Gavin Bryars

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety eight and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a composer. He came from a musical family, went to the Royal Northern College of Music, and was happily studying and playing in a working men's club when his true musical calling began to develop. He wanted to experiment. He was one of the founders of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose members tried but failed to play the right notes. And in works like The Sinking of the Titanic, dismissed when first written but now taken seriously, he achieved recognition as an important artist. Later this year, his second opera, Dr. Ox's Experiment, will be staged by the ENO and televised by the BBC. I've always believed that music is a social activity, he says. It's about playing in company with people with whom you feel on a wavelength. He is Gavin Bryars. Your Titanic piece is topical again, of course, Gavin, and a good example of the kind of music that you create. How did it come about? Tell me about it.

Gavin Bryars1:25

Well, I was writing all sorts of things at that time. I think this is the only piece from that period that I've kept. I've burnt the rest. But this was a piece where I'd been impressed by the reported behaviour of the ship's orchestra, the eight musicians, and the way they conducted themselves in the last especially the last five minutes of the ship's um sinking.

Presenter1:43

They just went on playing.

Gavin Bryars1:44

They went on playing and according to the wireless operator that he didn't hear them stop playing. And so I conjectured, well, what happens if they keep on playing under the water? Obviously, they can't, and so on. But it seemed to me to be an extraordinary piece of behaviour, but also an incredibly heroic thing. And unlike the normal picture one has of musicians, one normally sees, say, people in the pit of an orchestra in the opera house rushing to the bar before the last chord is almost finished. Whereas here they are staying to the end and voluntarily playing. You know, it's unheard of.

Presenter2:13

And and what were they playing? Because on your uh your Titanic piece it sounds like Amazing Grace to me.

Gavin Bryars2:18

The phrase does sound like Amazing Grace. It's it's an episcopal hymn tune called Autumn, and that's what the wireless operator reported. Quite often people use Nearer My God to Thee, and that's the piece which is o most often associated with it, but it seems most likely to be in a tune called Autumn.

Presenter2:32

And what kind of sounds did the survivors talk about hearing?

Gavin Bryars2:35

Well most of the survivors of course were extremely young at the time. But I did make a list of all the different reported images that people had of the sinking. In fact one of the versions I made, the piece starts with this kind of collage crash. And what I do, I ask my percussionists to actually to uh reenact the metaphors that they described. So for example one person described the collision with the iceberg as like the ship rolling over a thousand marbles and someone else described it as being like the tearing of a long strip of calico.

Gavin Bryars3:05

And some one described it as being rather like a sloppy landing on the lake in Missouri.

Presenter3:08

But your music goes on after that, doesn't it? It goes sort of on down and down and down. It seems to me really rather an elegant death, really. There don't seem to be any screams of terror. It's just this this

Presenter3:19

almost relentless playing in a rather graceful slide under the water.

Gavin Bryars3:23

Yeah, well I'm I'm sort of paying homage to the band I think and one of the things that I uh worked on was the idea that w if they started the sounds underwater, if they'd managed to do that of course the strings wouldn't vibrate underwater anyway, but in theory if they had played the music underwater, it would be in a sense perpetuated by the fact that water is a very sound efficient medium. Uh I I actually did some work in the physics department at Cardiff University to try and calculate precisely what would happen as the sound eventually got down to the bottom two and a half miles down.

Presenter3:49

And you've performed it in different places, including a water tower. To disastrous effect, Anson.

Gavin Bryars3:52

Yeah, yeah.

Gavin Bryars3:54

Well, it was a bit dodgy because uh we were recording the piece in this water tower and it was being done as part of a live concert. It was this Napoleonic water tower in central France.

Gavin Bryars4:03

so that we were playing in the basement and people were listening upstairs.

Gavin Bryars4:06

They had the idea as a kind of way of animating the building again to st start this fountain flowing which used to flow on the outside of the building, which was a very nice idea, and so we could hear the sound of trickling water. What no one realised of course was that water drained back into the bottom of the tower where we were playing. So as we were playing we could see water slowly starting to lap around our feet and of course we had all this electrical equipment and it was a pretty accurate reenactment of the the possible dangers on the Titanic itself.

