Composer Reacts to Glenn Branca - The Ascension (REACTION & ANALYSIS)
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- Опубліковано 24 лип 2024
- Bryan reacts to and talks about his thoughts on Glenn Branca - The Ascension
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0:00 Intro
01:00 Reaction
14:18 Analysis - Ascension?
17:43 Analysis - Terror or The Unknowing?
26:02 Outro
#reaction #glennbranca #nowave
Haven't listened to this in so long, gain somethingnew from him every timei revisit. Kind of like the upside down world version of Reich. Also it's crazy how influential this man was, man, I know he's gone but he deserves his flowers still. How many thousands upon thousands of bands exist because they heard Swans or Sonic Youth or Godspeed when they were just trying to capture the same magic he did
I applaud you for going down the rabbit hole with Glenn Branca. I admit, for me his The Spectacular Commodity is the most rewarding track and one I regularly come back to.
Watching you try to wrap your head around this was fun.
Branca is an absolutely fantastic and innovative composer. I've been listening to all his symphonies. Fantastic and intense. But requires a stiff shot of whiskey at times. You should listen to some of his longer works. :)
the ascension - in a sense of permanently rising energy. that´s the way i understand this piece. it doesn´t has to to show any aspects of ´positive´ / `negative`.
it shows so to say the way of zen. it`s actually beyond dualities. musicwise it contains the main comission of music per se: the game of building tension / relaxiation.
the 1st time i listened to this piece in 1982 i was totally blown away by the beauty, the passion and the power of the compositional idea, the sounds and harmonies
and especially the instrumentation of multiple electric guitars. (i`m an electric guitar fetishist😁)
the pure intensity and beauty of physics.
i never felt this piece as an image of something evil, dark or `terror` or similar negative associations.
just another peak of intensity and passion. that`s it what makes me love this piece so deeply.
btw - it seems to be really difficult for well educated musicians/composers to listen to music without being always in an analytic and comparison mode.
this is a real dilemma, because this kind of listening disables a state of mind which is required to get as deep as possible into a work of music and its actual main intention
which probably won`t be a desire of a composer to be analysed musically by other `nerds`:-).
the purest enjoyment of listening to music is being in an unconscious state.
for the highest level of enjoying music you have to forget the composer, musical laws, yourself, everything rational in a way.
like the way a little human baby is able to hear and get the emotional message of a piece of instrumental music before being ´ educated´.
it doesn´t care about ´dissonances´ as something ´uncomfotable´, odd or evil.
otherwise, the listener will never break through the mental surface and will therefore not be able to experience the full power of such a composition like this track .
btw 2 - the music of branca is basically written to be played and experienced in a live context.
in this case a recording can`t be able to reach the actual comission by the composition. it`s quite impossible.
it actually can't do more than a look at a photo album for instance which can be also exciting, but on a pretty partial level.
that`s of course my personal subjective opinion.
cheeerz and pacem in terris!
Symphony No.3 is wonderful.
You've got to hear Light Field. It's one of the best things you'll ever hear.
Interesting that you should react to this on the "best of 2022"-week. I actually hadn't heard of Branca until recently, but one of my absolute favorite records of the past year was was Scarcity - Aveilut that is composed by the current conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble. It definitely seem very inspired by this, but goes into more of a black metal direction, which works really well.
Once the drums properly kick in, the music became very very reminiscent of Amebix's "No Sanctuary" record (1983) which is amazing and cited as major inspiration for doom, drone bands like Neurosis who use heavy, harsh, bleak ,raw , tortured sounds.
I'm not certain, but perhaps the "ascension" is every listeners personal aural experience as they sit through this avant-garde piece which starts building loads of tension and then giving a sudden release that makes one feel like they've ascended from some destitue state of mind into some sort of clarity. That is, one might say you could take yourself through this journey (this track) deliberately in order to feel or be in a certain state of mind only for the sake of reaching that end point and being thankful that it's all over and feel good about being released from it . I think it is something like that since the very essence of avant-garde and most drone/noise acts is providing a certain emotional experience that should leave you with a deep impression. Something to contemplate on or, at the very least, get that sense of rising tension and getting that very much needed release. It's a fundamental part of music composition in general, yes but the experimental, noise, avant-garde acts tend to create things unconventionaly for the sake of greater expressiveness and thus create extreme, acute tension and release effects.
