E-Mail This Article to a Friend Symphonic rock Glenn Branca leads 100 guitarists through his Symphony No. 13 BY JONATHAN DIXON

NEW YORK — Composer Glenn Branca stands under the vaulted ceiling of Studio A in the Kaufman Astoria Studios, with alternating flickers of patience and annoyance at play across his face, looking out over 100 guitarists. There are no clocks anywhere on the walls, but the passing minutes are becoming palpable. The musicians have been in this room for hours, having arrived with their instruments that morning to play on Branca’s recording of Symphony No. 13: Hallucination City, and not much has gone right.

But no one on either side — the orchestra pit or the conductor’s podium — shows anything more than subliminal hints of frustration. The guitarists slump or swivel in their chairs, raking their picks across muted, de-volumed strings. Branca has gone from leaving the room to smoke cigarettes to just lighting up where he stands.

This isn’t the first time 100 guitarists have assembled in one room — composer Rhys Chatham did it in 1989 for his symphony An Angel Moves Too Fast To See — and neither is it the first time Branca has performed this piece. Symphony No. 13 had its debut on the plaza of the World Trade Center on June 14, 2001, just three months before the WTC came under attack. It was performed at twilight, with the red sun reflecting off the glass of the towers. The performance was a glorious mess; where Chatham’s work is disciplined and nuanced, at his peak, Branca writes music that could shake Olympus. This was music that aimed to match the grandeur of the city’s skyline. The night of its debut, the center didn’t always hold, and sometimes the whole thing tripped over into chaos; playing outside worked against the sonics of the ensemble, and some of the rush of the music got lost amid the concrete. A few who participated said they felt under-rehearsed. But there were moments that made your pulse race. Symphony No. 13 is one long crescendo, full of tension from the first measure, building and building, climbing in a roar of consonances and dissonances. It’s music that at every point moves to ascend. Branca’s second "guitar record," from 1981, was called The Ascension.

The studio players want to make the piece ascend. They’re doing the session — scheduled for 20 hours over two days — for free, and they’ve come from all over: Boston, Memphis, California, Minnesota, and parts of England and Canada. The musicians are divided into nine sections of tenor and alto guitars and basses, each under the supervision of a section leader who’s a veteran of Branca’s past ensembles. The median age of the guitarists is early 20s, and almost everyone I speak with approaches the session with the same seriousness and concentration that a young independent filmmaker might show if he were given the chance to go back and work on a John Cassavetes film.

Branca — who first came to New York in the mid ’70s to pursue experimental theater but soon moved to the fringes of the rock scene — is one of the most important figures in American music today because of the sway that two of his acolytes (and former ensemble members), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, have held over much of the interesting rock produced during the last couple of decades. As an innovator, Branca is the very definition of the undersung, undervalued artist. It was from Branca that Moore and Ranaldo learned the true potential of distortion and volume when deployed by electric guitars — the effects of massed overtones in an enclosed space. Whenever you get to that point in a Sonic Youth concert where the sound accretes to take on physical mass accompanied by phantom voices and instruments that seem to have no specific source on stage, you’re hearing Branca. If Sonic Youth were the most influential band of the late ’80s and early ’90s (consider offspring like the Pixies and Nirvana), then much of that influence is owed to Branca. And as a modern composer, he’s been recognized by everyone from concert-music scribes like John Rockwell and Kyle Gann to the Queen of Denmark, for whom he once played.

As Sonic Youth made an Orphic climb out of the underground, they wore Branca’s influence as a badge of pride. The musicians here are all aware of this. But they share one additional, more visceral motivation: almost everyone remarks to me at one point or another, "I had to know what 100 guitars was going to sound like." Plus, as section leader John Myers puts it, "I just had to be here; how many times in your life is this going to happen?"

Branca too wants to make the piece ascend. He’s worked with ensembles of massed guitars for almost three decades, and this symphony is a kind of culmination. The sound of it, the almost constant upward rocketing, and the sheer size takes ambition to the point of hubris: overtone-driven shock and awe, music drunk on electricity and volume. And if his ascension didn’t aim for transcendence, it would be purely hubristic. You can only imagine what it sounded like in all its purity, ringing in his head, before he wrote it down. Not for nothing was one earlier symphony subtitled "The Peak of the Sacred" and another "Devils Choirs at the Gates of Heaven."