A student of philosophy before becoming a jazz bassist (and, in the trio Joseph Holbrooke, with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley, helping found the British free improvisation tradition along the way), Gavin Bryars has always viewed ‘composition’ in an extended field.
His first major work, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), was originally written as a single page of performance suggestions related to the imagined sound of the ship’s string quartet as it sank below the waves. (‘What interested me most’, he later told the critic Paul Griffiths, ‘was the whole network of things capable of becoming compositional material’.) This was followed in 1971 by Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, based on the looped song of an unknown homeless man. An extended version created in 1993, featuring the voice of Tom Waits, was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize.
Since the release of these two works (as the first disc on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label), Bryars has written extensively for stage, ballet, film and art gallery, as well as concert hall.
His many collaborators have included the director Robert Wilson (the CIVIL warS, 1983–4), the choreographers Merce Cunningham (Biped, 1999) and Edouard Lock (New Work, 2011, 11th Floor, 2014), the artists Juan Muñoz (A Man in a Room, Gambling, 1992) and Massimo Bartolini (In Là, 2022–3) and the early music groups the Hilliard Ensemble and Fretwork.
This diverse body of work is connected by an ongoing interest in ‘music which refers to other music or to other musical values’, as Bryars once put it; and a fascination with manipulations of time – from the distension of the episcopal hymn ‘Autumn’ in Titanic as it reverberates through the ocean, to the conflicting temporal experiences of his second opera, Doctor Ox’s Experiment (1998), to the construction of A Man in a Room, Gambling as a series of short, unannounced radio broadcasts, inserted like the shipping forecast into regular programming. Always original and experimental, without ever being obscure, it is a unique contribution to British musical life.
Written by Tim Rutherford-Johnson.
