A Symphony for 100 Electric Guitars

I arrived on the first day of rehearsal for Glenn Branca’s Symphony No. 13, Hallucination City, carrying my bass guitar on my back and a heavy amplifier borrowed from a bandmate by its top-mounted handle. The dinky practice amp I keep in my apartment wouldn’t do. 

One might think that a piece like this one, scored for 80 electric guitars, 20 basses, and one drum kit, would call for each musician to play at about the volume of a violin or a clarinet, so that together they approximate the dynamic range of a more traditional orchestra. That may have been what the people who left were expecting as we performed at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on Friday. A substantial lot picked up their things and made for the exits within the piece’s opening minutes, or so I’m told. I was too consumed with anticipation to notice, counting my way through the 78 and a half measures of silence that open my part as the other guitars buzzed like lightning-charged locusts, gathering in a swarm that was also a storm. The beginning is one of the quiet parts, relatively speaking. In soundcheck, Reg Bloor, our leader, listened to each of us 100 playing for a few seconds unaccompanied to dial in our volume, and often conveyed with a brusque upward gesture that the amp should be louder. I don’t think I once saw her tell someone to turn down. 

I was familiar with Branca’s music more by reputation than experience when I received an invitation to play in the Hallucination City orchestra a few weeks before the performance. Sonic Youth and Swans were two important bands to my teenage development as a fan of loud, dissonant, and otherwise confrontational music, and I knew that members of both had done stints in Branca’s 1980s ensembles that were influential on the albums I loved. It wasn’t until adulthood that I understood just how influential, when an avuncular noise-scene veteran whom my band was crashing with on tour passed around a joint and put the composer’s mind-blowing 1981 album The Ascension on the turntable after a gig. That night, I learned that so much of what thrilled me about both bands, and what I wanted from experimental guitar music in general—the sense of volume and repetition as routes to transcendence that lies painfully beyond daily experience, the hot coals over which one must walk to reach it; the discipline of a band in lockstep rhythm and the freedom of amps squalling out of control—came directly from him. 

In 2018, Branca died of throat cancer. Bloor, his widow and close collaborator, lived and worked with him for his final 18 years, playing in his ensembles and helping to translate his idiosyncratic notation into sheet music. (He was known to compose with dots and jagged lines on graph paper.) She would be conducting his music for the first time since his death, leading a performance of his most ambitious work at his home city’s premiere symphonic concert hall, the sort of validation from the classical-music establishment that mostly eluded him during his life. The stakes were high. I was nervous as I contemplated the invitation. Though I can read music, it’s been years since I’ve been required to do so with any regularity. Branca was not exactly known as a mellow guy; perhaps Bloor would conduct his work with an iron fist. But I knew an opportunity like this one probably wouldn’t come again. 100 cranked amps onstage at Lincoln Center. What was I going to do, say no?

My girlfriend Katie and I were running late that first day. We figured, with 100 guitarists commuting to midtown Manhattan for a 10 a.m. call time, we wouldn’t be the only ones. Katie was playing in the Tenor 5 section; I was Bass 2. The amount of rehearsal ahead of us seemed both daunting and insufficient. Two ten-hour days, then we’d take the stage on the evening of the third. Sure enough, lots of others were still pulling up as we arrived. We milled around at the loading dock of a rehearsal studio whose regular clients are Broadway shows and arena-filling pop acts, waiting for a freight elevator to descend for our amps. We hugged friends, some of whom we knew were playing and others pleasant surprises, and introduced ourselves to strangers, teasing out degrees of connection through mutual acquaintances. 

Despite the harshness of the music we were there to play, the energy was warm and welcoming, goofy and earnest. It felt like avant-garde summer camp. We met a bassist named Brenna and quickly sussed out that she’s friendly with a punk-jazz drummer-composer whose band Katie played in for a few years, and who was also a longtime friend and collaborator of Branca’s. Brenna shared a mysterious remark the punk-jazzer had made when she told him she’d be playing in Symphony 13. With Branca—I’m paraphrasing—the real genius was in the music that existed only in his head. The pieces you can actually hear are just his doomed attempts to capture it. We had a laugh about this idea in the loading dock that morning. How could this guy know what Branca heard in his head?

