Glenn Branca Ascends in Brooklyn

The New York Downtown arts scene – the music side of it in particular – is something I've touched at a dozen different points without ever grabbing hold of it. Like a leitmotif it keeps showing up on the edges of my life, and I keep resisting the idea of making it my scene. This is usually followed by regret, years later, when I see how rich and enduring it is and how lovingly its true exponents and fans embrace it.

Still, not really feeling a part of the scene doesn't quite explain why I have never been to a Glenn Branca concert until tonight, though I was aware of his music almost from the time he set foot in New York in the late 1970's. I suppose I have told this story before, but since most of the readers of this blog won't have heard it why not give it one more chance. When I was a student at the Mannes Conservatory – now a college of the New School – in the late 1970's, my brother and I formed a rock band. We quickly outgrew the Upper West Side bedroom we had converted into a music studio and started looking for rehearsal space – one that was all but free, since we had very little money. I can't recall how we found it – probably an ad in the Village Voice – but we managed to locate someone who wanted to share a basement rehearsal studio at 262 Mott St. That someone was Jules Baptiste, who founded the band Red Decade. At that time Jules was performing with Glenn Branca; that's how I heard of him, and his "symphony for 100 guitars". It sounded like a crazy idea, not to mention probably too loud for my tastes. Besides, since Jules was playing landlord – and, we assumed, having us largely subsidize his studio – we sometimes just barely got along, so running out to see him play wasn't a top priority.

Well, there it stood, for, um... about 37 years – until tonight. Today, the stars just aligned – thanks to my wife taking my daughter and mother-in-law on a cruise to Halifax (the purpose of it, lest there be any confusion, was not specifically to allow me to see Glenn Branca). Having that rare, momentary notion of myself as a "free man" from around 2:30 p.m. today until a few days from now, I was already more open than usual to the concept of an evening adventure. The notice of a Branca concert this very night – at Roulette, an easy trip on the R train from my remote Bay Ridge location – somehow slid beneath my eye as I leafed through the NY Times. Even more enticing, the premier of a memorial piece for David Bowie, with whom Branca had briefly collaborated and who was an admirer of his music.

So there I was at the stroke of 8:00, complimentary earplugs in hand, ready to experience my first Branca concert. What did it feel like? Well, not very different from the day I sat in a different Downtown room (The Kitchen, I think) waiting to hear my first (and last) Cecil Taylor concert. Expectations of an immersive but not terribly easy experience. Nothing I can take out on the street and hum as I head back to the subway. A feeling of obligation – to myself, to St Cecilia, to some spiritual link that I can only place by thinking of a lot of vague connections. I look around, and imagine everyone over 50 to be someone I either know, or should know, but can't recognize after decades of hair style and body weight changes. Patrons of the Downtown circuit who have either had works performed here or at least smoked dope with Phillip Glass, if not Andy Warhol. Feeling oddly at home, like I belong here, even though everyone knows everyone else, or so I assume.

The first item on the program was a set of six pieces called The Third Ascension, a recent work for four guitars, bass and drums. Each piece had a slightly different impact. The first, "German Expressionism", seemed to have more open sounds and events than some of the others, though it also featured a bit of energetic improv, not to say wilding, by Reg Bloor (who is Branca's wife). Next was "The Smoke (Guitar Concerto for Arad Evans)", hardly a concerto in anything remotely like your usual sense, and featuring smoother and more tonal sonorities than the first. After a change in the guitar tunings, the next two pieces also featured the trance-like continuities that make the Downtown music scene what it is. I found both of them too loud to enjoy, even with the deeply appreciated earplugs. (I did not wear them through the whole concert but for these two pieces they were hardly out.)

Another tuning change preceded what turned out to be my favorite piece of the evening, "Twisting in Space", a mutating cloud of appealing soundscapes that reminded me a bit of something Robert Fripp and Brian Eno might have come up with. The last piece, "Cold Thing (La Belle Dame Sans Merci)" is, I suppose, appropriate to its subject, though once again I found the sonorities a bit harder to take than, say, the sound of two Boeing 767's landing on either side of you.