Presenter4:31

Tell me about your first record.

Gavin Bryars4:33

Well my first record is um a a jazz record which meant a lot to me when I was playing jazz, the Bill Evans trio playing My Foolish Heart, and for me it's just one of the most perfect pieces of chamber music jazz and incredibly elegant playing.

Presenter5:09

The Bill Evans trio playing My Foolish Heart, with Bill Evans on piano, Paul Motion on drums, and Scott Lafaro on bass. Um you wrote another work based on or using elements from that, didn't you? From My Foolish Heart, Gavin.

Gavin Bryars5:22

Oh I did, yes. In fact, uh long time afterwards I wrote a piece called My First Homage, which was a kind of homage to this kind of jazz and even quotes from this piece and it uses the same uh initials, MFH. I even quote at one point D. Ken John Peel for Master of Foxhounds, also MFH, you know.

Presenter5:37

But does it matter if we don't get that kind of pun?

Gavin Bryars5:39

Not at all. I mean, composers use all sorts of things to get themselves going and to

Gavin Bryars5:44

to develop ideas and it doesn't really matter whether listeners have them or not.

Presenter5:47

But you began your professional career in a much more traditional genre, as I said in the introduction, playing in a in a working men's club in in Greaseborough, yeah?

Gavin Bryars5:55

Greaseborough is the Palladium of the North, it was called.

Presenter5:57

Oh, really? And was it was it their good?

Gavin Bryars5:59

It was sensationally good. It was basically a miners' club which was organized by a local mining community, a working men's club, which actually plowed all the profits from the beer sales back into entertainment. And when I worked there, I worked there for a year and a half, they would have eight acts per evening for seven evenings plus Sunday lunchtime. So there were eight shows a week. And on Sunday morning from ten till twelve, we would rehearse all eight and then do them all.

Presenter6:24

So you're playing in all sorts of different styles. All sorts of things.

Gavin Bryars6:26

All sorts of things. I remember the first thing I actually played was playing with someone who claimed to be the world champion Xylophonist playing nineteenth century overtures. And Freddie and the Dreamers were top of the build at that time, which I didn't have to play with because they had their own bass player, you see. But it was that kind of thing where the top of the build would be very well known.

Presenter6:40

Kathy Kirby.

Gavin Bryars6:41

Kathy Kirby, David Whitfield, Dickie Valentine, you know, stars of the sixties. Well, late fifties and sixties really, they're a little bit past it by then.

Presenter6:47

And then there was Tiny Tim.

Gavin Bryars6:49

Ugh.

Presenter6:49

Tell me about Diny Tim.

Gavin Bryars6:51

Oh, wonderful singer. I joined the Tiny Tim Fang Club in 1968. For me, he was just an extraordinary performer. I mean, his big hit, of course, was Tiptoe Through the Tulets, but he went on singing that kind of thing until quite recently. In fact, he was even singing Tiptoe Through the Tulets as he died and died in the arms of his wife playing the ukulele. It's astonishing, you know.

Presenter7:10

You're making this up, I guess.

Gavin Bryars7:11

No, absolutely true. It was reported in the Evening Standard that uh must be true. Yeah, oh, it must be true, yes.

Presenter7:14

Must be true.

Presenter7:16

But you thought he was great even back then in when when are we

Gavin Bryars7:19

Sixty eight was when he uh first came out, sixty seven, sixty eight. And he used to say that, you know, this kind of spirit of the dead musical singers lived through him and he'd do all some extraordinary pieces from the turn of the century as well as these more popular things like Tiptoes with a tulip.

Presenter7:33

So for you it was an an incredible experience in that you know you were improvising. It was musically very rich. It was a marvellous education by the sound.

Gavin Bryars7:40

It was. One had to learn to sight read very quickly, doing all eight shows in two hours. You had to think on your feet. Sometimes things would happen. I remember this world champion Xylophonist, some of his parts were actually written in red ink. What I wasn't prepared for, which were rehearsed in normal lights, what I wasn't prep prepared for was at the end of the show when he would play the beer barrel polka with a xylophone strapped to his waist, spinning around on roller skates in red strobe lights, so I couldn't actually read the music. So you just simply have to just, you know, keep going somehow.