Hallucination City is scored for something like 20 distinct sections. Sometimes, they sound in unison, but often, they work at complex cross-purposes: pinprick patterns of call and response, submerged countermelodies, drones that ebb and recede past each other with the irregular regularity of the tides. At one point, after a day of trying and failing to wrap my mind around a challenging rhythmic passage at the top of the third movement, I realized that the score had my section playing in jerky 7/8 while the rest of the ensemble charged ahead in 4/4, though there was no marked change in the time signature. The graph paper started to make more sense. Sheet music was useful for communicating Branca’s ideas to players, but they really live outside of the barlines. 

The line about the music in his head started to make sense too. Rehearsing Symphony 13 reminded me of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. With everything happening at once, at an extremity of volume that’s difficult to convey in writing, it’s all you can do to hold the sound of your own section in your mind, plus maybe one or two of the sections seated nearest you if you’re really paying attention. You are only touching the elephant’s toe. Anyone with even a modicum of concern for their future ability to hear is wearing earplugs. As a bassist, I was seated in back, near the drums, and had little idea what the people up front were doing most of the time. After rehearsals, Katie and I would try to compare parts and we might as well have been comparing our lives in different countries. Trying to hear the whole piece at once is like trying to hear the whole world. 

It was tempting to believe, at first, that it didn’t really matter if you messed up. The audience would experience the music as an impenetrable wall of noise whether it was played correctly or not. But as we ran each movement a number of times, the attitude in the room shifted. Those of us who’d slacked off on preparing our parts in advance spent breaks studying the music, pencil in hand. By day two, my section had crystallized. Hard, elegant edges emerged from the amorphous rumbling. Dynamic shifts that had once seemed arbitrary became arresting and sensuous. I began to look forward to a passage early in the final movement, when, from beneath the howling chaos, at the delicate upper ranges of our basses, we sang out a sequence of arpeggiated major chords. 

As for whether the audience would appreciate these details, or even perceive them, we just had to have faith. I kept thinking of an impossible ideal version of Symphony 13 that exists somewhere out beyond the limits of human hearing and the acoustic properties of the rooms in which we played. A version that could show you the whole world at once; the version Glenn Branca heard in his head. It’s easy to dwell on his work’s confrontational aspects: I like to think he would have been satisfied by the Lincoln Center walkouts, were he around to witness them. But the thing that will really stick with me from performing Symphony 13 is the collective effort to render its vast and elusive beauty with the greatest fidelity available to us, knowing that we’ll never hear it in full and trying anyway. It’s bigger than you, and it will keep lumbering on whether you join in or not. No one can hear your individual contribution, not even the person sitting next to you, possibly not even you. Certainly not the audience. But if everyone drops out, the music stops. 

The symphony’s most dramatic moment comes a few minutes before the end. The progress from measure to measure pauses for a time. You reach an extended fermata, a tidepool of sorts, strumming open strings and waiting for Bloor’s cue to proceed. You knock your guitar out of tune on purpose, obliterating the possibility that the music will close on a note of unexpected consonance. She begins conducting with her entire body, crouching and stretching and waving her arms in ecstasy, bringing the orchestra from a whisper to a roar and back again. In rehearsals, it became clear that the quietness of the quiet parts was as important to her as the loudness of the loud: We would run certain sections over and over, and she would remind us, with increasing conviction, that we should be playing at piano. When we reached the tidepool, it never failed to bring tears to my eyes, the way she hushed us by hunching close to the ground and urged us along by standing and shaking, wielding our collective volume as an extension of herself. I couldn’t help but think about the personal dimension the performance must have for her, the grief and the celebration, and the way it was all coming out through our 100 cranked amps. 

At Lincoln Center, for whatever reason, we skipped the tidepool. Just rushed right past it. I don’t know why. We tacked it on at the end, but it didn’t hit in the same way, not with the same fragility or the same force. This disappointed me in the moment, and it still does. But I’m trying to think of it differently. It sounds funny, given how aggressively the music seizes the attention of anyone nearby, but there’s something very private about the experience of playing Symphony 13. You are protected by the noise, as a member of the orchestra. It encloses and shields you. The impressions of the audience—whether they are revolted or elated, bored or on the edges of their seats—are of little consequence. I was glad when people told me they liked it, of course, but I didn’t truly understand what they meant, or what they’d heard. In any performance, there is an experience of the work that exists only for the performers and another only for the audience, and in this one the difference is especially pronounced. It was somehow appropriate that the whole raging tenderness of the tidepool was only for us. No one can hear the whole world. But in those moments, we got close.