I've been listening to composer Glenn Branca's work for very nearly 20 years, ever since reading a bit about his multi-guitar ensembles in Musician magazine and subsequently tracking down The Ascension. I'm on his mailing list, so when the call went out for volunteer guitarists to help him record his 13th symphony (for 80 guitarists, 20 bassists, and a drummer), I had to do it. The scores went out in the mail shortly thereafter, and I found that I was assigned to the Tenor 1 section, and consequently had to restring my guitar to all B strings.

From the player's point of view, the 13 is not a terribly complicated piece--nothing shorter than a quarter note--but there were sections that presented some challenges, like the ones that had the same three or four notes over and over in different combinations, where it was easy to get lost. On top of this, I was working on several paying projects, but I put in as much rehearsal time as I could, in advance of the October 9 and 10 recording dates.

This would be over Columbus Day weekend, so many of the hotels in town were completely booked, or overwhelmingly expensive. Several different options for couch surfing didn't work out, or were complicated for several reasons, so I thought I lucked out with an inexpensive room in New Jersey. I had a pleasant drive up on the 8th, but at the end of it was crawling through decrepit, industrial Jersey to arrive at the worst hotel room I've ever been in: the Howard Johnson Express in North Bergen. The problems began with an overall uncleanliness--the carpet was filthy, the corners of the room were dusty, a couple lampshades had visible burn marks. While the door had a deadbolt, the upper security bar (which takes the place of the old chain-style security) was missing. A strange, stale smell filled the room. I was getting a good rate, and I had no other options for the night, though, so I thought I'd stay. I dialed in, checked email, and called Patricia.

Checking the email told me that I'd have a fair amount of work to catch up on this evening, which would end up absorbing my time until midnight. I'd hoped for some nearby place to get dinner, but the place's position in a kind of industrial park along a divided service road meant that there weren't many options. Even if I went driving in search of something, the divided road would make it difficult to get back, and I didn't feel like finding out what this neighborhood had to offer. I decided to get through the evening and get breakfast the next morning near the studio.

It's well known that the bedspreads in hotels are not washed as often as sheets, and neither are the blankets. I understand this; that's why I folded down the bedspread. I didn't expect, however, the archipelago of dried semen stains on the blanket. My experience went downhill from there. Turning on the TV to watch the Presidential debates on CNN, I heard tinkly new age piano music. PBS? Nope--the previous occupant (presumably the owner of the DNA sample) had left the TV on the (apparently new age) porn channel. Fortunately, CNN was only a click away.

Later I got a close look at the pillows on the bed, which boasted a number of stains and an array of human hair. I did not see any lice or nits, thankfully, but I put a shirt over the pillow to avoid coming into direct contact with it. I slept in my clothes.

Sleeping through the night proved to be an impossibility. My immediate neighbors ran the tub for long times--I could fall asleep to this--and then abruptly shut off the water, waking me up. Minutes later, they'd begin again. This pattern kept up until 3 am. Cars would appear in the parking lot, pull up along side each other for long periods of time, idling. Maybe this was a pattern of drug dealing, or maybe they were comparing notes on the problems in their rooms. A couple times I thought I'd jump online again and check for some other accommodation options, but I was now no longer able to make outside calls. I hadn't seen anything about local calls being limited, but this fit the pattern of unpleasantness.

I'd decided by morning to leave, and got a shower. Of all the bath towels, not one was free from pubic hair, so I used the hand towel. I checked out, listed my complaints, and I was refunded for the two nights I wouldn't be using. While I was at the front desk, another guest came up, saying that he wanted to complain about his room, which was moldy, and he'd like another one. I told him to make sure they didn't switch him into room 35. I'd take my chances with friends or ensemble members--hey, there'd be a hundred of them--and I got on the road, following MapQuest directions to the Lincoln Tunnel. I was happy to get out of New Jersey, and it was nice to be back in Manhattan, if even for a brief crosstown drive to the Queens/Long Island Expressway Tunnel.

Coming out of the tunnel, I missed my exit, and went jamming along the LIE until I realized that the street numbers were getting way too high. I turned around, going back to 278, which I got on going west instead of east, so I quickly corrected that--now I was making progress. I got off at Northern Avenue, went several blocks looking for a clue to where the studio might be, took a guess and picked well--there was the sign for the studio complex's movie theatre.