Finally at the end of the concert, with no special announcement or fanfare, came The Bowie tribute, "The Light (for David)". This I have to say was a complete success, for me at least: I felt transported, mesmerized in the way this kind of music is supposed to achieve, and had no inclination to reach for the earplugs in spite of the volume. In fact I was sorry it ended, as I was about as close to feeling stoned as I have ever been without drugs. (Okay, one bottle of Brooklyn Lager – does that count?) Bowie, I think, would have been pleased.

As for Branca, he "conducts", after a fashion; at least he signals changes of sonority to the performers. His music is oddly metrical, sometimes even sporting a heavy backbeat on the drums, and with the energetic drumming of Owen Weaver behind the ensemble there is no real need to keep a beat. Instead, Branca sways, bends his knees and swoons, extends his arms like St. Francis receiving the stigmata, and sometimes ushers the performers towards a change of volume or tempo. When he speaks (with some difficulty) he offers comments that suggest he is well aware of how challenging his music is – "We're only just getting started!" (three pieces into the concert); "we have another tuning change, so go get yourself a drink – you may need it".

Well, that's one down on my list of obligations. I see four upcoming Rhys Chatham concerts in the NY area – will I manage to get to one? That would be after, not 37 years, but let's be honest, more like 47. Rhys was my classmate at the Third Street Music School back around 1969 or so. Our teacher, Tom Manoff, kept close tabs on the new music scene, and took the class to visit Morton Subotnick's studio, where he demonstrated an early Buchla synthesizer. Manoff was the first person to encourage me to compose music. I don't recall seeing Rhys again after a went to college and left the Third Street settlement. I should pay him a visit.

(P.S. - Why no pictures or video clips? They were recording the concert and asked us not to take any pictures.)

Eighth Blackbird in The Kitchen

Birds of a feather flock together, they say. Unfortunately, few birds match up to the Parrot for feathers, and p.s. the Parrot doesn't use Flock to edit his blog (couldn't get it to work with Blogger). Be that as it may, we are happy to associate with non-predatory birds of all stripes, or even those lacking stripes. We therefore headed down to The Kitchen last Friday (yes, that's how long it takes me to post these days) to rescue a few imperiled turkeys, and instead found some perfectly contented Blackbirds making a joyous racket like we haven't heard since the last cicada festival.

"What's all this about?", you unfeathered species may ask. For starters, Eighth Blackbird is an ensemble of musicians who specialize in performing music by contemporary classical composers (I am aware of the near-oxymoron there, but let it slide for now). The small ensemble sports a couple of woodwinds (flute and clarinet), violin and cello, piano, and about a many percussion instruments as you can fit on a medium-sized stage.

The Parrot likes anyone who likes Wallace Stevens, and the name of the group obviously comes from Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (even if it didn't say so on their web site), the eighth verse of which has to do with musical accents and rhythms. Does Eighth Blackbird realize that when Stevens says, "I know too that the blackbird is involved in what I know", the blackbird represents death, the end of the musical tone, at which point the music can first sound in our imagination and become a thing of beauty? The Parrot is pleased to announce that Green represents life in the imagination for Stevens, which can happen only after the death of the real; that's why you have: "The blackbird sat in the cedar-limbs. The day was green." At least on my interpretation. Anyway...

The Kitchen, it so happens, is not the place where the parrots' and blackbirds's friends turn to roasts, but rather a central institution of the so-called Downtown arts scene since the 1970's. "Downtown" here is an aesthetic term and not a location. The Kitchen is now on West 19th Street in Chelsea, center of the contemporary plastic arts scene and a whole lot less geographically Downtown than it used to be. (The Knitting Factory, on the other hand, is geographically more downtown than it used to be when it was a Downtown performance space, but it is no longer aesthetically Downtown, just a concert space for a hodge-podge of rock groups.) The Kitchen maintains its Downtown aesthetic in its home between the Chelsea Piers sports center, the art galleries where anyone who fancies themselves an art collector goes to find the Next Big Thing, and the offices of the Dia Foundation arts center, where the Next Big Thing has already been found and labelled.

