The Australian Magazine

Oct 18-19 1997

Avant Gardesman

by Miriam Cosic

Until the moment it did, he had forgotten completely he was due to discuss his life and work with a journalist from the other end of the earth. Given that he's coming all the way out here to perform during the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts this month and that he's never been here before -and that his is hardly a household name with the Rage generation - you'd think he'd be looking forward to drumming up interest in what he has to say these days.

Bryars is a very English composer. Not archetypically English, as in Edward Elgar or Benjamin Britten, despite the fact he lives in a 17^th century cottage 17km from Leicester, has his office in a converted stable and eats kippers for breakfast. His Englishness is more of the down-to-earth, working-man type. Modest but doughty, the polar opposite of British pomp and circumstance.

Like the man, Bryars' music is neither pompous nor circumstantial. It is experimental stuff, rooted in the cross-disciplinary anarchy of London in the Swinging Sixties. You know the kind of thing: musicians and painters, poets and sculptors, all collaborating on performance art which pushed the outer limits of tradition. Or of tolerance, the musically conservative might say.

Much of Bryars' work is deceptively simple, contemplative, a kind of shimmering immersion in aural sensation. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet is his most famous work, the dirge-like hymn sampled against a background of Bryars' instrumental music. The old man whose wavering voice we hear singing was an anonymous hobo, whose song was recorded for a television documentary about the homeless. The disc was re-released in 1993, beefed up with vocals by Tom Waits. It's hard work but somehow groovy. The original was one of his first recordings. His latest, A Man In A Room, Gambling, is the same genre 20 years on and much more enticing because it's less depressing. A man with a sexy Spanish accent - the sculptor Juan Munoz, in fact - reads five versions of a text describing how to cheat at cards. A mesmeric musical background seems to advance and recede over his narration.

The five-minute pieces - there are 10 of them, actually, but Bryars' record company thought it would be pushing things to have the lot of them on a single disc - were designed to precede the late-night weather report on BBC radio. Unannounced, they were intended to ambush listeners and provoke curiosity. "One of the functions of the music is not to be dominant, but to have the same function that sleight of hand has when you're doing tricks," Bryars says. "So sometimes you are diverted from what Juan is describing by a particular phrase or harmony in the music. And when you go back to the text, you find you've actually lost the thread…"

Bryars' voice is intense and he speaks quickly, eliding words the way French speakers do. Except he's speaking English. You have to listen intently when he speaks, or risk begging his pardon every five minutes. He lives alone: I've got three separate phone lines and fax lines. I've got mobiles, pagers, e-mail and the nearest airport is 40 minutes away." He starts listing all the other airports within cooee and their distances from his house. There are quite a few of them.

Just when he's starting to sound not only monomaniacal about his work, but slightly over-preoccupied with detail, a sunny expansiveness suddenly creeps into his voice. He has started talking about his daughters, Ziella and Orlanda, modified Italian names, which are unique, he points out. They are 17 and 14 respectively and cellists both, just like his dear old mum, who is 95, still keeps house for herself, and plays in a string quartet every Monday night. His daughters live with their mother in London, but visit regularly. So regularly that the conversion of the stables became necessary. His study in the house contains a computer and teenagers shrieking around the Internet are not really conducive to composing. Living alone has its merits.

"I'm sure it does make it easier for me and I suppose that's a rather selfish thing," he admits. "I'm very close to my daughters and I speak to them every day on the phone. They spend most of their summers here, and we usually go to Venice on holiday. We also have a family dog, a Dalmation, which spends half its time with me, half its time in London. There's an easy sort of give and take between both halves of the family."

I had been expecting Bryars to baulk at personal questions - "serious" artists often do - but he clearly doesn't mind at all. Especially about the kids. His daughters, evidently, are fine musicians. They played on his disc, The Sinking of the Titanic, and in a concert with him last month. But while the young one may follow him into the profession - she "has a very very good ear, she has perfect pitch and an incredible memory", he says, purring with pride - his older daughter has a broader range and is interested, at the moment, in both astrophysics and filmmaking.

Musicality in the Bryars family may well be genetic. While his mother is still wielding the bow in her nineties, Bryars' father, who had a fine baritone voice, died when he was only 54 (his own age now, he points out nervously). An uncle was church organist and an aunt was a "semi-professional" pianist. "Bear in mind, I was living in a small town in Yorkshire where we had no contact with professional music organisations at all," he says. "So it was essentially music made around the church, around amateur music organisations."

