Glenn Branca (born October 6, 1948 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
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Branca started playing the guitar at age 15. He also created a number of tape sound art collage pieces for his own amusement. After attending York College in 1966-1967 he started the short-lived cover band The Crystal Ship with Al Whiteside and Dave Speece in the summer of 1967. Branca studied theater at Emerson College in Boston in the early 1970s. In 1973 he moved from Boston to London with his then girlfriend Meg English. After moving back to Boston in 1974 he met John Rehberger. While there, he began experimenting with sound as the founder of an experimental theater group called Bastard Theater in 1975.
Working out of a loft on Massachusetts Avenue they wrote and produced the music/theater piece "Anthropophagoi" for a 2 week run. The lead actor John Keiser was chosen in The Boston Phoenix as one of the best performances of the year. In 1976 The Bastard Theater's second production was "What Actually Happened" at a new loft in Central Square, Cambridge and later at The Boston Arts Group. Considering the unconventional and sometimes confrontational nature of the productions, the shows still received interested reviews from the Phoenix and The Boston Globe. All music for Bastard Theater productions were original compositions by Branca or Rehberger and were performed live by the actor/musicians.[1]
Branca moved to New York in 1976. His first encounter with the NYC music scene was with the N. Dodo Band whom he observed many times at their rehearsal space - Phil Demise's "Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter". This is where he first met Jeffrey Lohn who was playing electric violin with the N. Dodo Band. He then formed two bands in the late 1970s: Theoretical Girls in 1977 with composer/guitarist Jeffrey Lohn and photographer/musician Barbara Ess, and later The Static. He also recorded Ess's band Y Pants for their debut release on 99 Records and performed with Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio in 1977,[2] a noise music experience that was very important in the development of his compositional voice (Branca 1979). In 1982 Branca launched his own record label, Neutral Records, releasing Y Pants' LP and the first few records by New York noise rockers Sonic Youth.
In the early 1980s he released his first album under his own name, Lesson No.1. In the same year he composed several medium-length compositions for electric guitar ensembles, including The Ascension (1981) and Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (1981). The Ascension appeared on his second same titled solo album in 1981, Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses was released not earlier then 2008 on cd. Soon after these two compositions, he began composing symphonies for orchestras of electric guitars and percussion, which blended droning industrial cacophony and microtonality with quasi-mysticism and advanced mathematics. Starting with Symphony No. 3 ("Gloria") (1983), he began to systematically compose for the harmonic series, which he considered to be the structure underlying not only all music but most human endeavors. In this project, Branca was initially influenced by the writings of Dane Rudhyar, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Harry Partch. He also built several electrically amplified instruments of his own invention, expanding his ensemble beyond the guitar. A few of these instruments were third bridge zithers he called "harmonic guitars". And he built instruments with large amounts of strings he called mallet guitars, because they were percussion instruments played with drumsticks, monotone electric cymbaloms with an additional third bridge on resonating positions. Early members of his group included Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Page Hamilton of Helmet, and several members of Swans including Michael Gira and Dan Braun.[3]
In the early 1990s, David Baratier attempted to document Branca's teaching style in They Walked in Line. In September 1996, The Glenn Branca Ensemble played at the opening ceremony for the Aarhus Festival in Denmark. The ceremony took place in the Musikhuset Opera House, and in the audience were the Queen of Denmark, the mayor of Aarhus and other dignitaries. After receiving more than 25 major commissions since 1981 Branca's music has finally begun to receive academic attention. Some scholars, most prominently Kyle Gann, consider him (and Rhys Chatham) to be a member of the totalist school of post-minimalism.
Beginning with "Symphony No. 7", Branca began composing for traditional orchestra, although he never abandoned the electric guitar. Branca also plays duets for excessively amplified guitars with his wife, and conducted his 13th symphony for 100 electric guitars at the base of the World Trade Center in New York City in June 2001. Since that time his 100 guitar piece has been performed in cities all over the U.S. and Europe. In 2008 he wrote his 14th Symphony, entitled "The Harmonic Series", which is performed by a traditional orchestra. The first movement of this symphony, named "2,000,000,000 Light Years From Home" premiered in St. Louis performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Robertson on November 13, 2008. This was the 12th major orchestra to perform Branca's orchestral work since 1986.
In 2008, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award as well as a Caps grant in 1983, an award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and a NYSCA grant in 1998, all for music composition. In 2010 Fortissimo Records re-released Brancas 1981 album The Ascension as a special edition on 180 grams vinyl and Branca wrote a piece The Ascension: The Sequel, which was released in the same year on the label Systems Neutralizers. This follow up piece led to new interest in his work and notable performances at Primavera Sound Festival 2011 and Villette Sonique 2011.