Gavin Bryars on the Ivors and Innovation

Gavin Bryars is one of the most established of British composers, yet the Yorkshireman has had relatively little recognition over the years in terms of awards – until now, where he has been recognised by the Ivor Novello Awards with a special award for Innovation.

The Academy citation reads, “Gavin Bryars is an innovative composer, renowned double bassist, and a trailblazer in free improvisation. He gained international acclaim with his groundbreaking works, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), establishing him as a key figure in minimalist music. Since then, Bryars has made significant contributions across various mediums, including stage, ballet, film, and art galleries, in addition to concert halls. Bryars' work is consistently original and experimental, yet remains accessible, making a distinctive impact on British musical culture".

Shortly after the Ivors ceremony last month, Presto spoke with him about his career and the impact of his music.

Many congratulations on winning the Innovation Award!

It’s very good news, having never had an award in my life! I was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize 31 years ago, for the second version of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, with Tom Waits. In those days they always had one jazz and one classical release. Stan Tracey was alongside me, with Portraits Plus, but I couldn’t be there because I was actually performing the piece in Lyon that night. There was a lot of press about it, and the story of the old man was spun around a lot.

Your contributions to stage and ballet are recognized by the committee. Have you always gravitated to working with others across art forms?

I spent most of my life trying to avoid writing music for film, though twenty-five years ago I married a Russian film director, so I had to do it! I have written five operas and around twenty ballets, so in that situation you are inevitably collaborating with a stage director or a choreographer. I've also done quite a lot of things with visual artists, which is a bit more unusual because I did work in the early days in a fine art department. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the kind of work we did was viewed as not being serious, or even dangerous. We weren't allowed to teach in conservatoires or universities, but the art colleges were interested and I worked at Portsmouth and Leicester for a long time, because those more liberal departments thought people in another medium could bring something to visual artists.

I found that vice versa too, because when I was talking with visual artists I found the conversation much better and more interesting than ones with musicians! They were talking about ideas and concepts, with refreshing and wide-ranging topics. I’ve done many installations, including one thirty-two years ago in a castle in France that is still there. Oddly enough, a few years ago there was a touring exhibition of all the British sculptors in the French National Collection, and I was one of them because of this installation. So in France, I'm considered as a British sculptor!

I understand you studied with John Cage?

Nobody really studied with Cage, because he didn't give lessons, but I was with him and in his ambience. I enjoyed his work and philosophy, his outlook on music. We happened to be in the same place in Illinois in 1968, having met him in London in 1966. From that I learned an awful lot, and I became part of the post-Cage experimental music tradition with Cornelius Cardew, developing in London.

Did you find it refreshing the way in which Cage embraced other art forms?

I found him immensely refreshing, for that and many other reasons. Anybody who's worked with Cage never writes music which sounds like his. If you worked with Berio, Stockhausen or Boulez, if your work didn't sound like theirs, you'd be doing it wrong. What Cage did was encourage you to be your own person, to have your own voice. It was the attitude, the state of mind with which you do it – that was the important thing. You got permission to approach music – and life – in a slightly different way.

There is also a thing that I took from him to be somewhat self-effacing, to be slightly detached in the act of composing. It doesn't preclude having emotional feeling and spiritual aspects, but you’re not drawing attention to your skills and your craft. For example there is a technique that I call ‘orchestrating for Bravos’, where you get louder and louder and then suddenly stop. Someone is bound to say “Bravo!” – they have to! I don’t do that.

At what point did early music come into your world?

Much later than university. I did a philosophy degree, so I never had any real technical tuition. I thought it funny that I was eventually made a Professor of Music, yet my only qualifications were A-level Music and grade eight piano! I discovered early music through being commissioned by the Hilliard Ensemble, just after I had done my first opera Medea. When you write an opera, your name’s in the paper a little bit more than if you do a little experimental gigging in Hackney! The Hilliard commissioned me, and I became friends with Arvo Pärt through working with ECM, and with John Potter especially. He was a guiding person because when I wrote things for the Hilliard I wanted to fit within their state of mind and framework without making it a pastiche.

After that I worked a lot, and I’m now on my eighth book of madrigals. I love working with early music singers and instrumentalists, they bring a kind of intelligence to music that you don't necessarily get with more conventionally well-trained classical musicians. The early music artists have to make creative inventions on how the music might have sounded, so they devote more time to exploration and nature of the music than might be the case with, for instance, a published violin sonata.

Has British culture played a big part in how you compose, in particular your local surroundings?

It has in a lot of ways, and Scotland and Ireland too. In Ireland, I've worked with the great singer Iarla O'Lionáird, and we’ve done things in Gaelic, from the eighth to the sixteenth century. I worked a lot with Blake Morrison on librettos for two of my operas. When he came with me to Goole, my home town, he said that when he walked up the steps of the river bank at the bottom of the road where I lived, he suddenly understood my work a lot more. When he saw that river, and the very flat landscape which went on into the distance, he was sure that he understood a lot more. I think there is a sense of place and a feeling for particular things. I have done a number of pieces which relate to geographical places like Hilda’s Abbey at Whitby, or the South Downs, or the West Coast of Scotland.

