My wife has only ever been reduced to tears by two pieces of music: Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Arms and Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Imagine then her horror when Point released a new version of Bryars’ signature work with vocals provided by… Tom Waits.
I told this story to Gavin Bryars in 1998 when I pestered him for his autograph in the cafe at the ICA in London. He was snatching a cup of tea between sessions of a workshop he was leading around that evening’s performance of Dr Ox’s Experiment for English National Opera.
Bryars listened patiently as I waffled on before dutifully inscribing the copy of the CD I thrust at him with the words: ‘Nessie – Don’t cry! Gavin Bryars.’
Nearly twenty years later, by way of preamble, I relate the story again. Bryars mulls it over: “It certainly could have happened that way,” he says down the phone from his studio. “I remember that particular workshop and the performance.”
While my friends and I thoroughly enjoyed Dr Ox’s Experiment, I think it’s fair to say Bryars’ opera irked the purists. Surely he was just being mischevious setting Jules Verne’s novella about a gas that speeds things up at such a glacial pace?
“The whole thing was a bit strange,” Bryars admits. “I got off on the wrong foot with the Director at English National Opera. When he asked me what Dr Ox’s Experiment was going to be like, I told him it was going to be ‘like Parsifal with jokes.’ That didn’t go down very well…”
Dr Ox’s Experiment was a collaboration with Bryars’ friend, the writer Blake Morrison, who composed the libretto. A cursory glance through the list of others with whom Bryars has worked over the years yields John Cage, Philip Glass, The Hilliard Ensemble, both ENOs (Brian and the afore-mentioned opera company) and The Kronos Quartet, as well as a few surprises such as Father John Misty and Aphex Twin.
Nothing Like The Sun, Bryars’ setting of eight Shakespeare sonnets commissioned by Opera North, is performed at the Howard Assembly Room later this month and includes an appearance by Gavin Friday of post-punk art provocateurs, The Virgin Prunes. I ask Bryars what he looks for most in a collaborator.
Gavin Bryars: I don’t really look for anything. I just enjoy the fact that I am taken outside myself.
When you’re writing a quartet or a concerto for someone, you’re aware of the performers. It’s not like when you are collaborating with a fellow artist as an equal. In that situation things are brought into play that are maybe ideas or concepts that you’ve never thought of because it’s not your territory.
When I was first teaching I worked in a Fine Art department and I loved the fact that fine artists think in a different way from musicians. They tend to talk in terms of ideas, whereas musicians tend to be more interested in technical things.
I do a lot of work with choreographers. Each one has a different approach. Each one will give me a different degree of licence, or exert control, or want to put in particular ideas. The same thing happens working in opera, when you have a theatre director, you have a librettist, all those things have to be taken in different ways.
It’s just like being in a healthy relationship, finding a kind of give and take. It stops you thinking just about yourself.
Is that how you keep your interest going? Are you ever tempted to recycle something you’ve done before?
Gavin Bryars: There can be moments, when you’re up against it with time, when you think, ‘Shall I sneak something in here or copy?’ It’s perfectly respectable. Mozart did it. Mahler did it. They all do it. You quote yourself or you parody yourself… And I try to avoid that.
There’s certain things that I suppose you could say are stylistic traits – certain ways of handling harmony – which are mine by instinct. That is not really like self-copying: it’s more like saying Bridget Riley does a lot of things with stripes. It’s the way she paints…
I like the fact that you will return to pieces though. There are at least three different recorded versions of The Sinking of the Titanic, for example…
Gavin Bryars: I do try to find new ways of dealing with them. There was a time when I didn’t do Jesus’ Blood or Titanic. When I’d recorded them I thought of it as a way of getting them out of the way.
And then when later I started doing them again, some people said, ‘Isn’t it a bit of a chore? It’s like The Rolling Stones having to do Satisfaction.’ Well, in a way. But if you’re playing Satisfaction, you’re playing it in a town where no one’s ever heard it before, so you’ve got to make it fresh. You can’t give a tired old performance, so I do rethink.
For example, recently, I did two small scale chamber versions of Jesus’ Blood and Titanic with just five musicians. They were thirty minute versions. I did it in a little gallery in Uppingham and it was very nice because suddenly you had to focus differently. They were more austere. You were more exposed. There was nothing to hide behind. It was great and I keep doing that.
Wesley Stace has this thing in November at Bush Hall called Cabinet of Wonders – Ian McEwan’s on the bill, and so is Rich Hall, the comedian – and I’m doing this thing with Wesley’s band: five of my musicians and his band. I’m making a new version of Jesus’ Blood for that. Obviously the old man’s voice is there, but the actual accompaniement will move around it in a different way.
