Sharp practice

Musical Times, Autumn 2003 by Fox, Christopher

Gavin Bryars at 60

CHRISTOPHER FOX investigates the mellifluously melancholic music of a sexagenarian master of mystery

GAVIN BRYARS is sixty this year and his birthday on 16 January generated considerable media attention. It is a mark of his reputation that even BBC Radio 4's 'Front Row', not usually noted for its coverage of contemporary classical music, included an interview with him. But like most of the birthday tributes the 'Front Row' interview concentrated on Bryars's early work. As he wrote to me,

It would be a relief to talk about recent work after doing any number of 'retrospective' views as a(n almost) sixty year-old and discussing Jesus' blood and Titanic yet again. I have nothing against these works of course, and as my former manager used to say it's a bit like the Rolling Stones knowing that they will always have to perform 'Satisfaction'.1

Jesus' blood never failed me yet (1971) and The sinking of the Titanic (1969) are indeed modern classics but in this article I want to focus on Bryars's more recent music, particularly that of the last decade. Nevertheless it is important to acknowledge that in a sense each of Bryars's works, even Jesus' blood and Titanic, is still current. A Bryars work is never 'finished' as that term is normally understood because, rather like an installation artist invited to present an existing work in a new space, Bryars is always prepared to adapt the materials of his work to fit new circumstances. In 1971 Bryars acquired the tape of the tramp's voice which provides the basis for Jesus' blood and, by one of those tangential connections which so delight him, first listened to it on a Revox tape recorder which the jazz bass player Dave Holland had left with improvising saxophonist Evan Parker when Holland moved to New York to join the Miles Davis group. Over the following years Bryars gradually evolved the orchestration which was then recorded for Brian Eno's Obscure label and released in 1975 on an LP with The sinking of the Titanic on the other side. That LP effectively fixed the piece for most people but not for Bryars and he returned to the piece in the early 1990s for a CD devoted to a series of versions of the piece, including one in which Torn Waits adds his own descant.2

That Bryars is able to return to pieces written many years earlier is testament to a number of features of his oeuvre which make it quite unusual and to which I will return throughout this article. Firstly, his preoccupations as a composer and the aesthetic from which those preoccupations spring have been remarkably consistent throughout his career. Secondly, most of his works have a robustly individual conceptual framework which can seem to exist independently from the musical material involved in any one realisation of that work. This is most notably the case with The sinking of the Titanic: it is quite possible for different realisations to include none of the same music and yet still be performances of the same piece since the identity of the piece lies not in a particular ordering of notes but in the whole constellation of music-related data around the historical event of the Titanic's fatal voyage. Thirdly, his musical language, particularly in the music written after 1975, has stuck faithfully to the same principles of melodic, rhythmic and (especially important in Bryars's music) harmonic organisation. It is the mellifluous melancholy of this musical language which has won Bryars his many fans; later I hope to unravel some of the mysterious complexity beneath its smooth exterior.

BRYARS is a prolific composer but one whose creativity is particularly stimulated by sympathetic musicians. After the early conceptual and/or indeterminate works written between 1968 and 1972(3) he fell silent until 1975, re-emerging from two years in which 'there was nothing that I was able to write that made any sense to me'4 as an early version of the composer he is today. During the 1970s he produced relatively little music, diverted both by teaching duties at Portsmouth and then Leicester polytechnics and by the task of preparing the official biography of Lord Berners. Bryars began work on the Berners biography in 1976, eventually abandoning the project in 1983 (Berners's centenary) when, as he put it, he 'had to take the decision to be either a biographer or a composer. (There are people from each side who think I made the wrong decision.)'.5 In the following two decades demand for his work has grown and his output has grown correspondingly, including scores for dance theatre, and many orchestral, chamber and vocal works. Most substantial of all are three full-length operas: Medea (1982, revised 1984), a version of Euripides's play made in collaboration with Robert Wilson; Doctor Ox's experiment (1995-97), based on a short story by Jules Verne; and G (2001), a portrait of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing process. An attempt to deal with all this work is obviously beyond the scope of this article (and Bryars's music is in any case well documented on his web-site at http://www.gavinbryars.com); instead I want to focus on just two works, A man in a room, gambling and the first two books of madrigals, part of a larger work-in-progress. Why these two works? In part I have chosen them because they seem to me to be paradigmatic of those features of Bryars's compositional praxis which I mentioned earlier: stylistic consistency, conceptualisation and note-to-note organisation. They also allow a consideration of Bryars's use of text, an increasingly predominant feature in his work.