on braxton

...Part of what’s interesting about these speculations is the visual component: the small box, the skyscraper, the enormous police whistle (a totalitarian state expressed in the form of a toy).3 Perhaps there is something of the same fascination with scale in reaction to Braxton’s enormous contra-bass saxophone, an eight-foot high instrument that he wheels about on a platform (more benignly, and I think appropriately, its scale returns us to childhood). One interesting note about the destructive power of low frequencies is that soldiers break step when crossing a bridge, so that the steady rhythm does not bring the bridge down. There’s a strange corollary in Braxton’s “Composition No. 19 for one hundred tubas” from 1971. The music, schematic rather than note-specific, is described as “twenty pages of schematic music and instructions to be prepared for four groups of marching ensembles— twenty-five musicians in each—in any order and for any length” (“Anthony”): music for 100 marching tubaists....