Conversations with Gavin Bryars

AUDREY RILEY

Musician and researcher

Writing for people rather than instruments is central to this conversation with Gavin Bryars, which traces how his experience as a bassist, improviser, and composer continues to shape his relationships with musicians and musical works.

Introduction

You are about to hear or read an edited extract, a construct, of a conversation that I had with Gavin Bryars on 4 September 2022. It’s interesting that the questions provoked by the Performer-Composer conference on which this publication is based caused me to reflect—I have never directly asked Gavin about the influence of his own performance experience within the scores he creates for others to perform. As one of the players of these works, the answers appear so clear—this is a conversation I have in the moment (via a notated score) with another performer. Gavin Bryars’s own experience as a performer initiates that conversation.

Beginning as a bass player in a working men’s club, a jazz player, and then an improvisor, dismantling jazz improvisation with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley before finally meeting John Cage and turning to composition, Gavin Bryars is known as the composer of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking of the Titanic. Daily in his garden studio at home in Billesdon in the English Midlands, the working practice of the experienced performer-composer continues, as the playing style and interests of the intended performers, along with the performance situations for each composition are carefully considered. Driven by philosophical ideas and the influence of art, and specific to people or places, this working practice instigates a wide range of compositions and confirms that there will be no leisurely retirement for this working composer just yet.

I understand how to play a Bryars piece simply through the experience of playing with Gavin Bryars and his ensemble. The works Bryars composes are for you and about you. The agency of performance in this situation is handed to the musician: it is the performer who becomes a kind of “performer-composer.” A self-directed approach is found in this delicate exchange through the experience of trying a piece out together as a group without being given direct instructions. It is a practice of evolution through which it’s possible to see Bryars’s own experiences as a jazz performer as influential to the complete process, and a sense of permission, discipline, and acceptance written in and rooted in Bryars’s experience of working with John Cage.

There is a question about future authenticity. How will a future performer understand the evolution of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble’s working practice and find the acceptance they need to take that agency, balancing permission with the discipline that the works demand? The pieces themselves are environments, situations, but this is not improvisation. Instead, a fine balance exists within the works where the musician is invited to push the envelope, sensing as they play what freedoms they have. ¹ Having spent a decade performing with Bryars within the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in the subsequent ten years I have been asking these same questions concerning the MCDC musicians’ working practice. When the performer-composer, the performer-choreographer is not available, how do we understand how to play, how to dance their works?

The conversation with Gavin Bryars for this conference gathered an hour and a half of material to add to the interviews made during my doctoral research. ² These new questions were formed together with Luk Vaes to ask how a future performer will understand an authentic performance of a Bryars work. The answer is an answer and yet not an answer.

A transcript of the edited conversation for the Performer-Composer conference follows each recorded conversation. And by visiting the Spotify player at the end of this chapter, you can listen to a playlist of works and recordings discussed in the conversation (work titles written in bold font in the text below are included in the playlist).

Question 1. Performer or composer?

Audrey Riley Do you think of yourself first as a performer or a composer?

Gavin Bryars Well, I don’t think it’s clear cut. I started out as a performer. I was a jazz bass player and was a practical hands-on playing musician. I started to think about writing things and these became sort of like abstractions but then … when I started writing, through Cage and through that experimental world, in that sense I wasn’t. Except that, within the experimental music world all of us were writing for each other as performers. We didn’t have outside organisations who would perform. So, in a sense we were in a circle where we had to do both—perform and write. And we wrote for each other as performers, so we knew what each of us could do and we wrote to those strengths and weaknesses. So, in that sense I think of myself probably, now, more as a composer than a performer, but I would say that I come to it initially through performance.

For many years I didn’t write anything for either the double bass or the piano—the two instruments that I play. Because what I felt I would do, I would write what my hands do naturally, and that seemed to me to be a limitation because I’m not a virtuoso on either. I’m a decent jazz player but in terms of other kind[s] of bass playing, no … I didn’t write anything.

The only thing I wrote for bass was By the Vaar ³ for Charlie Haden, but in that case, I was not writing it for bass I was writing it for Charlie, and I was writing for the way Charlie plays the bass, which is not the way other people play the bass. I wasn’t drawing on my own abilities or experiences as a performer at all. I would find out what their characteristics were, how they played, what their kind of musical ethos was, their approach to the music, what made them feel good, all those kinds of things, and then I’d write something.

And then it was the Double Bass Concerto itself. ⁴ So, I wrote something which I can’t myself play (I probably could if I really tried, but I wouldn’t dream of doing it in public), but it was a piece using the classical bass devices and techniques in concerto vein. So, I denied myself as a performer in order to write that. Similarly, when I did the Piano Concerto, ⁵ I wrote some things which were probably how I would play the piano in the ensemble—like the kind of accompaniments I might find in something like The North Shore ⁶, or Lauda (con Sordino) ⁷, you know those kinds of things—but that’s not virtuoso piano writing, that’s straightforward doodling.