The session would be at Kaufman Astoria studios in Astoria, Queens, which does a lot of film and television work, as well as recording. There's a lot of history here--Marx Brothers comedies were shot here, as were Rudolf Valentino films. More recently, it's been home to Sesame Street. It turns out to be a huge, multi-building institution, with the main office near the American Museum of the Moving Image, appropriately. I parked right across the street from the studio entrance, and the guard directed me to the diner at the end of the block, CUP, which turned out to be quite nice--decent espresso, real(!) fresh-squeezed orange juice, and an array of good-sounding entrees. I ordered French toast, and studied my score.

By 10, more people carrying guitar cases and amps showed up on the street, and we started down to the basement studio, past the mailboxes in the basement, past the Lifetime technical headquarters, past restrooms and service entrances for the kitchen. Only a few others were there--the engineer, a couple other musicians. Two of the basses arrived, one of them a gentleman in his late 40s who had played the 2001 show. He was toting a gorgeous stripped-down '68 Telecaster bass, and it was obvious that this event would be a grand opportunity to check out people's gear. There were plenty of modern day Strats and Teles, but there were notable deviations, too, like a Hagstrom II, an Ovation Magnum bass, a Fender Bass VI, and some others. But the Telecaster bass was definitely a fine instrument.

In the tracking room itself, the hundred chairs, fewer music stands, and the drums were already set up. We were asked, though, to remain in the hallway, because the layout of the various sections hadn't yet been fully assigned. Glenn and his wife Reg Bloor appeared, bringing the master score and a wheel of brie. We were able to bring our gear into the tracking room, so I found my place in Tenor 1, right at the front. Reg would be our section leader. Whoa. She was playing a rather nifty 60s-era Teisco in perfect condition, apparently purchased for $60, something that's always good to see.

Reg told us about last year's European tour, when Glenn's quartet with her and two others had been shut down by German police. "They always put us in art spaces." In this case, they were to play in an old church...which had no windows. As in, just holes, with plastic over them, which failed to keep the sound confined, and soon the neighbors complained. They'd had a number of engagements cancelled on that tour, although they still got paid.

More people arrived, most of them from around NY, but there were a number of us from out of town--some people down from Boston, one up from DC, another Tenor 1 from Houston, one from Minnesota, one from San Francisco. I knew from one of the correction emails that another tenor had come up from Pittsburgh for this, and it turned out that he was sitting right behind me--his name's Taichi Nakatani, and he'll actually be participating in the C&I show in November. Seated next to him, though, was the one who had us all beat: he'd flown in from England, just for this.

I couldn't help but note the sheer density of the Converse hi-top population, myself included. But there was some demographic variety along the race, sex, and age axes. It also struck me as a very large collection of introverts. People were friendly, but generally people stuck to small groups they seemed to know.

We did some tuning up, checking our gear, some low-volume rehearsal, and some milling about. Runners showed up with bags of baguette, going out again and returning later with soft drinks. (Oddly, they'd gone all the way up to Inwood for these, so I wonder if there was more to the story than at first appeared.) Longtime Branca and Sonic Youth cohort Wharton Tiers would be the drummer on the piece. I spotted Battles' Tyondi Braxton on the other side of the room. Our seats began to fill up, and it was announced that guitar cases would go out in the hall--while the tracking room was of a decent size (40 x 60), there just wasn't room for people, amps, and cases. (I had a gig bag and my messenger bag, which I slid under my chair.) Amps were placed directly behind each player; mine would be playing into the back of my jacket for much of the time. I thought about putting up the top boost on my amp, but was afraid of damaging Taichi's hearing. (Fortunately, he had hearing protection.) There weren't enough music stands to go around, so I'd be sharing with the player next to me--Ben Miller, formerly of Destroy All Monsters. Wow.

Glenn, various runners, the engineer, and producer Weasel Walter were in and out of the room, checking on various things, and ultimately Glenn decided that he'd just want to work with the basses first, getting their levels, so we tenors and altos stepped outside. While we were filtering out for this break, one of the other tenors came up and asked for me; he was a member of a mailing list I'm on, and I'd set him up with the gig. We went out to the lounge and chatted a bit, grabbed some bread and brie, and swapped music education stories. Again, a very nice guy and a good player--plenty of these here, and I felt as though I'd conned my way into it or something.