In short, what I'm thinking is that this is meant to be more of a visceral experience than a deep-meaning, read-into-the-music type of piece.
You may find Rhys Chatham a more approachable composer working within the same kind of aesthetic. I think Branca and he worked together in the early days and he is far less abrasive in his approach.
I absolutely adore Branca's work - he was truly one of a kind. Though I'm not surprised at all that you weren't into this =P To be fair, even John Cage was freaked out by his music.
This album is a classic, but Branca has a very rich body of work outside of it too, and composed a series of symphonies as well which is his work that I particularly really love. Some are relatively sparse and even pretty (well, at least for me), some are massive, complex, alien walls of sound, far more abrasive than this track. There's one called Hallucination City which is a symphony written for literally 100 guitars, and that is quite the experience. You bring up the feeling of terror and the unknown, and I do think that it's something that a lot of his work definitely evokes. Very deliberate dissonance, use of weird tunings, modified and custom built guitars, and even entirely made-up custom built instruments - it all lends itself to making it feel very otherworldly and unsettling, and he made some incredibly captivating music with that.
Coming back to this track, I believe the title is simply a reference to the symphony of the same name by Olivier Messiaen, as well as to the John Coltrane album of the same name, being inspired by both. You asked why those who enjoy this track enjoy it... I'm never any good at answering that question about music, but on a surface level, it's a very engaging listen for me. It's very tense, it's very gripping, it's very cathartic. It does a great job with atmosphere and the textures of it. It's not too dissimilar to what I like in post-metal, I guess. And on an academic and analytical level, it's pretty fascinating too, I think. Not nearly as much as his later works and symphonies, but still, it's undoubtedly avant-garde. Worth keeping in mind that this was 1981 too.
Great parallel you drew there between this and post-metal. There's so many micro sounds and decisions throughout that despite sounding noisy on the surface actually contains many facets throughout, taking the listener on quite the journey if they're engaging with it emotionally.
Brave choice of a unique composer. I saw him in London where his ensemble performed Symphony No 6 (Devil Choirs At The Gates Of Heaven). The impact was just as much visual as well as sonic, with the sight of numerous lead electric guitarists thrashing away something to behold. Should you decide to follow up on this reaction, I've included a link to the first movement of No 6. ua-cam.com/video/A4HoNeIWu2M/v-deo.html
Also a link to the first movement of my favourite of his competitions Symphony No 3 Gloria. Both of these have more variety than the piece you listened to which might be, I.M.O., more suitable for a first time listen. ua-cam.com/video/-hAMfm2PgDM/v-deo.html
Please Critical Reactions, review this song, Glenn Branca Symphony 6 movement 1, it’s literally my favorite song from my favorite album, no one on UA-cam has reviewed it and it would be so satisfying to see you react to it and share it with a larger audience. I appreciate your analysis on this work as well
Also, I think the ascension could be representative of both like a sort of physical ascension through this sort of demanding almost violent act, as well as in context considering what he was going for it could be taken as representing a canonization of the form, specifically with the electric guitar and distortion, if not just the form of rock music in general in terms of it's place in academia
It feels like it's writing a sort of mythos through opera of the state of music in his era, which could include your interpretation of ascension, I e rock music as a religion in the squalor of 77 nyc
Never heard of Glenn Branca and No Wave is one musical movement I don't know much about. Listening to this brought to mind avant-garde composers like LaMonte Young and perhaps the early noise rock experiments of The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed. It sounds like the aural equivalent of a static landscape that only changes via the play of light and shadow as the sun moves across the sky; ie, it's the kind of music you live in, not really the kind of music you listen to for something happening. Yet, given the stasis I'm surprised it ends up moving/changing as much as it does.
