Composition Description by "Blue Gene" Tyranny
Originally entitled "Angel Choirs at the Gates of Hell" and organized in four movements for guitars, keyboards and drums (1987), "Symphony No. 6 / Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven" was revised in 1988 and scored for 10 guitars, keyboard, bass, and drums and re-grouped in five movements. (Following up on this imagery, in 1989 Branca composed "Gates of Heaven" for chorus.)
As a study in gradually denser sonorities ("resultant masses") over a rock-steady pulse, this music digs deep to elicit sensations often approached by the profoundest chant. The natural harmonic series is used to generate the rhythms of the various accumulated layers making up these densities. A captivating and gradual unfolding of the music results.
John Cage and Glenn Branca once had a disagreement about Branca's music being "fascist". Cage felt that the densities create the sensation of a "sustained climax" and thus restrict the mind from opening up, but I seriously doubt that fascists (who history has shown tend to go for the most common denominators like maudlin sentimentality, kitsch and mysterious powers "out there") would like Branca's symphonies.
Review by Charlie Wilmoth
Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 6 is as dense, edgy, and dramatic as listeners have come to expect. Symphony No. 6 isn't a symphony in the stuffy classical sense -- it's not written for a traditional orchestra, and it doesn't obviously adhere to symphonic form. Still, the use of the term "symphony" is appropriate here, since it aptly describes the grandiosity of Branca's work. This particular symphony is scored for drums, bass, keyboard, and between eight and ten guitars. The guitars are used exclusively for texture and noise, however, not melody; the guitarists use a variety of unorthodox tunings and coax unusual sounds from their instruments. The piece's five movements typically begin rather quietly, then grow into massive noise squalls, accompanied by insistent, pounding drums. Symphony No. 6, like many of Branca's works, has one foot in the late-'70s New York no wave scene that inspired Sonic Youth, and the other in the experimentalism of late-20th century composers like Iannis Xenakis. This recording may frustrate listeners who wish Branca would just join one camp or the other, but that doesn't make his work any less powerful or evocative. Branca is one of the few avant-garde composers with the nerve to subtitle his work "Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven," and one of even fewer whose music is discordant, engrossing, and scary enough to make the listener take such a subtitle seriously.
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