Soft drinks were in the house, but no bottled water yet. Most people stood around and ate, went out for smoke breaks, got on their cell phones, met each other, and I made an effort to start networking, in hopes that I'd find a place to stay for the night. I placed calls to New York friends, some back to Pittsburgh with people who had friends with places to stay, with the thought that if I got enough people working on this in parallel, something would come up.

I noticed one woman from the alto section using a PowerBook in the hallway, and asked if she was getting a wireless node. She wasn't (damn--I'd been under the impression that there was 802.11b here), but I noticed she was a fellow user of Ableton Live, so we talked software for a while. She was down from Boston, where she was going to Berklee, and had a small group with a drummer and a cellist. Sounds interesting; I may get a chance to hear it.

On the way to the rest room, someone else asked if I was me (I am). He was Kevin Patton, up from Houston, and apparently quite the happening guy in the Texas experimental music scene. I was momentarily confused--how'd he know me on sight? Turns out he'd gone through the cc headers of one of the emails that went out with score corrections, and he started looking at people's domains, so he'd been to the site and apparently recognized me from one of the photos here. For a moment, though, it was weirdly like being an extremely minor celebrity.

Altos had their levels checked, and then finally us tenors. Glenn stood at the podium at the front of the studio, and indicated to each of us whether to turn up, down, give more treble, etc. After the fourth or fifth "more treble," Glenn said, "You'll notice that I like treble," and it was true--at no point did he ask to hear more bass. I ended up at volume 8, bass and treble 5, and the guitar all the way up on both pickups. Much of this was to change. After going person by person, we went section by section and made adjustments; finally all the tenors together. It was quite a thrilling sound--there's an inherent excitement, tension and release in this tuning, probably because it sounds like several players hitting a tonic.

We took yet another break, where we discovered that bottled water had made it into the building, but that the bread was already gone. After a while, all the players reconvened in the tracking room for the first full sound checks and rehearsals. This was the first truly magical moment: when all the 20 basses at the back of the room started up, tremolo picking the same notes, I got this involuntary stupid grin on my face. I looked around and saw that a bunch of the rest of us guitar players had the same grin. This was going to be cool. We tenors were next, and we played our open strings. A few further volume adjustments were made here or there, and the same with the altos. Finally, we all played together, and it was indeed a thrill. Everyone likes to play loud at some point, and here we were contributing to this vast collaborative harmonious noise.

It was time to rehearse, and this is where the trouble began. It was very difficult for all of us to hear the drums. From where I was, I could feel the bass drum, but many people couldn't. The drums were surrounded by baffles so they could be miked without bleed, but this killed many people's ability to hear them--even though we were in the same room. The studio wouldn't remove the baffles, which frustrated Glenn, as he'd recorded most of his work without baffles, and it was never a problem before. But we'd need some kind of monitoring solution, so we were given a long break while it was worked out.

A military army travels on its stomach, and this is no less true of a guitar army. The runners weren't back with the bread yet, which was a bit of a problem for getting something to eat. Many of us resorted to eating brie and hummus off plastic wrap. Most people, if you were to tell them that you were putting them on bread and water, they'd think it was punishment, but we would have been delighted to have both. We stood around and talked, and I checked on the housing situation by cell phone--no improvement there, although one of the altos up from Virginia said he'd had two invitations, and he couldn't use both, so he'd try to get me set up. A bright spot! We'd trade cell numbers later. I talked a bit with Ben, who's doing some neat stuff with a heavily modified Kalamazoo solid body (not unlike what I was playing here). Sadly, I accidentally whacked him with my own Kalamazoo guitar a couple times, due to the tight seating.

We went through a few more tests of the drum monitoring, now with craptastic NS-10s and perhaps somewhat better Alesis near-fields at the front of the room feeding the drums to us...not that this would do much for people in the back, but they might have received actual drum sound from the kit, so they were covered. We also got the benefit of producer Weasel Walter doing a diamond-shaped aerobic routine on 1-2-3-4 so that we knew which beat we were on, and concertmaster John Myers keeping count of the measures and doing the shake-shake-shake-shake-bring-the-neck-down-dramatically rock star move every tenth measure so we'd know where we were in the section. (Of course, if you didn't know what 10 we were all in, you were pretty much lost for good.)

