Talking with the Congenially Caustic Glenn Branca

Glenn Branca

Symphony No. 12 is the densest, most succinct piece you've ever done.

Well, I finally got to a place where some of the ideas I was using in the orchestral music could be adapted for the guitars. It was something I thought I wouldn't be able to do, because with the orchestra there's so much more transparency?you don't have the tremendous volume and the tremendous overtones. If you make the chords too dense, you just get mud. On this piece, I capture some of the subtleties that I was getting with the orchestra, and I felt as though it worked. I'm not sure how successful the actual concert was. Onstage, it sounded like a fucking dull roar to me, but it wouldn't be the first time that's happened and it sounded good in the room, so I don't know. But that's the reason why it seemed to be denser. Also, this is the first guitar piece where I've really worked with the dynamics a lot. It would be a pity if the volume in the room may have been so high that the dynamics were lost.

The title, Tonal Sexus, is obviously a play on the title of your first symphony, Tonal Plexus, from 1981. They're comparable works. Have you come full circle?

There's no question that the full-circle thing was going though my mind. What happened was that I went as far as I wanted to go with the guitars, and my interest was in writing the orchestral music. The opportunity came up to write another guitar piece. I was not interested in continuing in the direction in which I had been going with the guitars. It was sort of like dropping everything and starting over again and not really worrying about it. [Tonal Sexus] is obviously a somewhat facetious title. My titles at least usually have the potential to be more serious. This is a pretty shallow, obvious allusion. But yeah, Tonal Sexus was meant to be a more direct, hard-hitting kind of thing.

Your conducting methods are pretty open-ended. Sometimes you seem to just say the hell with it. How much of your work is totally fixed?

First of all, all of the work is fixed, at least compositionally. I want it to be exactly what I want every fucking time, so every damn minute of every damn note has been written out. As far as the conducting is concerned, for years I haven't really conducted in any meaningful way. In fact, it's not even necessary to have a conductor. I've even entertained ideas of sending the group out by themselves, but most promoters would not allow that. They want me to be there doing my shtick. [Tonal Sexus] was the first time that I didn't even bother to pretend I was looking at a score. In fact, all I ever do is dance around in front of the music. Going back to Symphony No. 1, when I actually took my guitar off, put it on the ground and started conducting. It was never a conscious decision. I was just giving cues with my guitar, but eventually there was too much to do. But what I also discovered was that when I started moving around, all of sudden the music began to swell, it began to implode, it began to become exciting. That still seems to be the case. I know for a fact that musicians do like to watch me jumping around. It definitely is a source of entertainment during what are, in fact, very difficult pieces to play.

Whatever happened to your idea of writing a piece for 2000 guitars, which you would have performed in Paris for the coming of 2000?

First of all, it wasn't my idea. It was my agent's idea. She got funding for it. In fact, I was paid to write the piece. It would have been Symphony No. 13. The sketch of the piece is completely finished; in a few days I could have the entire piece written out. But it required a tremendously large budget. It was gonna be funded by the French government. It would have cost about a million dollars, and it's clear that that was just too much money. Over a period of about two years, the thing slowly caved in, though I did receive my commission, so I'm not complaining.

Nice work if you can get it.

[sneering] Thank you, I hope everyone's very happy for me. But I should add that my agent has hatched the idea to do the piece in a reduced version, to tour a piece that would require 500 or 600 guitars in arenas. It is possible that we'll still be doing something with it, in which French guitarists will be openly invited to come and play.

Why do you play in New York so infrequently?

No one can afford to pay me what I have to be paid. When I first started out, there were times when the musicians played for nothing or practically nothing. Very quickly I decided that that can't happen. When we're talking about 12 people, it gets to be expensive. It costs a few thousand dollars just for me to do a gig. Very few venues in New York will pay that kind of money because people in New York will pay to play. I'd play every month if someone would book me and pay me properly.

Yet you're still based here. Why not move to Paris or some arts-supporting haven, like Rhys Chatham or so many of your peers?

That sounds great to me, man. Why don't I move to Paris? Jesus Christ, I can't even pay the rent next month! I'm stuck here like everybody else.

Any comments on that photo of the Queen of Denmark holding her ears during one of your performances?

We performed at an outdoor festival and it was a mixed program. I didn't want to insult the Queen, so I gave her the shortest possible amount of music; we only performed eight minutes [of Symphonies Nos. 8 and 10]. First of all, in that picture, she was not holding her ears. Everyone in her entourage was holding their ears. But the Queen could not, you see, because it would have been an insult. So she sat there. And suffered!

Branca's website is [glennbranca.com]. Most of Branca's works are available on Atavistic Records ([atavistic.com](http://www.atavistic.com)).