Memorial Thoughts about Glenn Branca

Today provided yet another reminder of why I am reluctant to subscribe to The New York Times in either a print or an online version. Glenn Branca died on May 13, yet it was only through an article that came through my “NYT > Arts” RSS feed this morning that I became aware of the news. The article was by Seth Colter Walls, and it was apparently classified as a “pop music story,” which is a category that I tend to avoid. The piece was a “top ten tracks” affair with a passing reference that a “full obituary of Mr. Branca will follow.”

Personally, I feel that Branca deserves far more than the usual “pop treatment.” Many, if not most, of his albums deserve to be treated as a coherent whole, even if listing to that whole in its entirety could border on the unbearable. My own “first contact” with Branca came through choreographer Twyla Tharp when I saw a performance of “Bad Smells” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Branca wrote the music explicitly for the choreography, and the performance provided me with one of my most memorable encounters of unrelenting dissonance that was both auditory and visual. Thanks to Tharp, Branca’s name became firmly planted in my long-term memory.

Over subsequent years I began to follow up by collecting full albums, first on vinyl and subsequently on CD. The first of those albums was his third symphony, whose full text title was Gloria: Music for the First 127 Intervals of the Harmonic Series. (Those who have followed this site for some time can probably figure out why the title appealed to me.) The album was a recording of a performance made at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 16, 1983; so the venue itself had a positive disposition. What appealed to me was the intense discipline required to perform this music, whose dissonant stance departed significantly from the approach taken for “Bad Smells.”

On the other hand I was becoming braced for the sterner stuff. I arrived at that point when I went back to the first symphony, whose full title is Tonal Plexus: Music in Four Movements for Multiple Guitars, Keyboards, Brass and Percussion. This was one of those pieces that could never be given a satisfactory account through recording, simply because the intensity of it all would blow out just about any audio equipment intended for home use. As one of my old friends put it, this was “music to melt the wax in your ears.” Quite honestly, I doubt that I would have the stamina to sit through this music being performed; but, even at the “distance” imposed by recording, I could appreciate the intensity and the rhetorical stance that took one to the brink of unrelenting violence.

I would later learn that Branca’s approach may have been one of the few performance experiences that turned out to be too much for John Cage. Thus, the release of the album Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses came with a booklet including text entitled “Cage’s Folly;” and a recording of Cage in conversation with Wim Mertons. Whether Branca really came too close to the brink of fascism (or crossed it), as Cage suggested, in some of his performances may be debated for some time. These days I suspect that many would find what he did relatively mild compared to more recent disruptive approaches to performance. What is most important, however, is that there was always a solid foundation of music behind the surface structures of intense amplitude and rhetoric.

It is probably time for me to go back to review the Branca corpus, not as isolated tracks but as the well-conceived architectures that the composer had in mind.

Exploring the Harmonic Series

In writing about Sofia Gubaidulina's "The Light of the End," performed by the San Francisco Symphony last week, I made a comment to the effect that composers who have explored the sounds of natural harmonics often fall into the trap of what I called "aimless wandering;" and I realize that this may deserve some further explanation. The history of our Western music tradition is, among other things, a tradition of normative usage. This is already evident in the manuscripts collected by Edmond de Coussemaker, particularly those in his Scriptorum de Musica Medii aevi. One of my favorite examines is the "Ars Cantus Mensurabilis" of Magistri Franconis (Franco of Cologne), one of the first manuscripts to document the synchronization of the voices of polyphonic music through rhythmic patterns. Rather like a pioneer of knowledge engineering, Franco attempted to infer "rules of practice" from examples of how both he and those around him were "making" polyphonic music around the end of the thirteenth century. By the middle of the twentieth century we had teachers like Arnold Schoenberg departing from the traditional pedagogy of the "rules" of harmony and species counterpoint to try to identify how every note of a composition served a "structural function," based on where it was situated in the score (structure) and how it served what I have called the composition's journey through time (function).