In a way, Bryars has continued the family tradition of amateur music- making. He ended up studying philosophy at Sheffield University, not music, because of the arcane enrolment rules which stranded him up the academic creek without a modern language. He studied composition with George Lindstedt on the side, however, and played double bass in a jazz band. "I tended to use the money I earned from playing in cabarets to acquire scores, a lot of music by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and so on. More and more, I wanted to move away from improvised music into composed music."

Although other people have labelled him one, he doesn't call himself a minimalist. "I was friends, and still am friends, with composers of minimal music - I got to know Steve Reich in 1969 and we've been friends ever since - but I never wanted to compose like them."

Their common interest was tonality, of course, the poor sibling rivalry of audience-frightening atonal music - developed by arch-modernists such as Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez - which had a stranglehold on the serious musical establishment when Bryars was coming of age. While the minimalists went off onto mesmerising shifting repetition, Bryars, however, retained an interest in melody. The other interest he had in common with the minimalists was an affinity with the visual arts, where the term minimalism originated. Bryars taught in fine arts departments for more than a decade. Increasingly interested in the visual, he was invited to lecture in art - though music remained his metier - and he has published research on Marcel Duchamp.

"Most composers working in the experimental area[in the late sixties and early seventies] worked in art colleges, and often talked about the parallel in ideas between experimental music and the visual arts of that time; pop art, conceptual art, systems art, minimalist art, and so on.

"Art colleges were very lively, liberal environments at that time, and there was a great deal of interest in this music. I remember in 1970 going to Philip Glass concerts when there were six people in the audience. It was minority music, but it came up ultimately because a lot of rock musicians found a kind of parallel in their work. In a way that was a kind of underground too, but that evolved; Philip Glass writing operas, Steve Reich writing orchestral pieces. John Adams becoming more eclectic. That takes you away from the simplicity of early minimal music, and that starts to re-investigate tonality."

Bryars himself has moved into more conventional forms. His 1984 opera, Medea, directed and designed by Robert Wilson for the Paris and Lyons Operas, was a critical and popular success. "I was surprised that we had 11 performances and every one was completely full. Granted, the musical language was tonal and was a language they could understand. There were vocal lines which they could recognise, very singable and so on, and the staging was very very imaginative." His next opera, Dr Ox's Blood, will premiere next year at the English National Opera, and he has started a small-scale 12-performer piece for Music Theatre Wales.

"As a result of [Medea]," Bryars says, "a lot of performers, who I probably wouldn't have encountered, started to get in touch with me, like the Arditti Quartet. Lots of very serious, high-level performers started to ask me for pieces."

The Hilliard Ensemble, the Balanescu Quartet, the cellist Julian Lloyd-Weber, Brian Eno and Tom Waits - among the hipper members of the avant-garde music world - came knocking on his door and he wrote for them and his own ensemble. As the years passed, his works took on a quasi-spiritual flavour, some of it a secular response to the work of Arvo Part and John Taverner.

He didn't launch himself into the exciting but precarious free-fall of full-time composing at that time, however, mainly because he and his wife had just split and a divorce was in the offing. Teaching was a way of supporting his children. Eventually juggling what became two full-time jobs - his teaching and his composing - proved impossible to manage. "I remember writing this piece for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I was writing from eight in the evening to six in the morning, and then having to teach from nine to six the next day. And that's the point where I thought, 'Look, this is crazy'."

That was only two years ago. He misses teaching - "Once you live alone as a composer, there is a danger of starting to think the world revolves around yourself" - but has been marvellously productive since. And there remain fresh fields to conquer. Like Australia. For the Melbourne Festival, he will take part in three concerts. Program One is all Bryars: his second String Quartet, Les Giancailles from his latest CD, and Jesus' Blood. Program Two juxtaposes his work against that of Melbourne composer David Chesworth, an equally experimental artist who roams among genres for inspiration. The final program pits Bryars against contemporary Australian composers including the iconoclast Michael Smetanin.

Typically, it was the nature of his invitation to Melbourne which intrigued him. A curator, Tyrone Landau, was appointed to organise three concerts around Bryars' work, an unusual way to go about programming. "If it was simply a question of someone phoning up and saying would you like to come to Australia to do a concert…" Bryars begins , and pauses. I hold my breath. Is Bryars actually about to finishhis sentence with: "I'd say, you must be kidding"? He doesn't, of course, but it's hard to tell from his tone if he hasn't suddenly realised his direction and done a fast U-turn "….then I'd say OK, and I would propose a program. This way was more interesting because it's more what they really needed to hear."

