Musicians - Glenn Branca

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > Glenn Branca

	Musicians - Glenn Branca

Glenn Branca (born October 6, 1948 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is an avant-garde composer and guitarist.

Branca studied theater at Emerson College in Boston in the early 1970s. While there, he began experimenting with sound as the founder of an experimental theater group called Bastard Theater. He moved to New York in 1976, aligning himself with the No Wave movement. He formed two bands in the late 1970s, first Theoretical Girls (with composer/guitarist Jeffrey Lohn) and later The Static. He also performed Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio in 1977, an experience that was very important in the development of his compositional voice (Branca 1979).

In the early 1980s, he composed several medium-length compositions for electric guitar ensembles, including The Ascension (1981) and Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (1981). He soon thereafter began composing symphonies for orchestras of electric guitars and percussion, which blended droning industrial cacophony and microtonality with quasi-mysticism and advanced mathematics. Starting with Symphony No. 3 ("Gloria") (1983), he began to systematically compose for the harmonic series, which he considered to be the structure underlying not only all music but most human endeavors. In this project, Branca was initially influenced by the writings of Dane Rudhyar, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Harry Partch. He also built several electrically amplified instruments of his own invention, expanding his ensemble beyond the guitar. Early members of his group included Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Page Hamilton of Helmet, and several members of Swans.

Beginning with Symphony No. 7, Branca began composing for traditional orchestra (although he never abandoned the electric guitar). Branca also plays duets for excessively amplified guitars with his wife, and conducted his 13th symphony for 100 electric guitars at the base of the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. He recently finished his 14th symphony, which he has performed in France, Belgium, Germany, and in the US with a quartet that includes his wife Regina Bloor on guitar, Tony Cenicola on drums, and Ryan Walsh on bass guitar. More information on his music can be found on his webpage below.

Branca's music has finally begun to receive academic attention. Some scholars, most prominently Kyle Gann, consider him (and Chatham) to be a member of the totalist school of post-minimalism.

Discography

#Lesson #1 For Electric Guitar (99 Records, 1980) #The Ascension (99 Records, 1981) #Symphony #3 (Gloria) (Atavistic, 1983) #Symphony #1 (Tonal Plexus) (ROIR, 1983) #Symphony #6 (Devil Choirs At The Gates Of Heaven) (Atavistic, 1989) #Symphony #2 (The Peak of the Sacred) (Atavistic, 1992) #The World Upside Down (Crepuscule, 1992) #The Mysteries (Symphonies #8 & #10) (Atavistic, 1994) #Symphony #9 (L'eve Future) (Point, 1995) #Symphony #5 (Describing Planes Of An Expanding Hypersphere) (Atavistic, 1999)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Glenn Branca ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Glenn Branca; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay