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Artist
Glenn Branca
12+ albums
no waveexperimentalAvant-Gardepost-punkcontemporary classical
about
Glenn Branca (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, October 6, 1948 - May 13, 2018) was an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. Branca received a 2009 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. 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. His first encounter with the NYC music scene was with the N.Dodo Band whom he observed many times at their rehearsal space- Phil Demise's Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter. This is where he first met Jeffrey Lohn who was playing electric violin with the N. Dodo Band. He then formed two bands in the late 1970s, first Theoretical Girls (in 1977 with composer/guitarist Jeffrey Lohn) and later The Static. He also performed in Rhys Chatham & His Guitar Trio All-Stars 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. Startin
top songs
albums
The Ascension
Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus)
The Ascension: The Sequel
Songs '77-'79
Lesson No. 1
Symphony No. 5
The Third Ascension
New York Noise
Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs At The Gates Of Heaven)
Symphony No. 5 (Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere)
Symphony No. 3 (Gloria)
Symphony No. 2 (The Peak of the Sacred)