Are you still as busy a composer now you’re in your eighties?

I am. I’m not trying to reduce – quite the opposite! I accept commissions, and I have lots of things on the go. I am doing a very large scale choral piece for The Crossing, and a piece for the Science Museum with Icebreaker. I’m also doing a piece, Due Qui, with my son Yuri at the Venice Biennale at the end of November. I work a lot with Mahan Esfahani, and have written a concerto for him. I’ve also written a String Sextet with the Consone Quartet, which we’re looking to record. I also have my own ensemble, and we try to perform as often as possible. I think it's important that I should be seen as the person who wrote it, rather than operate behind a performer.

Your discography is spread across several labels but centres on your own GB Records imprint.

I recorded with a lot of companies, you know – the old Argo imprint, then several albums on ECM. Over twenty years ago I got a bit fed up with waiting for the labels to decide when to release things and deciding what to put on the albums. I started doing my own label to get things out, and now I have around thirty-five albums. I’m looking to release some operas on the label, and I hope to have a splurge of new stuff in the new year. I was lucky that the first album I did was Biped, a dance piece for the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, commissioned after Cage’s death. The treasurer of the company was a good friend of mine, and he paid for the recording of the CD. That started me thinking about a series of albums, and I found I had two or three where I had the rights on the music. Once you have three, it’s more likely a distributor will take you on, and Proper have been great – they’ve handled my work ever since.

What did you take from your relationship with ECM, and Manfred Eicher?

Manfred and I got on very well. He was a bass player himself, so you find on ECM the bass is always very well recorded! I worked with him for eight to ten years. I learnt a lot from the way in which he approaches working in the studio, and the almost obsessive care that he has. We would listen to our recordings on his car radio, to get a different perspective from the studio. He was very alert, and fully engaged.

Thinking of different listening perspectives, The Stopping Train – your piece with Blake Morrison – is an illustration of how music and transport go so well together. Was it enjoyable to write?

It was, and also because it was specifically for my locality. Sound UK wanted to do it, and they originally wanted me to do something from Leeds to Hull. I had no connection with Leeds, but could we do Goole to Hull? I timed the piece exactly so that if you played it on that stopping train journey, it would stop when you got to the next station – you wouldn’t have to hit pause, and would go all the way through. The one catch was there was one station where the train only stops on four occasions during the daytime, and it was one I particularly liked. I had already done the piece by then, and I was worried it would throw everything out. But as it turned out, after that, the train would often be a bit delayed where a branch line comes in, and it would work as if it had stopped at the station. It was working on that piece when Blake saw the river. The line follows the river a lot, and we did a beautiful film of it with our sound engineer, Mic Pool, who attached his camera to the window, so you see the landscape at right angles, which we never normally look at.

What would your advice be to composers who are just starting out in this climate?

It’s tricky. I stopped teaching more than thirty years ago to go back to the dangerous life, but there's one week in the year where I do some teaching at the Fuse Art Camp, in the French Pyrenees. About a dozen people go there, and they spend a week with me. I find what they’re trying to do, and enable them to do it as well as possible and to enrich it in some way, rather than suggesting they are on the wrong path, which would be the Boulez approach. It’s about trying to find things that they perhaps haven’t seen.

I think it important to listen a lot and to have an open mind, to not close down any avenues in terms of how you progress and get your work done. For a long time I was handling everything myself, and in the experimental days we had no support at all from the Arts Council or anybody. Between 1969 and 1987 I had nothing on the BBC at all. That changes, because younger and newer producers come in, and it's often the producers who push things forward. It's very tough for younger composers now, and I guess they just have to take every possible opening there is.

Your music has shown real durability, the obvious examples being The Sinking Of The Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. Both seem, if anything, more relevant now than ever.

It's true. There was a time if I was performing these pieces that I would much rather be doing something new, like Percy Grainger with Country Gardens or The Rolling Stones with Satisfaction. But people did want to hear the pieces, so I played them – and I also do now. I play a short version of Jesus’ Blood with my own ensemble, and we did a 12-hour one at the Tate Modern a few years ago. Recently I was in Serbia, and we did a version for a six-piano ensemble. In Lyon we did an arrangement for seven percussionists, plus various others, and a completely a cappella one for an Australian choir. 

It obviously always respects the old man's voice, however. The first Thursday in every November we play at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Richard Carter, the vicar there, has a memorial service for the homeless, those who have died in London in the past year. In 2017 we played there for the first time, and have played ever since, with two homeless choirs. It is a very touching service. I have put it in my calendar for the first Thursday in November all the way to 2042, when I will be 99!”

It is very meaningful that Jesus’ Blood is used in this way, with the homeless problem in London.

This year’s service was longer, because last year I think there were 87 names to read out. This year it was more than 130. The important thing is that every person’s name is read out, so that they are not anonymous. While we're playing Jesus’ Blood, members the audience will come to the front of the church, and pick up a card which has the name of someone who died that year. You take it with you. We play for 15-20 minutes while that was happening, and it is a very touching thing to do.”

View Gavin Bryars's complete available discography.