Well, need mightn't quite be the word. Want maybe. Certainly the small but knowledgeble band of Bryars aficionados in this country have been listening to his music on disc for long enough. For a man working outside the mainstream, it's taken Gavin Bryars a long time to come this far off the beaten track.

Article: applause 7 performance

The Sunday Age, 19 October 1997

All in the game by Andrew Scott

Bryars isn't like that. He's warm and giving. If those disappointed acolytes listened less analytically to his music, they would recognise it too. Bryars does not want to be worshipped. He wants to touch us. And he does, most successfully.

Not that the music world or the public embraced him from the beginning. Twenty-six years ago, the rock press paid attention to Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet because its producer was Brian Eno. Later, when at the instigation of Philip Glass, Tom Waits's voice was added to the recording by the original singer, a homeless man, it became a huge hit.

A British tabloid then accused Bryars of exploiting the homeless and attempted to claim the royalties for the quavering voiced (and long dead) vagrant. Then, says Bryars, "the realisation hit them they would be inundated with claims from every homeless person in England". The tabloid withdrew but Bryars cut a single and gave the royalties to charity. It's now a cult classic.

"The music hasn't changed; I haven't changed. The world's moved on," says Bryars. "I'm not arrogant enough to say the world has caught up, but the musical climate has changed enough to make a music which is more reflective and slow moving possible." His listeners' attention may wander but they respond to genuine musical emotion.

Bryars, an intellectual, understands his non-intellectual public very well. He allows for that. Take his new work A Man In A Room, Gambling, due to be performed in a three-concert programof his works at the Melbourne Festival. It's written with the half-listener in mind. We hear Spanish sculptor Juan Munoz explain in heavily accented English the moves of a card sharp. He could be talking to himself, he could be rehearsing his moves, he could even be warning us how to spot a cheat.

There's music in the background. Sometimes it swells, sometimes it becomes so insistent our concentration shifts: Bryars' music is playing the role of the card-sharp's accomplice. When you return to the voice, "you've lost the text, you've lost the trick." says Bryars.

Gambling is like a prelude to the main event, something we might as well catch while we're waiting. Bryars likens it to a sound he grew up with, the shipping forecast, broadcast before the late night news on BBC radio. "Your listening moved in and out of focus. My brother was a sea-captain, so I'd listen and notice the particular areas where he was sailing or the ones near the coast where I came from in Yorkshire. And I'd lose interest once you got to the Irish Sea because that was the other side of the world."

It's all a game, of course. Bryars enjoys games: mind games, word games. He plays games with titles. Bryars can't just write a cello concerto. It must have a tantalising sub title, such as Farewell To Philosophy - which works on two levels. It alludes to Bryars' early studies in philosophy, which he abandoned to explore music. And it has special meaning for the players: cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, its dedictee, and the English Chamber Orchestra have Haydn in their repertoire. Two Haydn symphonies are subtitled The Philosopher and Farewell.

"One of the things I would find hardest to do is to write a piece of music which is …(just) about music," says Bryars. "I've never written "Symphony No.1 or Piano Sonata No1 because that, in a way, is a rather internal, self-contained world. I find I'm most at ease if I'm working with an external inspiration….

"Subtitles give clues as to where the ideas come from. It helps the players to orient themselves to my thinking; and it helps the listener to see where the stuff's coming from. So it helps the whole process."

He's very interested to hear how new musicians playing his works affect the process. On his first day in Melbourne he heard part of his String Quartet #2 (the exception, no subtitle), played by the Australian quartet de Flocked.

"It was interesting: they were doing things which the Balanescu Quartet didn't do." De Flocked asked Bryars whether they were doing it right. "I said, 'You're doing it your way.' The piece has to become their piece, not mine."

Few serious composers are reviewed in the rock press. There's been Philip Glass, briefly Gsrecki and… Gavin Bryars. While Glass is, to the casual listener, aggressive, repetitious, energised, high-pitched, nervy and, to many, nerve-racking, Bryars, whose interest grew out of jazz and playing the double bass, developed a sound at the other end of the spectrum: rich, slow, dreamlike, evolving and resolving. But why does he have such broad appeal?

"I imagine it's all the pieces have some aspect of humanity", he says. "For me what made the Jesus' Blood piece was the dignity and humanity of the man whose voice I used. OK, there's a grain of intelligence doing this but there's also emotional colour, a sense that the music can genuinely touch in some way and that means it's not excluding listeners; it's drawing in people who wouldn't be attracted to something that's only cerebral."

