Music – Page 11 – An Echo That's Reversing

Symphony No. 1 – Finishing the 3rd movement, starting the 2nd

With this movement, and with each in the symphony, I want to dwell on a single theme in the way I did not and could not with my one-piece-per-month freshman exercises of last year. This work is my first major effort after those, and second efforts anachronistically always feel like senior theses to me, eschewing middle courses and diving in with more confidence. (This is a bit opposite to the curse of the sophomore slump but hopefully doesn’t result in an overfull mess.) Along with listening to it for coherence, I shallowly looked to the length in order to get a shorthand sense of whether I’ve committed enough time. The ~9 minutes of this movement feels like I’ve dwelt enough, and more importantly its flow and expression sound like it’s achieved enough. I’m content for now.

Mixing it in Dorico, which I plan after the symphony is complete, is going to take many weeks.

Symphony No. 1 – Time and texture

I realized after the fact that all of the titles except for the last movement have to do with time and the speaker’s relationship to time. 1st movement: subjunctive past; 2nd movement: present tense; 4th movement: past perfect; with the interlude referencing both infinite time and the end of time.

(1) What if this happened?
(2) I am now
Interlude: Everything was forever until it was no more
(3) An occupying army
(4) Decades had passed

Everything feels static right now, possibly because this current slow motion car crash leaves us in an endless nervous state that, when it ends, will cease to exist but will never end. My previous works were about a map that can tell the future and a man looking for the missing parts to his time machine, so time seems to be a general theme regardless of what’s happening in the world. Who knew?

Symphony No. 1 – The start

“16 Jun 2020”. I wrote that down on the first sheet of staff paper I pulled out to start the project that I’d wanted to do for years: compose a symphony. Last year’s monthly orchestral studies were a means to this end.

Glenn Branca symphonies

Having owned a cassette of his Symphony #1 (refed back in Sep 2018) and Symphony #3 on vinyl in college, I’ve had some persistent curiosity about his other symphonies. I’m not sure I’ll acquire them (those that are acquireable) because I’m a little out of the noise-rock thing at the moment, but I’d like to at least document what’s available. This information is gathered from:

The discography from his Wikipedia entry – several symphonies not mentioned
History and discography pages from his website. Each recording has its own page accessible individually but with no index page. Symphony No.1 links to the others.
Glenn Branca (Foundation for Contemporary Arts, 2009) – Biography and statements from Branca on several of his works, including #s 3, 7, 9, 11, 14
Avant-Garde Composer Glenn Branca Recounts His Cacophonic Symphonies One-By-One (The Village Voice, 19 Nov 2010) – Only excludes #16
Glenn Branca: A Guide to the Symphonies (Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 11 May 2016) – Includes #s 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. These are all of the recorded symphonies except for 13.
Glenn Branca’s Really Experimental Music: Why the Composer Is Still Punk After All These Years (Vice, 16 May 2016) – Interview with Branca and comments on #s 8, 10, 12, 13, 16
MIT Sounding Presents Both Sides of Composer Glenn Branca (Arts at MIT, 26 Sep 2019)
Glenn Branca 1948–2018 (Wire, May 2018)
Glenn Branca (undated), short review of several of his symphonies by David Sheridan and Michael Azerrad, from Trouser Press, includes #s 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, along with other works

Other, symphony-specific sources listed with their respective symphony.

Cambodian cassettes, Saigon rock

A year or so back, probably two years, Lisa and I went to Wax N Facts for a record store day [ed. written before pandemic isolation, how quaint?]. These visits are always discursive and you don’t know where you’ll end so that day I ended at the international/world music section looking for… not sure what. And (dun dun DUN) I found it in spades.

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