Presenter8:09

Tell me about record number two.

Gavin Bryars8:10

Uh well the second record I've got is uh an astonishing one which I came across uh quite recently uh uh uh when I was exercising my local gym. I saw this video of Shirley Bassey and I thought, well this reminded me a lot of my Greasba days, you know, the kind of the upfront entertainer, really strong performer. And it sounded like a sort of James Bondish thing. Then I realised that it was something else. It was actually working with uh an independent group, Propeller Heads.

Gavin Bryars8:33

Who'd put her into this context, and she'd agreed to work with them on a piece called History Repeating. I thought it was just the most stunning performance I'd ever seen, and I applauded her for choosing to work with these young lads. I thought it was fantastic.

Gavin Bryars8:44

Newspapers shout, A new style is born!

Gavin Bryars8:50

But I don't know if it's coming or going There is fashion, there is fashion

Gavin Bryars8:59

Uh

Speaker 18:59

I'm good.

Speaker 19:01

Coming back!

Speaker 19:02

And the joke is rather sad.

Speaker 19:06

That it's all just a little bit of history

Presenter9:13

The Propeller Heads with Shirley Bassey and History Repeating. Let's go back, um, Gavin Bras, uh, pre Greaseborough to Ghoul in Yorkshire, where you were born and bred, and most of your family still live, I think. A very musical family, I said. In in what sense, in what way, what did they do?

Gavin Bryars9:24

Are there

Gavin Bryars9:28

Well, in an amateur sense, my mother's a cellist. Uh my father was an amateur singer, sang the church choir in local amateur operatic societies.

Presenter9:35

He was a postman.

Gavin Bryars9:36

He was a postman. He died when I was nine years old. I ha an aunt was a very good pianist. She h got an LRM. An uncle my uncle was a church organist. So it was it was a a musical environment but within a kind of a local amateur context.

Presenter9:50

What instruments did you learn?

Gavin Bryars9:52

I I took out the piano.

Presenter9:53

Yeah.

Gavin Bryars9:54

My mother taught me initially, and then very quickly passed me on to Miss Chambers across the back lane, who took me f through my first couple of exams, then eventually to doctor Ramsey, who was the music master at the grammar school.

Presenter10:05

So he was quite an inspiration, was he?

Gavin Bryars10:07

Bud Ramsey, yes, he was uh always called Bud because he wore a cowboy hat and he was incredibly energetic. He was the music department was on the top floor of the grammar school and he used to rush up these th oh three or four flights of stairs and we'd be waiting and he'd run into the room and and shout out the Earl King and then sit at the piano. We'd all have to sing along and he was an incredible man, but uh very informative and open to all sorts of ideas.

Presenter10:30

But your mother, I think, kept kept the family going after your father's death be because of the cello, didn't she?

Gavin Bryars10:34

Oh yes. I mean the cello I mean she taught the cello at the the at the the grammar school, so she kept the family together, absolutely.

Presenter10:34

Yeah.

Presenter10:40

So she kept you solvent. Then you went to Sheffield to read philosophy, and taught yourself the bass while you were there.

Gavin Bryars10:46

Yes, there was a bass in the music department. I'd always wanted to play the bass, but I don't think there actually was a bass in Ghoul, in all honesty. And I I didn't take up the cello because anyway I suppose I respected my mother's instrument too much, I wouldn't want to have touched it. So I took up the bass at university and uh it was just lying in the corner of the music department.

Gavin Bryars11:01

In fact, I went to Sheffield intending to read music, but I misread the small print, and at the end of your second first year you had to choose, and I could only have done music with a as a dual honours with a modern language, so I decided to be lazy and do philosophy instead, and carry on studying music privately.

Presenter11:16

Next record.

Gavin Bryars11:18

Well the next record is The Lord is Listening to Your Hallelujah by the Carla Blay Band with an extraordinary trombonist Gary Valenti. Like the Bill Evans this is also a live recording. And Carla is someone I've known for many years and is an incredibly interesting performer and composer, one of those very rare things, a jazz composer and a woman jazz composer to Boot, who writes incredibly inventive and very, very witty music.

