Gavin Bryars

Summary

‘I write music the way I hear it, which is rather old-fashioned.’

In his introduction to a 2012 radio documentary celebrating the centenary of John Cage, Gavin Bryars commented, ‘It's rare for a composer to remain controversial throughout his life’, and he might himself be included in that generalisation. During the 1970s he was Britain's best-known composer of experimental and conceptual music, and twenty years later many of his works were recorded during the CD boom that saw the major record labels subsidise specialist projects with profits earned from the core repertory. As a result, many CD collectors knew of Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic, Jesus's Blood Never Failed Me Yet and Cello Concerto Farewell to Philosophy, even if they didn't buy them. Since then the non-mainstream repertory has increasingly returned to the specialist labels who don't possess the promotional clout of the majors, which may be one reason why Bryars's name seems less prominent than it did. Perhaps, too, some of the composition techniques he experimented with have lost their power to provoke.

There were additional reasons, both musical and personal, why he’d appeared to me a rather remote figure. One is the difficulty in pinning down what kind of composer he is – there's a long tradition of composerpianists but not one of jazz-based, double-bass-playing composers who explore free improvisation, minimalism, indeterminism and neoclassicism. There's also the contrast between his early, experimental works and his more recent, predominantly slow and often gravely beautiful music, whose shifting harmonies shun sentimentality. The second reason is that he spends the summer on the west coast of Canada and the remainder of the year in a quiet Leicestershire village, so is not part of the regular, London-based concert scene. Third, his e-mail replies to my request for an interview and its subsequent arrangements were brief to the point of bluntness. I wondered how forthcoming he would be when, or if, we met.

Rather to my surprise, the interview took place exactly as arranged, at his Leicestershire home in September 2011. He was straightforward, serious and apparently unemotional; perhaps because of his Yorkshire roots and his performing background in cabaret and working men's clubs he struck me as a grounded, no-nonsense musician.