100 Guitars’ Worth of Glenn Branca’s Violent Ecstasy

The first time Reg Bloor saw Glenn Branca perform, in October 1998, he was at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan, playing a Frankenstein’s monster of a guitar that he’d made himself. He sawed off the headstocks of two cheap Harmony guitars, then bolted the necks together with Sheetrock screws. The mutation, with a body at each end and an ultralong neck in the middle, created harmonics and other otherworldly sounds, which were Branca’s career-long passions.

Bloor, in her second year of studying guitar at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, was inspired enough to drop out and move to New York. She joined Branca’s ensemble in 1999. The next year, they married.

Branca, who died of throat cancer in May 2018, usually conducted his own groups. He filled his music with unusual tunings and enough stormy crescendos to merit comparisons to Wagner. Dressed habitually in black and crowned by an untamed pompadour, he conducted with a convulsive physicality that he once described as “my shtick.”

When he died, there was a risk that his music would fall silent. But Bloor, who was Branca’s concertmaster for years, recently decided to assume conducting duties for “Symphony No. 13 (Hallucination City) for 100 Guitars,” on Friday at David Geffen Hall.

“For a long time, I felt like I shouldn’t do it,” Bloor, 52, said in an interview at the Chelsea studio apartment she and Branca shared. “It felt presumptuous for me to step into Glenn’s shoes.”

The guitarist Reeves Gabrels, a friend of hers, said in an email, “Reg is undoubtedly the right person to conduct the music and bring it forward.”

Bloor faced the huge logistical problem of corralling 100 guitarists, some coming from as far as London and Los Angeles. She recruited more than 100 — some Branca veterans, some novices — because she knows from past experience that not all of them will show up. The absentees “come up with creative excuses,” she said. Whether 90 guitarists show up or 110, they’ll all play.

“Symphony No. 13,” Branca’s Lincoln Center debut, hasn’t been performed in New York for 25 years. The “hallucination” in the title refers to his use of extreme volume, which creates overtones — phantom pitches that may sound like cymbals or a choir — that ricochet off the walls. The composer Michael Gordon, who championed Branca’s music, once recalled borrowing two cigarettes and stuffing them in his ears to dampen the volume of the guitars.

Branca described volume as “one of the compositional elements in my work.” Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, who was in Branca’s group from 1980 to 1984, said in an interview that loudness “wasn’t an empty gesture, it was part of Glenn’s conjuring.” He added, “Given the physical volume, there’s no way you won’t be transported — either to some kind of heaven or some kind of hell. His music was a kind of violent ecstasy.”

Branca lived the archetype of avant-garde artist. His interviews were full of disdainful opinions on subjects including music and philosophy, but also rapturous endorsements. He loved Aerosmith and the Ramones as much as he loved Bruckner and Messiaen.

He refused to occupy middle ground. The novelist James Reich once called him “the Moses, the Ahab and the Faust of the electric guitar.” The composer Phil Kline, who played in Branca’s group for more than a decade, wrote in 2018 that Branca “split the musical atom and created a monster.”

Branca, who was born in 1948, grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., and went to college in Boston, where he helped start an experimental drama troupe. The plays he wrote needed music, so he taught himself guitar and began to compose.

He moved to New York in 1976, just in time to help create (with two groups he formed, Theoretical Girls and the Static) the city’s abrasive No Wave scene, which embraced amateurism and the anarchy of a kindergarten recess.

Soon he had moved on to composing experimental music, including “The Ascension” (1981), which David Bowie named as one of his favorite albums. Two years later, when Branca wrote a 55-minute piece for nine guitarists, he called it “Symphony No. 1,” to provoke classical musicians, he acknowledged. Calling this tumult a symphony was viewed as “iconoclastic or even disrespectful,” a writer for Le Monde noted. Branca went on to compose orchestral symphonies.

Bloor’s path to iconoclasm was less direct. She grew up in rural Ohio, she said, “cut off from the world. My parents thought rock music was the Devil.” When she finally heard rock, after the family moved to central Connecticut, she was disappointed that it didn’t sound satanic enough.

She took up the guitar at 12 and was good enough to be accepted to Berklee; she entered the school as a fan of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. In Boston, she met Gabrels, who was working with Bowie and exposed Bloor to experimental music. She forsook Priest to play in Twitcher, a neo No Wave band.

While working with Branca, Bloor made remarkable solo albums with playful titles like “Egregious Harmonics.” Her assaultive use of jackhammer strumming and dissonance isn’t for everyone. “I’ve cleared a few rooms,” she told an interviewer last year.

“Symphony No. 13” has an odd back story. In the buildup to the year 2000, Branca’s agent proposed to the French government that it commission a piece for 2,000 guitars. Branca thought the idea was “absurd beyond belief,” he told Pitchfork, but was persuaded by the $50,000 commission. He never wrote the piece and kept the money. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council knew about the commission and asked him to write a piece with 200 guitars. Branca declined but proposed a piece for 100 guitars, “which he still thought was absurd,” Bloor said.

He wrote “Symphony No. 13” for one drummer, 20 bassists (in standard tuning), and 80 electric guitarists, who are divided into three sections. Three strings on the alto guitars are tuned to E, the other three to E an octave above. The tenor and baritone guitars are similarly tuned, in B and low E.

“Symphony No. 13” had its premiere at the World Trade Center Plaza in June, 2001, the only time it was performed in New York. A 2008 recording of it was released in 2016, on the Atavistic label. The Lincoln Center performance will be recorded, and Bloor may issue it on her Systems Neutralizers label.

For years, Branca planned on throwing his scores and recordings into a bonfire before he died. “He said, ‘When I get the cancer diagnosis, I’m gonna burn everything,’” Bloor said. “He was a smoker and a drinker — he knew he was going to get cancer at some point.”

Once Branca changed his mind, he entrusted his legacy to Bloor. “She brought organization, form and focus to Glenn that he might not have had before,” Gabrels said. “No one knew his music better.”