Presenter12:10

The Lord is listening to ya, hallelujah, played by the Carla Blais band and featuring trombonist Gary Valente. So you earned a living as a jazz bassist while you studied music, and then suddenly, when you were about, I think, twenty three or so, you developed a pathological hatred of jazz. Why?

Gavin Bryars12:27

I'm never really quite sure what happened. I during that time I'd been studying composition and I got more and more interested in composers like John Cage and especially composers like Cage working in New York who were developing a kind of musical language which was trying to be more and more objective to detach the composer more and more from the music as it were. And it seemed to me that jazz was the antithesis of that and improvised music as a whole was the antithesis of that whereby you were completely identified with what you were doing. You were the music and the person and they were inextricably linked.

Presenter12:59

Wh while you were doing it, you mean you to it's totally self-indulgent in that sense, isn't it?

Gavin Bryars13:03

It can be. And and what I found was it became more and more predictable. There was a certain kind of um range of things that you go through while playing improvised music. And I found that when sitting down and composing, I could imagine things and think of things that would never occur to me in the white heat of improvisation.

Presenter13:21

Hmm.

Gavin Bryars13:21

Uh

Gavin Bryars13:22

And so I put my base in its case and it stayed in its case for seventeen years.

Presenter13:26

So what was it about Cage, John Cage, that you he was kind of godfather of experimental music, really, wasn't he? What what was it you what kind of pieces that he wrote were you listening to then and thinking, This is great, this is what I want?

Gavin Bryars13:30

Yeah.

Gavin Bryars13:37

Well, ironically, the piece which first impressed me was a piece called Four Minutes 33 Seconds, which was completely silent. So, in a sense, I wasn't really listening to that, I was just sort of enjoying the idea of it. And I was more aware of Cage's ideas than his music initially. But I obtained a recording of a 25-year retrospective concert in 1958, which was recorded and released in 1961. I had that album. And there were some pieces there which I just found quite extraordinary, but it was his approach to composition, the idea of working by chance operations, of sort of freeing himself from the act of composition.

Presenter14:08

Working by chance operations. What does that mean?

Gavin Bryars14:10

Well, it means that uh i instead of sort of choosing the notes that you're gonna write in a piece, you determine ad in advance all the notes that are possible and then by casting throwing dice or tossing coins you decide which ones you're gonna have.

Presenter14:22

Dangerous territory this though, isn't it? I mean, you know, you get into the area obviously where

Gavin Bryars14:24

Okay.

Presenter14:27

Somebody says, well, look, anybody can do that. I can do that.

Gavin Bryars14:29

And Cage's answer would be, Well, no one ever said that there's anything special about being a composer, anyone can be a composer. And that's one of the things I admired about Cage was this rather benign thing, that he was um he didn't sort of close down music, he opened it up.

Presenter14:41

And you went to work for him at one point, didn't you?

Gavin Bryars14:42

I worked as an assistant for him in in America in nineteen sixty eight uh when he was working on a project called HBSCHD, which was a big piece for amplified harpsichords.

Presenter14:51

And you found yourself fascinated. I mean, you knew you'd arrived at where you wanted to be, yup?

Gavin Bryars14:56

Yes, I knew that I actually wanted to be a composer, not a jazz musician. I wasn't certain that I wanted to be a composer like Cage. And in fact, in a way, one of the great things about Cage as an exemplar, as a teacher, is that nobody who spent any time with Cage sounds like him. So that he, in a way, he gives you permission to be your own man. Whereas a lot of teachers, European avant-garde composer for example, unless you sound like that, you're doing it wrong.

Presenter15:21

There's a right and wrong way. What you're saying is, if we're trying to define experimental music here, is there isn't a wrong way, nothing is wrong, everything is right, everything goes.

Gavin Bryars15:30

That's right. It g some of it can be pretty lousy and some of it can be uninteresting, but there's that there are no limits.

Presenter15:35

Record them before.