When one departs from the twelve-tone scale (particularly under equal-tempered tuning but, to some extent, also under other tuning systems), one also departs from a massive body of normative usage. What I meant by "aimless wandering" is that many composers interested in exploring natural harmonics can easily fall into the trap of just "noodling" (as one of my own composition teachers put it) up and down the harmonic series. (I offered Glenn Branca's third symphony as an example.) At the very end of "The Light of the End," Gubaidulina has a solo cello do this sort of thing, playing a series of arpeggios that rise from a fundamental, each one ascending to a slightly higher harmonic. To my ears, however, this was less a matter of "noodling" and more an effort to summarize the vocabulary of natural harmonics that had supported so much of the harmonic and contrapuntal structures we had been hearing since the beginning of the piece.

This morning I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a precedent to this "structural function" of arpeggiating through natural harmonics. It occurs at the end of the first movement ("Dialogo") of Benjamin Britten's C major sonata for cello and piano (Opus 65). The notes (no author cited) for my Etcetera CD of this sonata describe this "dialog" as a "wistful, oddly Brahmsian discussion of a rising or falling second, a nervous rhythmic tension being imparted by the piano's scalic thirds." Now I may be reading too much into how I heard this movement, but I came away feeling that the invocation of the harmonic series in the coda of this movement served as a reflection on the origins of those thirds and particularly the seconds. When it came to natural harmonics, we know from the open horn solo that begins and ends his Opus 31 serenade that Britten was too disciplined to give in to "noodling." The few upper harmonics that deviate the most from the equal-tempered scale frame an extremely visceral climax in that solo. Britten may not have been familiar with what Schoenberg was teaching about "structural function;" but this solo offers an excellent demonstration of the principle. I am thus willing to assume, with a relatively high level of confidence, that the arpeggiation of the harmonic series in his later cello sonata is guided by that same principle.

Was Gubaidulina influenced by Britten's precedent? Whether or not she had any direct relationship with Britten, there is a good chance that she was aware of performances by Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Britten's sonata was composed. Indeed, Rostropovich was still alive and active when Gubaidulina was working on "The Light of the End;" so there is at least a remote possibility that she would have been honoring him by assigning a solo cello passage to the coda of her work and then recognizing another coda that had been composed for him. This is a rather tenuous chain of hypotheses; but, in the context of this blog, it is close enough for rehearsal practices!

Naturally Harmonic

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that much of the history of Western music has been involved with the evolution of tuning systems to deal with the tension between the "naturally occurring" intervals of the harmonic series and the need for a more manageable collection of pitches and intervals (which is not necessarily a subset of the "natural" set). Joseph Yasser's Theory of Evolving Tonality begins his own model with the pentatonic scale (as in the pitches of the black keys on a piano keyboard), demonstrating how its pitches emerge from the first five perfect fifths in the harmonic series (if we begin on C, that would be C-G-D-A-E). In other words our first effort at a "scale" emerged from a sequence of 2:3 ratios.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. Most importantly, it overlooks the emergence of the tonic-dominant relation that has dominated almost all of Western harmonic theory. That relation is the inverse of the 2:3 ratio, which, mathematically, would be a 3:4 ratio; but that ratio never emerges as you keep piling on more perfect fifths. From a mathematical point of view, the problem is that there is no pair of non-zero integers, n and m, such that 3ⁿ = 2^m. In slightly more mystical language, you can always "depart" from your fundamental pitch to a fifth; but, if you keep going on that path, you can never return to that fundamental. To the extent that much of musical structure can be approached through the metaphor of a journey, the physical fact that you can never return is problematic.

By the eighteenth century those who made instruments, particularly keyboard instruments, came to deal with this problem through equal-tempered tuning. The octave would be divided into equal intervals, each of which was based on the same ratio of 1:2^(1/12) (the twelfth root of two). Mathematically, this meant that a "journey" of twelve of these intervals would take you back to the simplest harmonic ratio of a pitch to its octave, 1:2. It also meant that all of the natural intervals of the harmonic series based on integer ratios (i.e. rational numbers) could only be approximated by the irrational ratios of 1:2^(1/12), 1:2^(2/12), 1:2^(3/12), 1:2^(4/12), 1:2^(5/12), 1:2^(6/12), 1:2^(7/12), 1:2^(8/12), 1:2^(9/12), 1:2^(10/12), and 1:2^(11/12). Since the adoption of equal-tempered tuning, music history has seen the efforts of several composers to return to the natural harmonic series for both harmony and counterpoint.

