’t necessarily a genre, not any one definition. It could be anything. Maybe it’s people who are inspired by pop music, but basically it’s just about taking over the media and calling the shots: “We’re calling this pop music, and it is because we said it is.”