Gavin Bryars15:37

Well record number four is actually a slightly unusual one. In fact it's a spoken one. It's a radiophonic piece produced by Glenn Gould from what was called the Solitude trilogy. It's a piece called The Idea of North in which he collages all sorts of different people talking about going north and the image is taking a train from Winnipeg to Churchill which takes about three days and there's an imaginary conversation going on in the day car and it's done from a number of separate things edited together and right at the end the central character, a man called Wally who's a train guard who emphatically is not a Wally is talking about the idea of North and at this moment Gould adds underneath the ending of Sibelia's Fifth Symphony and it's a supreme moment.

Speaker 116:20

Sol?

Speaker 116:22

We're up against this William James.

Speaker 116:25

Uh moral equivalent of war. The equivalent of this war now is now the north.

Speaker 116:30

This William James that wrote in Harvard this many years ago, whatever he did.

Speaker 116:36

Option.

Speaker 116:37

I suppose he meant really that

Speaker 116:40

Not war the moral equivalent for us is going north.

Presenter16:49

The closing section of The Idea of North from Glen Gould's three sound documentaries, Solitude Trilogy. Let's go back to 1970 when you were teaching at Portsmouth Art College and you were one of the co-founders, as I said in the introduction, of the Portsmouth Sinfonia. It was, by its own admission, the worst orchestra in the world. A huge musical joke. How did it come about?

Gavin Bryars17:09

It actually wasn't a musical joke, uh it was incredibly funny, and it wasn't intended to be funny, it was just that uh a byproduct to the fact we played so badly was that it was incredibly it was hilarious to listen to.

Presenter17:18

So you didn't invent it that it should play off key or mount it you?

Gavin Bryars17:20

Format in tune.

Presenter17:21

Uh

Gavin Bryars17:22

The people I I was I was working with art students. One of the the facts of being a mu an experimental musician at that time was that one was not really employable in a music college or a conservatory or a university music department. But the art colleges

Gavin Bryars17:34

had a very open-minded attitude to what could be possibly art or any kind of cultural experience.

Gavin Bryars17:40

So I was teaching at Portsmouth and working with fine arts students and we decided one day to have a sort of Opportunes in Knox concert where all the different people in the college would do an act and we put together this orchestra and all as the um they'd always wanted to play classical music but couldn't, uh none of them really gifted on instruments at all and also it had no kind of like reference to musical history, the the music that they knew from the classical world was always things which came through popular means and so the piece we decided to do was um the Rossini William Tell overture because that was the theme music for The Lone Ranger. So we we made a little recording of this and did it as it was a kind of good uh film department in the college. We uh had a sound studio and made a recording and put it on little floppy discs and we sent it to different people in the world we admired, to footballer Rodney Marsh, to Legislature.

Presenter18:28

But you knew it didn't sound like it was supposed to sound.

Gavin Bryars18:31

It was pretty close. I mean you could recognize it.

Presenter18:33

That was the trouble. I mean, and that that of course is why it's funny. It's rather like, you know, for anybody who hasn't does doesn't remember the Portsmouth Symphonia, uh when one heard Les Dawson, for example, playing on the piano, you know, he deliberately, didn't he played sort of slightly wrongly. It's just immediately very funny, isn't it?

Gavin Bryars18:45

Only it

Gavin Bryars18:48

We w we were monumentally wrong. But the important thing of course was you had to recognize what we were trying to do. So there's no point in us, for example, to playing the Writer Spring or like Schoenberg, Pierre or Lunaire, because you wouldn't have spotted the the errors.

Presenter18:52

Yeah.

Presenter18:58

No, he's played Beethoven's fifth and we

Gavin Bryars19:00

Yeah, but only the bit you knew, you know, the da da da da and then the we'd ran out of ideas, you know.

Presenter19:00

Blow in the picture

Presenter19:04

And you ended up playing in the Albert Hall.

Gavin Bryars19:06

Yes. Two or three thousand people came, and that was recorded for a live album.

Presenter19:09

And wasn't uh was it that the occasion when all these cannons went on it was the eighteen twelve, wasn't it? And all the cannons went off in the wrong places.

Gavin Bryars19:13

Push me no.

Gavin Bryars19:15

Oh well they did because uh at that time I think the cannons were something like twenty five or thirty pounds each or something. I can't remember the exact amount, but we could only afford six cannons. And uh so we wanted to try one in rehearsal just to see what it was like, which left us five for the performance itself. It's incredibly loud. The whole place shook. It was unbelievable.

