Glenn Branca writes symphonies for guitars — really loud guitars. It’s music for large spaces, and not simply for volume’s sake, though even the most ambitious and colorful of this New York City–based composer’s works rock like hell. Branca’s music requires room for the sound of his instruments to swell up and create cumulus clouds of overtones that hang over the notes and chords and generate completely different sonic effects.
When he debuted his Symphony No. 6, the aptly titled Angel Choirs at the Gates of Hell, at Harvard’s high-ceilinged Sanders Theatre in the late 1980s, the result was astonishing. Those angels could be heard singing over the audience and his Glenn Branca Ensemble, as well as the peal of horns, hordes of buzzing bees, and the howl of the wind. It seemed like sonic magic, albeit achieved through his intensive studies of string vibration, amplification, guitar pick-ups, performance-space dynamics, and textural composition.
So it’s surprising that Branca, who is now seven more symphonies into his career (his most recent was written for 100 guitars and debuted at the former World Trade Center), is playing a pair of small clubs in the area. Next Friday, he’ll appear at T.T. the Bear’s in Central Square; the following night he’ll be at AS220 in downtown Providence.
For this Emerson College grad, it’s something of a return to his early career roots, when he led the avant-rock bands Theoretical Girls and the Static (both seminal acts in the late-’70s NYC No Wave scene that spawned, most famously, Branca acolytes Sonic Youth). But the new four-piece group Branca-Bloor he’s formed with his wife, Reg Bloor, don’t abandon the swirling sonic universe he’s spent the last 25 years mastering. " I’m playing the harmonics guitar, which is a weird doubled-backwards-upside-down guitar that I developed, " he explains. " I’ve played the harmonics guitar for many years, but it’s been this big piece of plywood on a table. A friend suggested I turn it into a regular rock-and-roll instrument that I could wear around my neck. So I took two guitars and screwed them together. There are pick-ups on both sides of the strings. It doesn’t need a resonant space. I can rely on the high harmonics always being there, wherever we play. "