That Piano Concerto was sometimes criticised for not being a proper concerto. It doesn’t have what they felt a concerto should have—the heroic struggle between the solo instrument and the orchestra, and my answer was, well I don’t see that as being anything very valuable. For me they’re a member of the ensemble, it was an ensemble piece in which the piano was the main feature.

I haven’t written anything else since for classical bass. I suppose By the Vaar was probably the closest, because at least there was some relationship between myself and Charlie in terms of our approaches to jazz. Charlie plays in a much more simplified way, and non-technical, just very clear, well-focused solid notes, and not a lot of flash diving about. So, in a sense, the actual act of performing myself has been something I’ve actually consciously avoided in composition. The opposite of what you would imagine it would be.

Question 2. How do you work with other musicians?

AR So this is you as a performer in the early days putting down the bass and saying, actually I’m going to turn away from this completely.

GB When I stopped playing jazz, I stopped playing the bass, and I didn’t pick up my bass for seventeen years.

AR Exactly. But that has changed then as time has gone on …

GB I did start playing jazz again.

AR And now when you say, write for the ensemble, and you’re writing yourself a bass part, are you thinking about what you would like to play, or how the bass can direct the ensemble through …?

GB And how it can make the ensemble sound good. And in fact, when [my son] Yuri plays my bass parts you just realise how unbelievably simple they are. But it’s the way you do it.

It’s rather like, when I showed Steve Swallow a picture of Yuri playing the bass when Yuri was eight, and he said, “I hope he has the pleasure that we bassists have of playing a good root on the first of the bar.” That is bass playing. And everybody blossoms if you do that. And that’s the role of the bass … is to make the ensemble blossom.

AR And this is coming from your leading the ensemble as if you were a jazz director …

GB And there are, you know, ensemble … jazz ensemble examples, Charlie Mingus for example who directed his jazz group from the bass. There is that kind of model.

Question 3. Did you study orchestration?

GB I got into orchestration when I was writing Medea ⁸, and I had to do it. I had a very short space of time. Historical models—I looked at composers because the opera [Medea] is a kind of solo soprano with an orchestra, so I looked at those. Strauss, Wagner, who’d written for that and how they wrote for it. I had books on orchestration, principally Forsyth, ⁹ but I did it by looking at scores, studying other people’s scores. And that’s rather like, you know, as an artist, a fine artist, you look at the historical models and see how people have done it.

Question 4. What is an authentic Bryars performance to you?

AR But for performers—ordinary performers, and without the benefit of being in your ensemble—how do you see an historically informed performance of a Bryars piece a hundred years from now?

GB Well I think if you look at the Cello Concerto ¹⁰, written for Julian Lloyd Webber who’s not a virtuoso, he concentrated on the thing he can do well, which is to play a very nice lyrical melodic line. I wouldn’t write something which wasn’t to his sound and to his musical ethos. Similarly, with John Harle … when I did the saxophone concerto [The Green Ray] for John Harle. ¹¹ [I wanted] to give them something which is musically interesting.

AR You’re making something that fits in a bespoke way, something for a performer, writing for people and situations.

GB Well I think that you find it in the world of jazz, with Duke Ellington and Carla Bley, and that’s outside the world of classical. Outside the world of classical that’s much more common. And in fact, you know, always the difference between the Duke Ellington band and the Count Basie one was that you could replace a Basie player with someone else and it would sound the same, but you couldn’t replace, say Johnny Hodges on the alto sax with someone else. It wouldn’t be the same.

AR The working practice [of the orchestral and chamber works] is coming from a jazz place actually.

GB Yes.

AR It’s about the people you’ve written the music for.

GB About their history, yes.

AR As far as I am aware, or my sense when I’m playing with you, that very much in the Cage/Cunningham way, you tend to accept what you’re presented with as authentic. As long as it’s done in a committed and honest way and is not used as a vehicle for self-expression.

GB The only time that will come out slightly differently is when I’m working with early music performers, with things like madrigals. We did an early music Jesus’ Blood. Twelve viols, we had sackbuts, we had cornets, we had recorders.

AR But what difference did that make in the performance?

GB None at all. It’s a different sound but it’s still the same piece.

AR So the approach was the same?

GB The piece itself doesn’t change. It’s kind of the colours that are a little bit different, that’s all.

AR But that was authentic for you, and so very acceptable.

GB Yes. And I deliberately didn’t have any instruments in there which were modern instruments, like any modern brass. So, all the instruments were early music, Renaissance instruments.

AR So it’s the material that becomes elastic, or the idea of the orchestration which becomes elastic?