Gavin Bryars19:33

Anyway we we got w we pl we started playing the piece, and then John suddenly realized his grandmother had come uh to the performance and he was worried that these things going off might sort of cause to have a, you know, a heart failure or something. So he he started signaling to the chap not to do the cannons, of course. He took that as a signal and set them all off, you see, so they're all in the wrong place.

Presenter19:51

When did grandmother have a heart attack?

Gavin Bryars19:53

She loved it.

Presenter19:55

Do you think it could happen again? I mean, was it just a sort of moment in time when we were all prepared to pay good money for people playing out a tune? Or could it happen again tomorrow? Is there something more to it?

Gavin Bryars20:03

Includes something more.

Gavin Bryars20:05

No, I think it could happen again if the spirit is right. I mean the the the important thing is we were all perfectly serious about it uh and we weren't fooling and occ occasionally uh people would join the orchestra and they start fooling around, so we'd asked them to leave. Everyone was doing the best they could. It's simply their best was simply not very good.

Presenter20:21

Hmm.

Presenter20:22

More music.

Gavin Bryars20:24

Well my fifth record is uh Tom Waits singing Tom Traubert's Blues. Uh for me Tom is just one of the great voices of the century. In a way an extraordinary voice, not unlike Tiny Tim's being an extraordinary voice, but the other end of the spectrum, the the gruff end of the spectrum.

Gavin Bryars20:39

No one speaks English and everything's broken.

Gavin Bryars20:45

In my states is a soaking way.

Gavin Bryars20:51

The two go waltzing Matun.

Presenter20:56

Once again.

Presenter20:59

Tom Waits and Tom Traubert's Blues. Tom Waits is somebody you've used, Gavin, in probably your most successful recording, Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet, which is based on the voice of a tramp singing this single verse, or is it a chorus? I I don't know.

Gavin Bryars21:13

It's a fragment of uh a piece and I I don't know what the piece is, um which I think is one of the reasons why I chose to work on it. I think if it had been a well-known hymn I wouldn't have bothered.

Presenter21:23

How did you come by it then?

Gavin Bryars21:24

Well a friend was making a film about uh tramps, about people living rough in in London, in the area around uh the Elphington Castle and Waterloo Station.

Gavin Bryars21:32

And in the course of this uh he obviously recorded a number of people uh on sound and so on, and some parts of these uh recordings he didn't use, so he gave me the outtick, as it were, t to just reuse to record my favourite Beach Boys albums or whatever of it and uh

Gavin Bryars21:46

I listened to them rather than just simply wipe them first. And in the middle of this, I heard this man sing this fragment, and I was very struck by it. In the first place, I didn't know the piece, but I was struck by the quality of the man singing. It was very musical. It was rough, but he was very musical. There's a certain kind of tenderness in his voice and a dignity, and he was also in tune. As it happens, he was also in tune with my piano. So I just sketched out a little accompaniment just how it would be harmonized. And then I realized that this fragment actually did make a loop. That if I made a loop out of it and kept repeating it, it naturally resolved.

Presenter22:19

So it just begins and it goes round and round, as you say, in this loop, and gently you paint in more and more orchestration and then voices. I mean, it becomes almost over the top, doesn't it? As you go.

Gavin Bryars22:29

It has a certain Greesborough quality. There is that kind of sentimentality. You're on the edge of something which could be, if you're not careful, rather maudlin. And I was aware of this, so there is a kind of bittersweet quality to it.

Presenter22:45

But how did you know it would work? I mean, did you try it out on anybody first or do

Gavin Bryars22:48

No, I think the the way I realized it was going to work was before I actually finally did the piece was when I was I was copying the loop which is a very fragile piece of tape onto a continuous reel uh in the college where I was teaching then which is in Leicester and I set the tape machine going, went downstairs to get myself a cup of coffee. The studio is on the ninth floor. I'd left the door open and when I came back fifteen, twenty minutes later

Gavin Bryars23:10

The studio where people had been working, the painting studio, had gone very quiet. And I thought, you know, it's a bit odd, usually a pretty boisterous place, people flicking paint at each other and, you know, all sorts of things going on. And someone in the corner was sobbing, and I thought, what's gone wrong? And I could hear this voice, and I realized that this man's voice, on its own without accompaniment, had in a way conditioned this whole space and coloured it in a very strange way. And everyone was just quietened down and touched by this voice. So I realised I actually had something intrinsically, emotionally, very powerful. And so whatever I did to it, I didn't want to take that away, but to enhance it if I could.