While the piece is notated to be at 60 bpm, Glenn decided to kick it up to (ha ha ha) 69. We did some rehearsal of the first section, up to about bar 68. It was a fairly easy section--lots of whole notes--and it was our first real taste of what it would be like to play this piece. In all honesty, it was very, very good. With all of the tenors playing the same thing at the same time, I wasn't able to pick myself out of the sound, but I could *feel* the power of the playing behind me, as if I was chorused and distributed across 40 other amps. It was like being at the tip of a rocket, or like part of some vast, unstoppable engine. Yes, this is why I was here. Even with all the hassles and the awful hotel room, it was all worth it to play this music.

Some of my impressions may have been due to positioning at the front of the room, and probably due to enculturation. I later talked to one of the tenors in the back, a young man wearing the t-shirt of some death metal band, and he said he felt like the music was a swarm of killer hornets laying waste to all life on the globe. Certainly there is a kind of buzzing bee swarm quality to the "staircase" chords, which are stacked minor seconds, so I can see where he got that vibe.

In this piece, everything's double-strummed--we're tremolo-picking not just one string, but at minimum three strings. Occasionally, we were to double-strum all of the strings, the ones we were playing, and the open strings as well. There are also two types of fingering--fretting the three treble or bass strings at the note indicated in the score, and the "cluster" or "staircase" chord, which is stacked minor seconds, and very easy to play in this tuning. This first section just used alternating notes and clusters, and it was striking--when people were playing clusters, the interference patterns sounded like a section of bowed strings playing arpeggios. It was an astonishingly simple way of getting a complex effect. When we swung into the consonant sections, the resolution was extremely powerful as well.

The dynamics indicated on the score for these early parts were ppp (soft), something very relative when talking about 100 guitars. At first Glenn's suggestion was for us to try to play it softly, so I went with a softer pick than usual, made of some ordinary plastic. By the end of the take, the tip was worn completely down. So I switched to my usual pick brand, which is made of some stiff plastic which might just be bulletproof. These held up admirably.

We took a brief break before tackling the next section, which was slightly more complex, and longer--two page turns, and a lot more jumping around. We'd play a bit before and a bit after the section, which would make the editing easier, giving them more material to work with on either side of the join. One thing that got a bit tricky here was the number of rests for our section, which certainly isn't the norm in rock playing. Some of the older hands were keeping count of rest measures by keeping a finger on the score; the rest of us kept a mental count which seemed to work out all right (but the finger method is better for being less fallible). Still, we had a good take.

We took another break, and lo, the bread had come. The runners claimed that every store they went to had sold out of bread, which seemed odd--in all of New York City, no one had any bread? Still, we lined up for it--a literal bread line. The water, however, was running low.

We were getting into late afternoon, and monitoring problems still bothered Glenn. I could hear the drums all right, and it seemed that the concertmaster and Weasel could as well, but we were all on the floor, and Glenn was up on that lectern, which may have made a significant difference. Some adjustments were made, and we moved on to the third section, the first "static" section--instead of chord changes over a consistent rhythm, we'd be playing the same chord on different beats, with different sections coming in at different times for a call and response effect. It was impossible to tell what this was going to sound like when I was just rehearsing my part, but in the actual room, with the sections answering each other, the design of the piece was surprising and thrilling. Large blocks of sound came from different parts of the room, new each time. Another peak experience, and I wonder how this will translate to disc. I would have liked to get a good look at Glenn's theatrical conducting style, but between looking at the score, the fretboard, and the concertmaster and producer, I didn't have the chance. A couple times I noticed that his glasses had fallen off from his gyrations, and I'd occasionally glance over to see if he avoided stepping on them. (Happily, the glasses made it through both days.)

Another break was required before doing the fourth section, and by this time a pattern of noodling emerged. Psych rockers would play, say, "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," prog rockers would quote Rush, and someone else attempted "Frere Jacques" in the new tuning. Generally, I'd try to practice with the guitar's volume all the way down, which was sometimes difficult with the conflicting amplified playing. This would become somewhat more annoying in short breaks during which Glenn would try to resolve some issue--as soon as he stepped off the lectern, the noodling would start up again, growing gradually louder, until Glenn would have to wave and shout, "Shut up! No noodling!" Perhaps a $5 noodling penalty would be in order, but there wasn't much momentum behind this idea.