GB In this case that’s Jesus’ Blood, which is an existing piece, but there are others. For example, when I work with singers I haven’t worked with before doing some pieces from different books of madrigals. Stile Antico ¹²—their repertoire is entirely Renaissance music, and so they sing it as if this were Renaissance music, which is correct, which is what I’m doing. The sound of the a cappella ensemble singing madrigals from Gesualdo, Monteverdi is a sound I want.

Question 5. Can you explain why there are different versions of Jesus’ Blood?

AR Different versions of Jesus’ Blood ¹³—whose idea was it that Tom Waits …?

GB Mine.

AR And why is the Tom Waits version very long?

GB Philip Glass had started his record label ¹⁴ and he basically wanted to do Jesus’ Blood, because he knew the Obscure version ¹⁵, which is about twenty-four minutes long. And I pointed out the reason that the old [1975] one is twenty-four minutes long is that was one side of vinyl, it was nothing to do with duration at all. When I did the first live performances at the QEH in 1972, and there was a projected film and I was using reel-to-reel tape, it was thirty minutes long because that’s how long a 16mm reel lasts, and how long a large spool of tape lasts—thirty minutes.

So, twenty-four minutes was the vinyl. So, when Glass proposed CD, I said no I won’t add anything else, it’ll be three times longer. It’ll be seventy-five minutes. Philip became very nervous—“it’s going to get very boring for 75 minutes”—and I said, “it would only be boring if you did it.”

So, I took the first twenty-four minutes—exactly the same structure as the old recording—and then faded it down into new material, the kind I wouldn’t have written before … various kinds of orchestrations and combinations of instruments, there was also choirs. And so, the old man’s voice is taken on a different journey through different territory. I was explaining about how it would move through these territories, and I don’t know why, I said well around about then, round about fifty-seven–fifty-eight minutes, Tom Waits will come in. And he was very startled, but I pointed out that in every version of Jesus’ Blood, everything is accompanying the old man. There are no soloistic things. So, what I wanted to do is to have someone join the old man and actually be a kind of companion, to sing with him and also not to sing as the loops. Tom sang in real time. ¹⁶

But the other versions are because, in a way occasions will come up where you have a situation, and the context is different. You’ll be able to do something which you’d never done before.

AR And this is because it refreshes it for you? Or is it because it refreshes it for the people who are performing?

GB Both. And for an audience. Even in the published version [of Jesus’ Blood] there are various road maps. There are different ways of putting these things together. The music is the same, but the different kind of sound envelopes are different.

Question 6. And different versions of The Sinking of the Titanic?

AR Different versions of the score of The Sinking of the Titanic? ¹⁷

GB 1972 is the first live performance. I conceived the piece in 1969 but 1972 is the first live performance, and then recorded it for Obscure in 1975. ¹⁸ And then I didn’t think about performing it very much again until 1990, at which point the Titanic had been discovered, the ship. And so, it was no longer a mythic object, the ship had been visited. ¹⁹

Then in 1994, as a follow up to Jesus’ Blood with Point, ²⁰ what we actually did was to take the existing 1990 version and we recorded over that and with it, so it’s dovetailed with it. In 2012 when it was the centenary of the Titanic, we did a longer version when Philip Jeck joined us, and we had that live seventy-two-minute version. ²¹

A lot of those were historical circumstances. And similarly, I introduced other things because for example, the bass clarinet solo isn’t in the first version. He plays in the 1990 version, to point to new information that had come. And that has happened from time to time; something else will come in from time to time.

And they may ask, why is this there? And with The [Sinking of the] Titanic there’s always a reason. In a way The Titanic involves hardly any composition at all. It’s an assemblage of different materials, as a construction.

Question 7. The Portsmouth Sinfonia

GB People over-theorise about the [Portsmouth] Sinfonia. ²² The Sinfonia was … it was a bit of a lark. I was working at Portsmouth, and I was working doing experimental music—Cage, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, Fluxus things—with the students. And we had this idea where we would have this one day where we would put on events, and all sorts of people would do things. Someone would sing some rock and roll, some people told jokes, there was a conjurer, there was a ventriloquist. So, we decided we’d have a classical orchestra. We would also have a string quartet, and a male voice choir. Six of us became a kind of acrobatic act called the Pyrotechnic Pyramid from the Pyrenees. Three people would kneel on the floor, two people kneel on top of them, and one person climb on the top and go “hola!” and that was it. So that’s what we did, and the orchestra was a similar thing.

AR But how did you go from being a jazz bass player and teaching liberal arts—how did you go from that to being in a Fluxus-based acrobatic act?

GB Maybe that was partly having worked in a working men’s club. ²³ The absurdity of all that and the kind of whole range of things I went through there. The kind of absurdity of the things we were doing and the incompetence. Because, you know, I worked with people in Greasbrough and there were people who would be quite skilful, then something would go very badly wrong and they were incompetent. You know, a whole kind of series of magic tricks wouldn’t work because of some gadget which failed. And for the audience nothing happened, but we knew what he was trying to do, and we just thought it was hilarious.

