Gavin Bryars and his music are a bit of an enigma to me. The man moves between Sheffield's improv scene, playing with Derek Bailey, an apprenticeship with John Cage, putting a record out on Brian Eno's label, being commissioned by Nicola Walker Smith, and, throughout, the character of his music remains loosely similar while never quite coming to settle. I saw him in conversation with Christopher Cook at the Barbican's John Cage weekend festival five years ago, where he was generous and charming. I've dug out my notes from the discussion (B is Bryars, C is Cage):
C says that recorded music perverts the experience of real music; story of boy at Stravinsky concert conducted by Stravinsky "that's not the way it goes"
age 16 Bryars found out about 4'33" and prepared piano from his music teacher
people knew about his ideas before they knew the music
B met C in 1966 by going back stage
until 1961 when he was 50 C had no support from any institution
"probably the nicest person I've ever met"
studying with C meant spending time in his company and absorbing his values
B was already interested in the eastern philosophy
C was about being cool and detached. This led B to abandon being a jazz improviser, which is all about self.
Was there a system within the notion of chance? Yes.
C saw Satie and Webern as the two great composers of early C20th. They dealt with duration in a way that Schoenberg didn't.
C wrote very detailed letters to Boulez about what he was trying to do.
Circuses: things can go on at the same time without being linked.
Cardew and Tilbury were the link between C and English underground. C was an anarchist in the American sense (not chaos, but the kind of order you have when you have no leaders), but he was also interested in Mao-Tse Tsung.
Links also wlth Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and Marcel Duchamp.
Same voice as Vincent Price!
Recognising that there is such a thing as tradition. C was a very good pianist.
No-one who spent any time with C ever ended up sounding like him. 4'33" cleared the slate. Freedom to be yourself.
When I got this CD in 1987 o '88, you could read about people like Bryars, but you had to be pretty dedicated to hear more than a tiny fraction of it, especially outside London. You had to visit the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival or scour the late night minority programmes on Radio 3. I think this may have been his second properly distributed release, after the Obscure one — and it was commissioned, like David Byrne's Music from the Knee Plays for Robert Wilson's unrealised Civil Wars performance.
Sometimes these pieces work for me, sometimes they don't. It's not them; it's me. It's the kind of attention that I need to offer to engage with them. The long piece with the french horn, First Viennese Dance, offers the easiest way in for me. Unlike the albums I've been listening to recently that seemed to be best heard on headphones, this one demands a room. Like a slowly dispersing gas, these slow sounds need a space to fill. The very long notes remind me (again) of the Deep Listening Band.
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