Going to a concert at The Kitchen was a an experience that reminded me of a song by one of the Parrot's favorite songwriters, Eric Alter of the Sloe Guns, who writes, "Even though he's never been, he dreams of going back to Dillon". At least I don't recall ever going to a performance at The Kitchen, though browsing through my 35 years worth of collected concert programs might convince me otherwise. So why the sense of eternal return? Well, I suppose this is excuse enough for a little name-dropping. H.A. Monk, under the name he was more commonly known by before becoming the world's least-linked-to Blog Star, has made the acquaintance of some interesting personages over the years. Perhaps the first was Rhys Chatham, with whom I sat in theory classes at the Third Street Music School many moons ago. I recall Rhys as a red-haired flutist with a large smile, but shortly thereafter he became the first music director of The Kitchen (and according to Wikipedia played the trumpet - but I swear that at that time he was running around with a flute). Our theory teacher, Tom Manoff, was a hip sort of guy who encouraged young musicians to experiment with new music. I was about 13 at the time. I used to travel with another musician friend of mine down to Sam Goody's record store and come home with a bag full of LP's. Sometimes we would bring home some contemporary (we're talking late 1960's) atonal work, which appeared to match the self-styled weirdness of our adolescent minds, and we soon started writing pieces which we thought of as tongue-in-cheek caricatures of what were had heard. But when I brought some of them to Manoff he took them very seriously, gave me some advice and encouraged me to keep writing. At one point he took the class to visit the electronic music studio of Morton Subotnik, who used an early device known as the Buchla synthesizer. This would have been roughly around 1967-8, when he was creating his famous pieces Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull. Chatham was also associated with a composer named Glen Branca. When my brother and I started a rock band in the early 1980's we rented a studio from a fellow named Jules Baptiste (no more his real name than a parrot called H.A. Monk), who was at that time performing with Branca. These are the people who created the Downtown music scene, and people you have probably heard of, like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, were some of the artists who emerged from it.

The Kitchen today carries on the tradition of music that was once called "experimental". Fair to say, it no longer sounds very experimental; be it the atonality of the Vienna School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), the adventures of the New York School (Morton Feldman, John Cage, etc.), the aleatoric compositions of Cage or Stockhausen, the droning of a Terry Riley or John Adams composition, or the various modes of electronica, it all sounds pretty standard, even historic. Once you get into exploring sound as sound, it opens up everything, but also closes off the idea of a new way or trend. Everything is experimental; so nothing is experimental. Everything is already modern; there ain't no "post-modern", because modernism already bit that one off. That's where I think we have gotten to; and why "contemporary classical" may not be such an oxymoron after all.

Nevertheless, this is far from an indictment of new music. In fact, once composers have settled into this system of sound exploration, what remains is an almost unlimited sphere for development and improvement of the ideas and techniques that once seemed to be so out on a limb that only a few gangly modernists would dare travel it. Since the more or less final, more or less complete overthrow of traditional Western classical tonality in the 1950's (to fix an arbitrary but not inaccurate date), composers have been free to build on one another, taking off many times from the same place but exploring the territory in a less naive way. It may still be hard to love some of this music, but it should not longer be hard to hear beauty, at least in bits and pieces, or to recognize mastery of the form.

Of the four pieces performed by Eighth Blackbird, the one I was most looking forward to was Jennifer Higdon's Zaka (2003). Why? Well, she was born in Brooklyn, for one, though she didn't grow up here but in Atlanta. But more importantly, I was floored by a 2004 recording of her Cityscape and Concerto for Orchestra (by Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra) and wanted to hear more. As it turned out, it was not my favorite piece on the program; rather more strident than I expected, whereas the orchestral pieces are well endowed with appealing sonorities. Nevertheless, it had some luxurious moments and exhibited what each of these pieces did: a maturity of sonority and texture that goes deeper than experimentation. I think back to pieces for similar ensembles from an earlier period - pieces by Luciano Berio, Edgar Varèse, Lukas Foss, and others, and what I hear now that I did not hear then is a kind of compositional comfort zone, where unusual sonorities are offered not in the mode of, "What about this?", but rather "Let's develop things this way". To put it another way: once composers relied on classical techniques (canon, fugure, inversion, prolongation, etc.) to give formal unity to these new and odd sounds. Now, if I am hearing things correctly, we are comfortable enough with the idea of these textures that the sonorities themselves can figure among the formal elements of the piece.