The idea of attempting things and failing was something which was attractive. Because what it does … the gap between what they’re attempting and what results, that is where the humour lies, and that’s where the interest lies. It’s not in the music that they’re trying to play, it’s the gap between what they’re trying to play and how much they manage to play it [video example 1].

Video example 1. The Portsmouth Sinfonia’s recording of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the album Plays the Popular Classics (1973). ²⁴

We’d all done all this experimental stuff, and we just got these instruments, and we had to decide what to play. So, it was a kind of a parody of a situation in some ways, though we were not being deliberately humoristic. Everyone was doing our best.

One thing led to another but there was no intention. There was no sense of … people tried to compare it with things like the Scratch Orchestra, and tried to think of high-minded artistic ideals, questioning values … not at all, not at all. It was simply very, very funny, but we were completely serious, we didn’t do it to make a laugh. If anyone tried to be funny, we would ask them to leave. You did the best you could, and the funny thing was the fact that your best wasn’t very good, and in some cases the best of some people was absolutely terrible. It could be completely hilarious.

AR I hear you saying that it was just a thing, it happened, it was what it was, but do you think looking back retrospectively … are there things that you hit on about doing that, that you carried into your composition?

GB No, I don’t think so. I think the only thing was there was a side of it which ties in with some areas of my kind of personal history like having played in this working men’s club, and some of the absurd things that I witnessed playing with comedians, and all sorts of things. And things going wrong and all sorts of things. So, you start to have this backstage view of showbiz and the way there are elements in some of the things you know, like Titanic, like Jesus’ Blood, which actually have an element of that sentimentality, of that sort of kind of quirky observation of events, you know.

AR The human desire to try to do something, even if it fails, which it often does.

GB Yes, yes. And not to sort of condemn failure or to judge. With the Sinfonia nobody made judgements about other people’s performances at all.

Question 8. John Cage and Merce Cunningham

AR You became dissatisfied with improvisation. It seemed to you to be artificial, and that’s when you abandoned improvisation and became interested in composition.

GB Progressively, as I’d been working with regular improvisation things, me, Derek [Bailey] and Tony [Oxley] ²⁵ every Saturday and we played every weekend and we developed a kind of language and a kind of freedom which was way ahead of anything going on in the UK, but we were isolated, so nobody knew about it much. Eventually, I decided that I’d become interested, over the time I was playing the bass, in composition and in the ideas especially of Cage, [Morton] Feldman, Christian Wolff, and so on. And especially the idea from John to find a way of producing music which was independent of your own taste and your own judgement and your own subjectivity and your own will, to find an objective way of working. And which felt to me where you would be more reflective and have a certain sense of distance from the material. Now, it seemed to me that what I was doing in my musical practice was the opposite of that. What I was doing was playing fast, thinking fast in the heat of improvisation. You’re out of control; it’s entirely subjective. And so that there was this gap between what I conceptually was thinking about, and what I was actually doing. So eventually I decided to stop working as a professional bass player and I took a teaching job in Northampton.

In ’66 when I saw Cage and Cunningham in London, and I met Cage, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t stopped playing the bass when I did that. ²⁶ I think that incident happened after that, but it’s all the same month. That whole dissatisfaction with the whole area of improvisation, and my feeling towards Cage, and then when I saw Cage and Cunningham and I saw that world then … I realised there was just much more to it than that.

Conclusion

Gavin Bryars, in this interview, gives us a perspective that art, composition, performance is sometimes about trying to do something, and it is the gap between that trying and managing to do it that provides the interest. A thought arrives that this “gap” is one of the clues to inhabiting a Gavin Bryars work—a space into which one must place a similarly humble and unassuming stance. Questions of authenticity will remain unanswered for the time being, and this is not because Bryars is unwilling to address the question; it is simply because he has not considered the question, nor sees the need. For this performer-composer, the notated scores published by Schott provide the urtext for his composed body of work. The working practice of the scores’ performance lives in the moment and will continue to do so. Conferences and researchers will continue to provoke questions about that practice. For the time being, the future performer of Gavin Bryars’s works needs only curiosity, intelligence, humility, and listening—and humour—to explore the performance environment and to find the subtle nuances of acceptance and conversation that foster the agency of the performance. Just a willingness to try … something.

Gavin Bryars at Orpheus playlist

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Related texts

In this publication:

Kristin Norderval, Building New Tables: An Eyewitness Account of Performer-Composers, Artist-Led Communities, and American Experimental Music Since 1960
—performer-composer communities

You Nakai, Like an Instrument That Only I Know How to Play
—overlapping musical identities

In other SONUS publications:

Caroline Wilkins, Sonic Images, Dreams, and Hallucinations
—musical collaboration and embodiment