Presenter23:42

That was in um early seventies or

Gavin Bryars23:45

Yeah.

Presenter23:46

Yes, and it achieved a cult status, really, didn't it?

Gavin Bryars23:49

Well, it did. I I did a recording in nineteen seventy five which Brian Eno produced, one of a series of records called Obscure Records, which was part of their marketing strategy, I think. But it did have a c sort of cult success. And

Presenter24:01

But then it was re-released in ninety-three, I think, as well as

Gavin Bryars24:05

I made a new version, yes.

Presenter24:06

Yes, I was going to say, because Tom Waits, the man we've just been listening to, was on it. How did you get together with him?

Gavin Bryars24:12

Well, I'd actually got in touch with Tom well in fact no, he got in touch with me first in the 80s when he was touring in this country with his band and uh h he'd lost his copy of the 1975 recording which he said was his favourite recording, which is very flattering. And then when I decided to make this new version of Jesus Blood, rather than making it the same length as the older, which was just like twenty-five minutes long, I decided to make it the whole length of the C D.

Gavin Bryars24:36

But I realized in doing that I simply couldn't stretch out the old twenty five minute version by making everything three times as long. I had to in a way take it on a keep the journey going as it were. And it occurred to me at one point, well, everything so far has been accompanying the tramp, accompanying the singing.

Gavin Bryars24:51

Maybe at some point someone should join in. And then it occurred to me Tom's voice is the closest to that of the old man in terms of having this kind of lived in quality, a sense of actually having suffered, a sense of actually being very musical but having a certain kind of pathos there, a wealth of human experience in it. And so I approached Tom and he agreed to do it. Next piece of music. Well, this is a different kind of quality of singing. It's the Hilliard Ensemble, who are probably the most perfect singers I know, and I've been working with them for a number of years now. But their repertoire is normally early music and contemporary music.

Gavin Bryars25:26

But there is one recording they made of nineteenth century German part songs, and it's just fantastic to hear this nineteenth century romantic repertory with all its chromatic harmonies sung so accurately and beautifully by early music specialists. It's a piece by Richard Strauss called Trammlicht.

Gavin Bryars25:52

A treasure.

Gavin Bryars26:24

Percy.

Presenter26:38

The Hilliard Ensemble singing part of Traumlicht from Strauss's Dry Menakura.

Presenter26:44

Um so you were making a name for yourself, Gavin Bras, in Europe. I mean, in Paris you had your first opera in'eighty four' and so on. But during all of that time when you were producing music that was actually making its mark,

Presenter26:56

The B B C was ignoring you.

Gavin Bryars26:59

Well, I suppose so. Uh I mean there was a musical culture in this country during the seventies and eighties which wasn't friendly towards experimental music. It wasn't just the BBC, it was the Arts Council, it was uh you know university life and so on.

Presenter27:10

They liked have on guard music, but they don't like

Gavin Bryars27:11

They did. They did. And I and I don't dislike avant-garde music. Uh I I'm it's part of uh you know my uh education through cage is that you um you don't jump from one thing or the other.

Presenter27:13

Yeah.

Presenter27:22

But now you're you're entering even further, I would have thought, into the establishment, because you've um written this opera, um Doctor Ox's Experiment, which is going to be put on at the ENO, and the BBC is televising it. Just tell me a bit about it. It's based on a Jules Verne story, isn't it?

Gavin Bryars27:36

Yes, yes.

Presenter27:36

Yeah.

Gavin Bryars27:37

which is set in the kind of mythical part of Flanders where time stands still, where everything goes on incredibly slowly, you know, just like the kind of stuff I write, you see. And uh into this environment, this very well it's very phlegmatic, unruffled environment, comes this mysterious stranger, Doctor Ox, and things start to change because he's actually conducting a an experiment. Basically he's injecting oxygen into the atmosphere and animating these previously rather kind of inert people.