Sound itself was surely one of the central elements of Gordon Fitzell's haunting electro-acoustic piece evanescence (no relation to the goth-rock group by that name - or at least, none that I'm aware of). The range of sonority here can be gleaned from two of the most significant elements in the piece: one, electronically generated, resembles the sound of a stereo cartridge that is either past its prime or hosting too much static, producing a zitzitzitzitzit until you run over to remove the needle from the record; the other, the ghostly whir of continuously rubbed wineglasses. Between these two lay an extraordinary range of moods and textures. Often the electronics consisted of modifications of the recently produced sounds of the instruments; using echo effects and other techniques there seemed to be, again, something much more serious than experimentation going on, something again reaching for serious formal development by means of these techniques. To say this is not to diminish the early electro-acoustic work of people like Mario Davidovsky; only to indicate that there seems to have been a kind of social maturation process within the field, with Berio and Stockhausen and Davidovsky and many others brilliantly setting the stage, and others taking up the call to deepen the drama.

Despite the sonic variety of the first two pieces, Steven Mackey managed to cull yet more new sounds from the players in his 1989 piece indigenous instruments (also presented in a recording as strange imaginary remix (2006)), through techniques such as downtuning the violin G string; as did David M. Gordon, who used quarter tone harmonies in Friction Systems (2002, rev.2005). Gordon's piece began, ended and frequently returned to a regular rhythmic tutti - or to put it in English, he had everyone banging on their instruments at the same time in eighth notes. This seemed most effective where it was most aggressive, perhaps because it reminded me of certain moments at a Cecil Taylor concert; but I can't say I found it very compelling otherwise. In general the piece seemed to harp on dissonance for its own sake - a characteristic I find less than satisfying. Even if it is a little bit pedantic to say so, it bears keeping in mind that music can have a direct effect on the body, and that this effect can be quite unpleasant.

The musicians who comprise Eighth Blackbird are clearly not only competent but very dedicated to the music they present, sometimes going to the length of performing this difficult material from memory. This leads into the last observation I want to make: it is a unique characteristic of contemporary classical music that it is largely nourished by small ensembles dedicated to performing it. The early Downtown composers actually formed their own ensembles to perform their music, touring like rock groups; today we also have groups like the Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird to carry the torch. Not that the New York Philharmonic and other mainstream ensembles don't play contemporary music. But to gather an audience predisposed to appreciate new music you must specialize in that sort of thing; and be prepared to face some empty seats if you play a large venue.

Does this mean that after all this time and effort, modern music has failed, and classical music is really just a short list of increasingly distant tonal museum pieces? This, I submit, is not a well-formed question. "Classical music" is not a unity that has a unified history. There is no period of more than 100 years in the entire history of Western civilization in which the music was of consistent nature and purpose or the audience was consistent in size or class composition. There was a period from mid-19th century to some time in the 20th when classical music was written for large middle-class and bourgeois audiences and succeeded in attracting them. During this time a cannon of works from the early 18th century to the early 20th was developed, and this cannon continued to generate ticket sales until quite recently. Put on a concert of pieces from the last 200 years, all of which are well ouside this cannon, and the audience will be about the same size as it would be for a program of new, atonal music, though the bodies attending may be different. New, non-tonal music has consistently attracted audiences for nearly 100 years now. When Pierre Boulez was music director of the Philharmonic he presented a series of very well attended "rug concerts" (you sat on the floor) in Avery Fisher Hall. The Museum of Modern Art presents outdoor concerts of new music every summer - last time I was there it was hard to find an empty space to sit. Back in October I attended a concert of atonal 20th-21st century music at a concert space in the Juilliard School; the program included works by Davidovsky, Donald Martino and Fred Lerdahl, as well as an impressive piano piece by my co-worker Sheree Clement. Empty seats were sparse in this small venue. Two weeks later I heard a program of less challenging 20th century vocal music by composers like Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein, sung by the group Cantori. This was a larger hall (the magnificent auditorium of the New York Society for Ethical Culture), and it was not exactly full, but again, there was a substantial audience. I think we should just give up on the idea that if people don't come in the same numbers to hear a concert of music by Schoenberg or John Cage or the young composers presented by Eighth Blackbird, that this music has "failed" or been shunted aside by rock, jazz and other popular idioms. The shape of classical audiences will continue to grow, contract, and redefine itself over the course of history. That's all you can really say about it. And for a parrot that's already saying a lot.