What you say about dissonance being used to represent the unknown reminds of Kubrick's use of Ligeti's music in 2001: A Space Odyssey that frequently accompanies the appearance of the monolith and the cosmic mystery that it represents. The title of this also brings to mind the free jazz of Coltrane's own Ascension, which famously had multiple groups playing/soloing simultaneously; and while that music is much more "active" than this the end result of it being as much about dissonant soundscapes as traditional music is similar. Very interesting stuff, but not anything I'd put on for casual or even close listening.
You should check out the video of John Cage talking about Branca, he's not a big fan either but he has some very interesting observations on his work
This musical piece starts from down beneath and builds up in a cyclical spiral manner. It ascends! To what? To whatever the listener attributes to it. It is evocative and for sure ascending! Music is not always for pleasure and entertainment. Often leads to introspection and subsequently expansion! Hence The Ascension!!!!!!
This first Ascension is great, but Branca's album The Third Ascension is his masterpiece in my opinion. Not only is the production quality much better, the arrangements are amazing. It was recorded live too.
I like all type of music and I founded marsterpieces pratically in every genere: classic rock, prog, folk, rap, metal, pop, jazz, ambient, punk.... but I think that Ascension is one of the very few works that are beyond the music. I admire your desire to understand. It's difficult and maybe not possible to explain the sensation of this to someone that is alien to a more "avant-garde" type of music. I would say you to listen this more times because it's difficult to get at first (also for me was like that) but I don't know if it's enough for someone alien to a certain type of approach and mind setting as you said you're.
Trying to describe this from my view: the first part is like you are suspended on a celestial dimension in a perpetual sorrow and melancholy. After this there is a brief part in which is like you pass through a particulrly pain zone. When the drum starts the real journey to the ascension begin; you must feel the transmutation of yourself (that is not always pleasant and enjoyable), you are in a swirling tumult, in a no-time vortex of continuous change of infinite and contransting states and emotions and at the end, after and escalation of titanic pain here it is in the last minute the explosion, the ascension to a superior indefinite condition, which is the wish of the human being. (Sorry for my english)
Thanks for your interpretation of this. That's a fascinating journey you took me on through this work. (And your english is fine, I understood everything you said 🙂)
For the algorithm
Killer record.
Find it interesting someone else prefers the other tracks. This is my favorite. Definitely makes more sense in context of the rest.
Almost like an emulation of moog or mellotron.
You should listen to John Cage on Branca's music even more now.
I wonder if listening to such difficult music enhances the listenability and joy of beautiful music, the same way that eating bland food for ages would enhance your appreciation of a well-seasoned meal?
That's an interesting idea. I know that watching indie films tends to make me appreciate more spectacle based films, like a Marvel blockbuster, and vice versa. It could even just be something along the lines of a palette cleanser where having a balanced exposure to all types of art keeps everything feeling fresh.
Not my favorite music, but I'll take some Lee Ranaldo wherever I can get him.
I preferred the other songs off the album
Our mere mortal minds. hee hee : ) This song is scary. I watch movies that make me uncomfortable. That I can ONLY watch once.
I love this whole piece, but on your comment about the payoff or the reward, I would say give it another couple of listens or so. Everything is winding and leading to 13:12 in the video, where the guitars coalesce around the final major chord- each guitar voicing major 3rd, 5th, and 9th notes (do they even sound like guitars at this point?). To me it's one of the most passionately delivered moments in rock music.
You're spot on. This is definitely a track most won't get on a first listen, myself included. Some things just take repeated exposure to for things to click. I'm happy to hear that the resolution absolutely works though and that I was missing something with my listen.
@@CriticalReactions
Cheers :) Can be hard listening on first listens, as Branca was such a unique and uncompromising composer and there was usually little to reference to other kinds of music- he really tried to push as hard as he could into surprising himself and the audience.
If you're not into the noisier, dissonant stuff (Branca often employed extremes of dissonance and consonance), you might find something to like about this one, it uses a conventional orchestra:
ua-cam.com/video/8r_26cRkVc4/v-deo.html
Man, you're seriously cute and handsome! Such a delight to watch your videos lol
This might be the most inaccurate review of Branca ever. I dont like this guy.
There. I said it.
His symphony no.3 first movement is something else