This fourth section proved to be one of diabolical complexity. Still, nothing shorter than a quarter note here, but with the ending section of the same three or four notes in different combinations, it was easy to get lost. And get lost we did. We had at least one serious derailment and started over, but we got through this one. I certainly got lost during the last part of this, and just laid out rather than dilute the effectiveness of the ensemble. One thing, though, was that my above-the-staff reading got a workout. I didn't have a solid performance of my own of this section all the way through, but it was good enough to break early.

I don't recall us moving on to the fifth section at this point; we were on page 5 by now--half the overall score--so we broke up for the evening, shortly after 8. The tracking room was going to be locked down, so we'd be able to leave our gear. This made my life a lot easier for the evening, so I was happy to do that. I made contact with my friends Phil, his lovely wife Dara, and their friend Dan, who it turned out were just getting seated for dinner at a Brooklyn restaurant, so they gave me directions and off I headed. On the way, I saw something rather amazing. Waiting at a light on Atlantic, the car next to me just took off through the red. Seconds later, he was pulled over by an unmarked car, in some surprisingly instant retribution. In about 20 minutes I was at the restaurant, scoring parking right out front. This quite surprised my friends, who thought I'd be at least another half hour, but the traffic situation was pretty good.

After a day of bread and cheese and finding myself in a place known for its burgers, I went for the veggie burger which--wonder of wonders--was actually their own, formed out of actual grains and vegetables, and not some awful mix. Rather nice, as was the pumpkin spice ale they had on special. We sat outside, enjoying the warm night, talking music, film, and politics. I did a bit of downloading of the day, and then we got caught up. A fine dinner, fine company, and fine conversation, including some amusingly provocative musical opinions from Phil.

After dinner, I saw that I'd gotten a cell message from my contact for accommodations, and learned...that this, too, had fallen through. This was going to be an interesting evening. At this point, Phil and Dara stepped in to fill the breach, even on this dreadfully short notice. Very nice of them! I'd have a place after all, and in Brooklyn, which was ideal for the next morning's commute.

There had been talk of heading into the city for a social engagement, and I offered to drive; it was quite nice rolling down FDR drive with the windows down, playing Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard box set on our way to a bar in Gramercy Park. When we parked, I noticed that we'd picked up a praying mantis, a nice glimmer of nature in the city. As we shouted our conversation over the bar's loud music, Dan observed that even if one intends to visit a bar for just 20 minutes or a half hour, one is still not going to get out before 50 minutes: there's introduction time, drink ordering time, small talk time, and goodbye time before one can get out the door. And in the event, Dan nailed it--in 50 minutes we were back on the sidewalk, and soon were in the car headed back to Phil's and Dara's very pleasant garden apartment in Brooklyn. We hung out further, discussed movies (notably Lucas, whose post-American Graffiti work now reveals itself to be crucially lacking), and I took advantage of the wifi connection. Soon enough it was 2:00, and time to turn in, which I did to the sound of crickets outside--another welcome glimmer of nature.

Having a clean, comfortable place to sleep made an enormous difference--I had a good seven hours or so, enough to recover from the sleep deprivation of the night before. I got a shower, packed up, chatted with my host a bit, and at around 10:30 I figured I'd have to get on the road. Many thanks to Phil, Dara, and their friend Dan.

I took my leave, and called home while I walked up a peaceful, sunny street to where I'd parked, the car unmolested. I made a few wrong turns trying to get back on 278, but after looping through what, apparently, was Red Hook, I figured it out. In Astoria, I didn't have the primo parking of the day before, but I did get a spot right opposite CUP, which would be convenient. Having to raise my voice in the bar the night before left me with a bit of a sore throat, so I went for the large orange juice and an espresso, figuring that I'd score some bread in the studio. Walking down the block to the studio entrance, cup of espresso in hand, the sun shining, the sky blue, the air warm, and a faint breeze coming from somewhere, I felt that in many ways, I could imagine no better life.

Glenn hadn't yet appeared, and there wasn't much in the way of a breakfast spread, but soon enough Glenn, Reg, and the bread and cheese (including a bleu or Gorgonzola or something) were in the house. There was once again a ramp-up period in which I managed to eat, connect with people (Ben had wondered how the accommodations worked out for me; Fred in NJ had left his cell phone in the car, so I wouldn't have been able to connect with him if I'd had to), and get some rehearsal in.