Bryars doesn't want to irritate, as do some modern composers, but to make people "itch a little bit", so that listeners and performers find stimulation beyond what's in the score.

Article: MetroArts

THE AGE,

Tuesday 23 September 1997

Music: Gavin Bryars

Sailing uncharted waters
by Stephanie Bunbury

Melbourne Festival

Bryars has worked with some of the most interesting names in art, theatre and music of the past10 years - Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno and, next year, the film maker Atom Egoyan. Along with the Hilliard Ensemble - which shows something of his mind's direction. In between matches, he has also created some of the most persuasive music, both challenging and accessible, of recent years. Bryars is one of the few serious musicians who actually sells. And he is, no doubt about it, dead - set serious.

Not that everyone takes Bryars seriously, even after nearly 30 years of making music. He does have his larrikin side, it's true. The Portsmouth of Sinfonia, a group of people who recorded the familiar classics on instruments they could not play, was Bryars's special contribution to '60s iconoclasm. It was a hoot.

Melbourne Festival audiences have the chance to hear a spectrum of Bryars' work. The Sinking of the Titanic dates back to 1969; Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet and Farewell to Philosophy date from the '70s. They have changed over time, he says, maturing in performance; a musician can expand a piece in ways the composer never anticipated.

Then there is A Man in a Room, Gambling, his latest collaboration, created with the Spanish sculptor Juan Munoz, soon to be released on CD. Part of his attraction to collaboration is that it stretches him to think from the point of view of another musician or, with Munoz, an artist from another discipline. Bryars is a far cry from the lone genius. "I can do what I do because I have worked hard over the years. I think about things and imagine things and, OK, this may be the quality of my imagination, but everyone has that capacity. Working with other musicians is an inspiration to me and I learn a great deal from them. You've got to have a degree of humility."

Much of his work is written for the nether end of the string family. The deep strings are heard to full effect on A Man in a Room, Gambling. This is really a series of five - minute pieces, all featuring Juan Munoz describing professional card tricks. Behind his exotic voice, the music drifts and gambols, with him, mesmerising and yet rather self - effacing. The five minute pieces were designed to be played on radio before the news, to come up unexpectedly, their subject matter puzzling and yet not insistent.

Bryars' model for this piece was the radio shipping forecast. "The shipping forecast has a mythic quality in English radio life," he says. A faint glow of enthusiasm steals across the set of his face. "It's something everyone knows, but nobody listens to it consciously apart from people who need it. It's something usually encountered by people waiting for the next thing; you're waiting for the news, or the Test Match is interrupted. So people have this vague sense of a very beautiful and rather imaginary geography. It's a kind of litany."

The Sinking of the Titanic attracted him as a subject because it was part of the collective memory - a great, mythically symbolic event that had been encrusted with other, smaller myths. For him, 1912 is the end of the 19^th century, with all its optimism and faith in progress. On the small scale, he painstakingly researched the question of what, exactly, the band was playing as it went down with the ship. It was the gap between verifiable fact and the subsequent falsifications that intrigued him.

"What I was trying to do was have a network of reference, of memory and counter - suggestion, all working against each other."

The other, older piece he will perform in Melbourne, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, was drawn from one moment in a friend's underground film about the London homeless, when an old man breaks into song. "There was something about his voice I found very touching. His voice was very musical; he was in tune." He put the voice onto a loop; he found it could reduce people to tears.

Gradually, he added instruments, always trying to reinforce the voice rather than undermine it. The first recorded version was 24 minutes, the length of a side of vinyl, but it has since been scaled up to 74 minutes when Philip Glass asked him to put it on CD. "In doing that, I couldn't just make it three times as slow or give three times the number of repetitions. I had to take it through a more complicated journey, as it were." For a forthcoming anthology, he has taken it down to one minute.

Bryars' background in jazz, he agrees, makes him easy about that kind of change. He also likes to work with musicians who specialise in early music, because they are used to improvising around stretches of music that have only been preserved in fragments, or ornamenting music that has been very sketchily notated.

But for all this enthusiasm, he could never write for other people's pleasure. "I've never been able to do that, and I don't want to start. I couldn't have done that Candle in the Wind nonsense for the Abbey. It seemed to me cheap and not even remotely interesting.

"I could have done something else. But I doubt whether I'm the first person they'd ask." No hint of a smile there. Gavin Bryars is absolutely serious.