minimalist jukebox part II, Glenn Branca
last night the long lines of leather and colored hair resembled saturday night at my local club mr. t’s bowl than disney hall.
i kinda chuckled to myself as i passed this sign as i entered disney hall
performed on
tonight’s program
is amplified
should you need
earplugs, they are
available from
our ushers
yeah right, just an public service announcement to cover themselves if the bluehairs complained.
….wrong
it was loud, not just musically loud or rock concert loud, but performance art loud.
i’m not really sure if i witnessed a music concert or an art installation. after settling and watching the pure spectacle of 100 guitarists onstage (well maybe 84 according to ryan at losanjealous) i closed my eyes and let the sound take me over. i soon felt like i was hallucinating and layers of my skin were separating from my face. not in painful physical sort of way, but in that all so special private existential crisis.
after the initial sound explosion, eventually my body and ears adapted to the performance, which mostly consisted of more of the same wave after wave of strumming. after a while i realized branca had no intention of using any contrasts in dynamics to create any tension. he tried to get them to play soft in a few sections, but how about inserting a tacet here and there for greater effect? he did vary the tempos between the four mvts. labeled march, anthem, drive, and vengeance.
the sound was like nothing i had heard before, not really any discernable pitch but mostly the physical sensation air and noise being pushed through the amps. the main (and i think only) performance technique being used was a fast tremolo.
no chords, notes or lines being played at all during the evening. since each guitar was being treated as a single note percussion instrument the result was more akin to listening to rhythmic counterpoint rounds passed through the ensemble.
the setup for the evening was pretty simple, each guitarist brought his/her own amp that was pointed straight up toward the ceiling. scanning the program notes the branca organized the “guitar orchestra” similar to ATBB ( alto, tenor, baritone, bass) chorus with the alto guitar strings tuned to B or E(in octaves), tenor guitars tuned to G (in octaves), and the bass guitars tuned to normally. the ensemble was split into 25 different parts and one drummer. on paper this at least implied the attempt at orchestration. in reality the orchestration elements seemed to resemble a more modular approach to composition and orchestration (terry riley).
the descriptions of this concert and the new samuel l. jackson movie both have one thing in common.