We started this time right where we'd left off, with a section I'd enjoyed practicing--essentially a series of whole tone ascents in several different rhythmic patterns, alternating root tones each time. Perhaps it was the sore throat, or my not having pounded through this section as much as I had the others, but I found in the event that it was rather easy to get lost. There were sections with a lot of quarter notes, which weren't at all difficult to play, but the fingering had me looking from the score to the fretboard fairly often, and the quarter notes made it tough to find the jumping off point again. So I again pulled the "copy what Ben's doing" method. We had a few false starts, but once we went through this, we went through it twice. At some point in the morning, a new person appeared, toting guitar and tiny amp, but it was agreed that he would not be able to be acclimated by the time we needed him to be, so he took his leave.

Another break meant another round of bread and cheese, and I ducked out to get more orange juice and espresso. Oddly, this time the total was different from the last time. When we came back, there were again monitoring issues, which took longer to resolve than the last time. This next section--another cluster section--presented some other problems as well. In the tenor parts are a lot of clusters around high E, and in this room the frequencies were too piercing. Glenn told us to play those an octave lower, which we practiced while they took another whack at the monitoring problems. It turned out that there was a dead spot in the back of the room, where they couldn't hear drums--back in the basses and the rear of the altos. Someone hunted down some Auratones to try to fill the breach.

We rehearsed this several times, during which we got badly lost, and Wharton was unable to continue drumming through these rehearsals. Weasel took over for these sections--truly a renaissance man. Glenn ducked out as well, but by the time he came back, we hit this section again for real.

Again, I found myself losing track of the measure and the quarter notes, but I generally knew the chords, so it was easy to follow along with Ben. We did two takes of this one, and then took another break, during which I tried to figure out what I was going to be doing that evening. Was I getting a cold? Or was I just dealing with a bit of fatigue? Should I try to meet up with a client for dinner? Get on the road? Scare up another place to stay? I looked into all the options, out of the same thought that I'd had yesterday of pursuing everything at once. Ultimately things seemed to stabilize around my having dinner or at least coffee with a client, with whom I was playing phone tag, and then driving out to Fred's place in NJ.

Our next section was easy--another static section, which we ran through twice. At this point I was used to the call-and-response effect, and it wasn't quite as dramatic as it had been the first time, but it did work. Sadly, on the second take, I came in a fraction of a beat early at one point, and you can hear my guitar quite clearly, out there completely on its own. A few measures later, another tenor took the bait also. Oops. Dunno if that'll be kept, or comped from another take. If it's in there, I'll say it's my solo.

By this point, the men's room was out of soap, and the trash can was overflowing with paper towels. During one of these breaks, I also discovered that a) Fred's family were fighting off colds, and it wouldn't be fair to impose on them in that state, and b) my client had made other plans for the evening, so dinner/coffee was out. So I started formulating yet another plan--I'd drive as far as I felt like driving, and stay wherever along the way. Maybe this would be sleeping in rest areas, or maybe just getting a room somewhere; I wasn't sure yet, although by phone, Patricia lobbied for the hotel option, so I'd at least have a bed.

We reconvened. This section ended on a fermata, or a long suspension of time, during which (in the live performance) the drumming speeds up to 80. With the monitoring situation here, that proved to be impossible. We tried it several times and in several different ways, until finally it was decided that we'd play at 60, and then later play at 80, and there'd be a crossfade before the drums kicked in at 80. We worked at this a couple of times, and it was quite nice just to hold a chord for a while with the double-strumming, even though our arms were getting a bit tired.

There was another long break here, during which the pizza delivery was arranged, but we had to get through the next couple of sections before getting the pizza. This section was another I'd not rehearsed as much as I would have liked, but it had enough rests and long, sustained notes that I was able to muddle through. There were a few impressive leaps, though, which made things interesting, and again we weren't to play the high Es as written. Reg pointed out that she didn't mind if some of us did play them that way, though, because it would be more texture. The problem was that when everyone was playing those notes, it was brutally piercing, but if only some of us are, well, no problem, really. Another decision was made to end this section on a fermata, unlike the score, but it would make the edit easier.

We took a brief break after this section, and went on to play the end, starting with the fermata this time, and moving around different tonal centers to end a tritone over where we started. The sense of what key to end on shifted several times during this portion of the piece, which was interesting to me...or maybe it was just my perception here. The piece ends on a note that's left to ring out, and unfortunately some people started talking before the decay was clear. We did the section again, and I think we might have had some extraneous noises, but not enough to rule out a fade. I would have liked a pure ring-out, but I think some people were more in band-practice space than they were in recording space.

