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Gavin Bryars. En paroles, en musiques, a collection of interviews with Jean-Louis Tallon, is the first book devoted to the British composer born in 1943, author in 1972 of the iconic The Sinking of the Titanic. The author, who has been a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique since 1974, reveals himself to be an eminently unclassifiable artist, with a panoramic curiosity and a rich and exemplary career.
What a trajectory and what a fascinating personality Gavin Bryars has had! For many music lovers, the English composer born in 1943 remains above all the author of two pieces that have had the rare privilege of becoming "hits" in so-called "contemporary" music, with an experimental tendency:The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, both created in 1972, recorded three years later for Brian Eno's Obscure label and regularly revived since then, whether by musicians or choreographers. But these soon-to-be-fifty-year-old scores, the work of a then 29-year-old composer, cannot by themselves sum up a body of work that has continued to expand and branch out, to the point where it now includes nearly 200 works, and an artistic path that is in many ways exemplary.
This is the primary virtue of Gavin Bryars. En paroles, en musiques, a collection of interviews published by Jean-Louis Tallon ( Le Mot et le Reste ) and the first book ever devoted to the composer, allows us to take the right measure of this exciting career. Author of several books of interviews, with the writer Pierre Bergounioux or musicians such as Meredith Monk(1) or Philippe Hersant, Jean-Louis Tallon spoke at length with Gavin Bryars between 2017 and 2020, going through the main stages of this journey with him. It is a path that is much less linear than one might think, beginning with the learning of the double bass and the study of philosophy: a jazz enthusiast, Gavin Bryars practised free improvisation with the guitarist Derek Bailey and the drummer Tony Oxley from 1962 to 1966, notably within the Joseph Hollbroke Trio, before abandoning this practice overnight, putting aside his instrument for many years to devote himself to composition.
The beginnings of this largely "self-taught, unorthodox and empirical" composer's "career", in his own words, are strongly linked with the emerging "experimental" - in the sense of Michael Nyman's book Experimental Music - and minimalist scenes. During a trip to the United States, he worked for a time with John Cage, met Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams (towards whom he was sometimes tenderly caustic) and especially Terry Riley. In England, strongly influenced by the approach of the composer Cornelius Cardew, he participated in 1970 in the foundation of the mythical and iconoclastic Portsmouth Sinfonia at the Portsmouth School of Fine Arts, where he teaches: an orchestra open to all aspiring musicians, whatever their age or level - Michael Nyman, Brian Eno and Simon Fisher-Turner were among them, along with numerous art students who were complete beginners - which endeavours to revive the standards of classical music in a perfectly uninhibited and refreshing manner.
At the same time, Bryars teaches at various art schools and pursues extensive research into the artists and figures that fascinate him: He is a connoisseur and fervent admirer of Marcel Duchamp and Jules Verne (whose work inspired many of his pieces, starting with his second opera, Doctor Ox's Experiment, premiered in 1998 at the English National Opera and directed by Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan), By the Vaar, a piece for double bass and orchestra written for the jazz double bassist Charlie Haden), he is also particularly fond of eccentric figures (from Erik Satie to Lord Berners and the poets of OuLiPo). His wide-ranging culture and his curiosity for all areas of art and science, which he has the delicacy to spice up with a quirky British sense of humour, are thus two of the most striking features of Bryars' personality. It is hardly surprising that he has been a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique since 1974 (when he began his work on Duchamp) , and in 2015 he joined - like Jacques Prévert, Joan Miró, Man Ray or Umberto Eco before him - the top of the hierarchy: the Transcendent Corps of Satraps.
It is tempting to understand Gavin Bryars' career through the notion of "eccentricity", especially if one refers to its astronomical definition: "that which deviates from a point considered as the centre". The composer never ceased to go where he was not expected, to be eccentric, as distrustful of dogma and academicism as he was concerned not to repeat himself. At the same time, this follower of Zen Buddhism appears to be excessively centred and balanced, despite the periods of doubt and sometimes intense depression that may have marked his career...
Be that as it may, the beginning of the 1980s marked a new point of inflexion in his work. Assuming his love for the post-Romanticism of Strauss, Busoni and Zemlinsky, which was expressed in particular in his first opera, Medea, staged in 1984 by Bob Wilson, he undertook to revisit nine centuries of the history of Western music, from Pérotin and Palestrina to Webern, Bill Evans and Minimalism, via Schubert, Alkan and Saint-Saëns. A history that provides him with the argument and the material for a work that is less postmodern - insofar as irony, as opposed to humour, is mostly absent, as is quotation - than "posthistorical", to use David Christoffel's words(2). Gavin Bryars has not hesitated to tackle the canonical genres, writing five operas, several concertos, four string quartets, two requiems, imposing cycles of lauds and six books of madrigals on Petrarchan sonnets, while creating his own ensemble and reviving the practice of the double bass...
The story of this musician, investigator as well as explorer, Sherlock Holmes as well as Philéas Fogg, is a fascinating one, in the course of which we come across Carla Bley and Philip Jeck, Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Carlson, Delphine Seyrig and Bertrand Belin(3)... Throughout the pages and the questions of an interviewer who never tries to put himself forward, Gavin Bryars appears as a man who is both humble and self-confident, in love with life and curious about people, sensitive to landscapes and geography as much as to history and fiction, and who never loses a critical spirit (Brian Eno, Philip Glass or Michael Nyman are gently scratched) which he seems to exercise above all towards himself. In the end, he is an eminently sympathetic and attentive man - this is also the impression left on me by our one and only brief meeting, in 2012, at the CentQuatre, in Paris -, a family man and a fulfilled artist (his four children are musicians and work with him)... One comes away from this reading admiringly wanting to lose oneself in this labyrinthine work, faced with a journey of such richness, such coherence even in its reversals. This is the work of an artist who, in classical times, would certainly have been described as an honest man.
David Sanson