This week Kurt Masur introduced to the San Francisco Symphony and its audiences one of the most recent of these efforts, "The Light of the End," which Sofia Gubaidulina completed in 2003. Masur conducted the premier of this work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; so he was, in may ways, the best person to bring it now to San Francisco. In his program notes for this work, Thomas May spoke of the intervals of the harmonic series as "deviations from conventional tuning," meaning that we perceive them as "out of tune." This is, to a great extent, true and is even reinforced by the psychological theory of categorical perception. However, since the rise of electronic and other experimental musics following the Second World War, we have been exposed to a wide variety of synthesized sounds; and many of those sounds have returned to their roots (pun somewhat intended) in the harmonic series. We are thus less susceptible to those out-of-tune judgments induced by categorical perception than we were around fifty years ago.

From this new vantage point, we can listen to Gubaidulina's score for what it is, an exploration of the dialectic between the traditional sonorities of equal-tempered tuning and those of musical instruments' natural harmonics. In Gubaidulina's personal aesthetic there is pain in this dialectical opposition; and there is no doubt that "The Light of the End" reveals that pain through considerable tension in both harmonic and contrapuntal constructs. However, listening to it is also a marvelous exploratory experience. It invites the same sense of wonder that John Cage had summoned in his most famous experiment based on the hypothesis that one could make a composition of those sounds that occurred naturally while one sat in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. However, while Cage's innovation reflected a let-it-be philosophy, Gubaidulina's is one of meticulous construction with an extremely broad palette of sonorities. It is also well informed by what Arnold Schoenberg called the "structural functions" of harmony and counterpoint. This is important because much of the pioneering work with such "deviant" intervals, whether in La Monte Young's "Well-Tuned Piano" performances or Glenn Branca's third ("Gloria") symphony (subtitled "Music for the first 127 intervals of the harmonic series"), has been little more than the sort of "aimless wandering" I recently attributed to Giuseppe Verdi. "The Light of the End" is very much a journey along which both harmony and counterpoint are steadily at work to move the mind behind the ear in a forward direction.

Needless to say, this is a process that is as complex as it is tense. So I can account for little more than the superficial impressions of a first immediate exposure. I suspect that I would have done well to attend all three performances this week, but I hope that it will not be a long wait before I have another opportunity to hear this piece. It has certainly benefitted from having Masur as a champion, but I hope that other conductors will soon follow Masur's lead. (I could make a pun about picking up his baton, but Masur now conducts without one.)

One might think that Anton Bruckner's fourth symphony ("Romantic" in E-flat major) would be an odd work to pair with "The Light of the End." However, in its own way this particular symphony is its own "Gloria" (as Branca had put it) to the 2:3 and 3:4 harmonic ratios. Horns figure significantly throughout the entire symphony; and much of their language is kept at a relatively fundamental intervallic level, at least until the full brass section erupts in the harmonic richness of the third movement's "hunting scene." This is not a particularly sophisticated piece of music; but, as I have written about Olivier Messiaen, the music is a product of a highly devout sense of faith. Thus, matters such as those "structural functions" of harmony and counterpoint (not to mention overall form) are secondary to Bruckner's invocation of a devotional spirit. Successful performance thus depends on being able to summon that sense of devotion without succumbing to self-indulgence. Masur achieved this through a sure sense of pace. Bruckner may have preferred meditation to journey; but Masur knew how to bring out the journey in this symphony and advance us through its four movements, even when the discourse of those movements was at its most repetitive.

As a result the entire evening amounted to a sustained meditation on natural phenomena. This made for a rare experience of aesthetic explorations grounded in philosophical assurances. This is hardly the stuff for a steady diet of concert-going; but, when it comes around, it becomes far more memorable than we can anticipate.