We'd played through the piece once, and pizza had arrived. So we ate. Oddly, there were only three vegan pizzas, which seemed ill-considered for the kind of people we had. Still, everyone had enough to eat, though the pizza itself was...edible. Glenn observed, "You can't get pizza like this in Manhattan." I chatted with a group of former Pittsburghers, who'd all perked up on hearing me mention the city (and also Tyondi, who's played here). They'd dispersed to Providence, New York, and other places, but we swapped stories of having worked with some of the same people. A nice connection.

At this point we had about three and a half hours left, so we were told that to make the best use of our time, we'd play through the piece again. This time, we were acclimated to the sound and feel, and while we were tired, we were inhabitants of the piece's sound world. We weren't just satisfied with playing the piece; we'd play it with worthy energy. So we did--we really hammered the first section, and I broke my first strings of the session (one high B and one low). I ran to the string bag for replacements, winding them up quickly without my usual obsession for making the winds even, and then realized that I had exact replacements in my gig bag. Duh.

We moved through the piece section by section, skipping the long, troublesome section from earlier in the day, most performances seeming better than yesterday's, but not all. At around half past seven, things stopped without us having reached the end again, and I wondered what was going on. We learned that the label had neglected to pay the studio, and that no more would be recorded until the situation was resolved. Shortly after this slightly disturbing pause, though, we were back on track, so they must have worked it out quickly.

Glenn said that there was a dilemma about which of the three remaining sections should be tackled, and the engineer offered over the talkback that in the time it would take to decide, we could record all three, so off we went. I found myself getting lost again during the major second climb, and in a few other places late in the piece, although the watching-Ben's-fingers method worked well again. On our last take, I broke my low B string again, but no matter--we'd finished. I'd hoped that we'd be doing the very end again to get a clean ring-out, but that wasn't necessary, apparently.

Here we were, deposited at the end of two days of heightened alertness and several kinds of trials, and we'd be breaking up. I connected with a few other people, exchanged cards, said goodbyes, and packed up. I (and others) loaded Glenn down with some CDRs, and asked him to sign my score. He was quite gracious about this and other requests, signing guitars and other mementos as well.

I joined a group lugging our equipment back through the maze to the front entrance (the only open one at this hour), glad to breathe some fresh air on the street. I called Patricia, let her know the session was over, and that I was heading home. I loaded the car, got yet another large orange juice and a double espresso to go.

In a decidedly comforting note, Columbia's radio station WKCR was playing a Monk marathon until midnight for Monk's birthday, so I had that familiar soundtrack to my trip on 278. I had the option of doing the Veranzano Narrows bridge to NJ, but I stupidly thought I'd go with the familiar Holland Tunnel, so I ended up crawling across Manhattan for an hour. A dreadful mistake, but I had plenty of time to think and listen to Monk. Once we were through the tunnel crawl, though, things opened up, and I was a ways into New Jersey before the WKCR signal disappeared into static. So I put in the CDR of...the 13th's sole performance in 2001. In many ways, I just can't get enough of this piece.

Having lost an hour to city traffic, I realized I wasn't going to have the energy to make it a long way without stopping. I had maybe three hours of driving left in me, and it was 10:00, so I decided to see where I was around midnight, and stop there. At first, this ended up being the PA/NJ border town of Easton, which I'd heard a bit about in some inn books, but a quick loop around town didn't seem inviting, and all they had was a depressing-looking Best Western. So I continued down 78 to Allentown, which had a Holiday Inn Express across the road from an amusement park we'd noticed on previous trips. And...they had a room, for $90, which at this point worked for me. I called Patricia again to tell her the plan, checked in, lugged all the gear in (not taking any chances at this point), and went up to the room to use the wifi, email various parties, and realize that I was staying up way too late. The bed was, happily, clean and free of any of the obvious filth of the Hojo Express in North Bergen, so that was a bonus.

I slept acceptably, got up around quarter to 9, got a bit of breakfast in the lobby, and checked out. I was back on the road, and home by 3:30, totally exhausted, but quite fulfilled. I think I'm going to pick up a cheap guitar or two to leave in this tuning.

Update, 06/05/2005: It looks as though Symphony 13 will be re-recorded for official release (and with a live performance) in early 2006. Stay tuned.