How did the collaboration with Aphex Twin come about?
Gavin Bryars: That was partly through Philip Glass. (He) had started a new record label Point, and wanted to put something of mine out. [The label released Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet in 1992, and followed it in 1994 with a new recording of The Sinking of the Titanic.] At the time, Aphex Twin was doing some remixes of some of Philip’s work, and Philip asked me what I thought of him doing something with mine. I thought the best way was to be helpful rather than just leave it. Otherwise he’d just do it anyway. I let Aphex Twin have lots of the component parts, so he could rethink them rather than just working with the entirety.
We actually met by accident. Philip was performing solo at the Festival Hall, or somewhere, and I went to have a cup of tea with him in the afternoon at his hotel in Kensington and Richard James came in. He was completely baffled by it all, stunned by the fact I was there. He didn’t know what to do. He was very shy.
I really liked what he did. [Aphex Twin’s Raising The Titanic Mix] What I have done with it since is incorporate his piece back into live performances of mine. Somewhere at the back of the hall you’ll hear a sort of chugging, like a motorik slow motion machine, and that’s the Aphex Twin mix. I’ve pulled it back into my world.
It’s funny you should mention Philip Glass. I’d been planning to start by asking whether you’d had any unusual jobs: Steve Reich did removals; Philip Glass moonlighted as a taxi driver. It seems a requirement that minimalist composers have some sort of unusual job on their CV. What’s yours?
Gavin Bryars: I did teach for a while, but I stopped teaching twenty five years ago and went back to the dangerous life of being freelance again. So I have that, a kind of academic cushion. After a while, I found it was a little too comfortable. You weren’t really taking any risks. It didn’t matter if it failed because you always had your salary to fall back on. I felt I needed to get out of that.
Philip and Steve have always been freelance people and when things are tough, they’ve had to take other work. Obviously I did jobs as a student: I was a riveter’s mate in Goole shipyard, and I did some farming, things like that.
Speaking of Goole, in your work there are connections between your music and landscape, a sense of melancholy, of time and loss… Is that a Goole thing?
Gavin Bryars: Yes, I think so. I really didn’t leave Goole until I was eighteen and went to university. I lived in East Yorkshire. If we went away, we went to Hornsea or Bridlington or Whitby. We stayed there. Once or twice I hitch-hiked to Leeds or Sheffield to hear a jazz concert, and a couple of times down to London, but that was it. So my world was East Yorkshire and I love that area.
I went to university in Sheffield and like many people who go to university in Sheffield, I stayed around for a few years afterwards because I love the city. My moving down to London, and later other parts of the world, was really because that was where the work was, that was where there was a cultural environment where I could thrive.
At the same time these places are my roots. It’s been particularly nice in the last couple of years to go back there. I did my first live performance in Goole in May at Junction [the town civic arts centre]. That’s the first time I’ve ever played in Goole since I played there as part of an amateur orchestra conducted by my uncle when I was nineteen.
I’ve done a couple of things with Hull City of Culture [Winestead, a piece inspired by the landscape of East Yorkshire and the works of metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell who was born there] and there’s Goole-Hull Stopping Train [with Blake Morrison], all of which is a homage to East Yorkshire.
That area is important. There is the whole topography of the area, the fact how incredibly flat it is. The Ouse at Goole is fantastic. It’s such a powerful river and people underestimate it.
Because of the flatness you have this huge amount of sky and any sort of incident on the land is a major one. You’ll see ships appear to sail across the land, but in fact they’re coming around bends in the distance, and eventually they appear. A tree will be a dramatic moment in a landscape like that. It’s rather like some beautiful Flemish landscape painting. You get that quality of focus on really tiny things.
But in terms of the feeling, you’re right, there is a sense of melancholy or a kind of – not nostalgia – but a sort of feeling of the elegiac that I find in East Yorkshire. People say that Yorkshiremen are miserable buggers anyway, but I think it’s more than that. I think there’s a sort of depth in Yorkshire that I don’t find in many other places. People tend to have roots there and, if they’ve left, they retain (their Northerness).
Like Blake Morrison, a friend of mine who I work with a lot. He lives in London, but he’s still completely a Northerner. He even writes about the idea of Northerness. It is a different characteristic.
You’ve dedicated Nothing Like The Sun to Scottish poet George Bruce. What’s the connection?