Presenter28:03

And you're playing in this yourself at the uh at the audio?

Gavin Bryars28:06

Yeah, well there's in yes, uh in two of the scenes I've actually written um a jazz bass part into it. So, you know, I'm I'm back in in in the jazz world again now. But um

Presenter28:16

Not that you need the money these days.

Gavin Bryars28:18

But I thought a quid would come in handy.

Presenter28:20

Number seven.

Gavin Bryars28:21

Well, number seven is a stunning piece. It's part of Wagner's Parsifile. And it's a particular recording. It's by Reginald Goodall. And it comes about from a particular experience I had in 1986, where I remember hearing this broadcast on Radio 3 and Goodall conducting Welsh National. And I noticed that at the English National Opera, a day or so later, he was playing with the same cast, the same production. So I phoned up and got one of the last tickets, and I saw this performance. And for me, it was just absolutely sublime. And I bought the recording, which was there on tape with a signed copy of by Reginald Goodall. And I was travelling to Japan just after that.

Gavin Bryars29:02

And I worked out that this is incredibly slow performance, and I could actually hear the performance twice in each direction as I was flying on Aeroflot across Siberia.

Presenter30:10

Part of the transition music from Act One of Wagner's Parsifale with the orchestra and chorus of the Welsh National Opera conducted by Reginald Goodall. Music to fly over Siberia by. What about music to sit on a desert island and create? I wonder if you've got any kind of desert island sounds in your head.

Gavin Bryars30:28

I don't know. I mean, actually being there would probably get me thinking about um writing. But uh being in a a state of solitude is something which a composer does all the time, and that is in fact the idea of the Glen Gould piece, is what you do in solitude, and so that I'm sure that I'll be stimulated to do something, maybe sketch out a notation in the sand or something of that kind.

Presenter30:46

What do you think you'd miss most? I mean, obviously people apart.

Gavin Bryars30:49

Probably my uh well, apart from my uh people as you say, uh probably my dog, Dalmatian, uh who's uh incredibly friendly and always has a smile, you know, that as eternal optimist. Uh I will miss that.

Presenter31:01

Tell me about your last record.

Gavin Bryars31:03

In fact my last record is a bit of an indulgence. I hesitate about choosing a piece of my own because I know there have been notorious occasions in the past. But this one is there for personal and family reasons. It's from a recording of mine called Cabin and Requim, a piece called Epilogue from Wonderlawn which is played by my ensemble who are essentially friends and colleagues. But on this occasion the ensemble also includes my daughters Ziela and Orlanda and Ziela happens to be playing on my mother's cello so it's a kinda and I'm playing bass on it so it's like a kind of a family album.

Presenter32:02

Part of Epilogue from Wonderlawn from Cadman Requiem, performed by the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and composed by my castaway, Gavin Bryars. If you could only take one of those, Gavin, which one would it be?

Gavin Bryars32:13

It's very difficult. I th think it w probably would be the Bill Evans trio.

Presenter32:16

What about your book?

Gavin Bryars32:18

It's The History of Science and Civilization in China by Joseph Needham. It's a book I've never read.

Gavin Bryars32:24

But it's uh written by a man I admire immensely, who Needham was the professor of physics at Cambridge, and in his retirement he decided he would write the Definitive History of Science and Civilization of China.

Gavin Bryars32:35

which would take him twenty five years. When people are planning their allotment and their saga holidays, there he is having a project which is going to take him into his nineties, and he completed it and died several years later, in fact, quite recently. It's a stunning piece of optimism.

Presenter32:48

And what about your luxury?

Gavin Bryars32:50

I think my luxury would be a chair, which is actually called a gravity chair.

Gavin Bryars32:55

A few years ago I had a very bad back injury, and the only thing I could sit in was this extraordinary Scandinavian device, which will kind of rest in four different positions. One of them is uh where you are actually sort of susp suspended horizontal in parallel with the with the floor, and it's the most perfect, orthopedically correct way of sleeping.

Presenter33:14

Gavin Bryars, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Gavin Bryars33:18

Thank you.

Speaker 433:26

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co dot uk slash radio four.