Gavin Bryars: He was a producer at the BBC and a Shakespearean scholar. He was an East Coast man too. It was just that he was up the North East of Scotland in a fishing village called Fraserburgh near Aberdeen.
I set four of George’s poems to music in 2009 for Leeds Lieder and called it Songs from Northern Seas. All the things about the fishermen and the fragility of life on the coast was a very beautiful thing. There’s things in some of George’s poems which have the same kind of feeling that I find in the sonnets. I deliberately chose the more abstract, more philosophical ones, that crop up later in the collection. It’s very close to the sensibility of George’s work, so I thought I should dedicate them to him.
I’m struck while we’ve been talking that the work you do is often structured around the spoken word, yet the music seems looser and able to evolve according to the circumstances of each performance. Are these opposing impulses important to your work?
GB: Yes. I think if you have a structure that is too tight, it can put a stranglehold on the music, and on the performers if you allow them no leeway to be themselves. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re including improvisation, but making sure that the piece becomes their own.
That’s one of the advantages of having my own ensemble. Over the years we’ve grown into each other’s company. They slot perfectly into the work I do. I know how this will sound best. There’s a kind of shorthand, so if we need to do a new piece, we can rehearse it that day and perform it that night. There won’t be a problem. It’s not particularly sight-reading. They know the idiom, they know the language, and they know the sensibilities. There is a mix of tightness and looseness which has to be there in any musical performance.
I wondered if it was also partly down to your beginnings in jazz?
Gavin Bryars: Probably, though my beginnings in jazz are lost in the mists of time. I started playing jazz properly when I went to university. I started playing the bass and then became a professional bass player by my second year, in fact. I was a professional bass player [Bryars was part of a trio with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley] and a very bad Philosophy student.
I saw jazz as a kind of way to freedom, a way of getting rid of the shackles. I saw that too in some of the literature I was reading at the time like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all that Beat poetry. People like John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe, those kind of people who were outside the established culture, those were the kind of people I admired.
I remember listening to Ornette Coleman on the radio – probably in ‘58 or ‘59 – and people saying, ‘How terrible. It’s not music.’ I thought, if you’re saying such bad things about this guy, he must be interesting. I became really passionately involved with that, and later became friends with Coleman, and Charlie Haden as well.
You seem to have done everything, but is there anything you’ve not done which you’d still like to have a go at?
Gavin Bryars: There are several projects that I would like to do. I’d really like to do a setting of Thomas de Quincey’s The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant which purports to be something written by one of Kant’s companions, but it’s written in a strange kind of ironic way. It’s extraordinary. It’s like Beckett.
I’m doing a new chamber opera in March based on Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. That’s with two singers. One of them is a French rock singer which puts me back into that Tom Waits’ territory of bringing a non-standard performer into a standard environment.
In a way, there’s nothing that I regret having not done – it would be nice if I did do the Kant piece – but I’ll quite happily just carry on. I really enjoy writing vocal music, but in a way whatever turns up is fine.
I’m not a composer like Wagner or like Mahler who has a clear sense of direction and says I’m going to write nine symphonies and produce so many operas and so on. You just keep going until you drop, or until the brain fades or whatever. I’m probably one of the very few who are able to do that. I don’t teach. I don’t live by performance. I perform, but I don’t rely on that for an income. I rely for my living on commissions and royalties.
Performing is a bonus to me and something I love. I think it’s great to get out there and let the public see the whites of your eyes. “This is the villain who wrote the stuff,” you know. The nice thing about performing Nothing Like The Sun in Leeds (and then a few days later in Prague) is that we have one singer, Sarah [Dacey], who hasn’t sung with me before. Also my third daughter [Alexandra-Maria Tchernakova] is the pianist. She’s studying piano in Moscow and she’s coming back to play with me in this context for the first time. She’s a fantastic pianist, so that will be nice.
All four of my kids play. When we toured with Titanic live during the centenary year, I was a lot better behaved. My band noticed it, but I’m worried they’ll go back and tell their respective mothers: ‘Do you know what Dad did last night?’ I’ve got to be very careful.
Ha! So no throwing television sets out of hotel windows then?
Gavin Bryars: None of that, no. And no setting fire to the settee. Well, maybe not in Leeds anyway…
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Gavin Bryars – Nothing Like the Sun is at the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds at 19.45 on 25th October 2017. For more information, including tickets, click here.
Find out more about Goole-Hull Stopping Train, a sonic journey by Gavin Bryars and Blake Morrison here.