SYNGE SONG
Composer Gavin Bryars talks to Trish Murphy about his music prior to the concert by the Gavin
Bryars Ensemble at Christ Church Cathedral on
Saturday 15 May
Although he’s just turned 60, composer
Gavin Bryars, widely regarded as one of the key icons of European modern music,
is definitely not content to rest on his laurels. As well as a programme of
some of his most recent work, his forthcoming concert at Christ Church
Cathedral, at which the Gavin Bryars Ensemble make their Irish debut, includes
the world premieres of new work in
his ‘8 Irish Madrigals Series’, based on the writings of JM Synge. “I wouldn’t
have written these at the time, had it not been for this concert in Dublin”, he
comments, adding with typical good humour, “It makes me feel very responsible
about the work, and nervous as well – I mean taking Irish literature back to
Dublin is a sort of dodgy thing.”
But guardians of the Synge legacy shouldn’t worry; Bryars comes across
as a composer of the utmost integrity. Taking part in this concert are tenor
John Potter, late of the Hilliard Ensemble, and Swedish soprano Anna Maria
Friman, both frequent collaborators with Bryars, alongside the Gavin Bryars
Ensemble, whom he describes as “a group of people I’ve worked with in various ways,
some of them for more than 20 years; it’s people I’ve actually chosen to work
with as performers, rather than those particular instruments; it’s their
musical character that I love, so that has essentially formed the nature of the
ensemble. Obviously I write things for lots of other groups, but if I’m working
by choice I prefer to work with these friends who happen to be really superb
musicians.”
Yorkshire-born
Bryars started his musical career as a jazz bassist, working in the early ‘60s
with the likes of Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, and he performed at the
Vancouver Jazz Festival as recently as 2002. It might seem like a long way from
jazz to madrigals, a combination he agrees is “not very common”, but the way
Bryars tells it, there has been a certain logic to that particular progression.
“I started out doing all sorts of things, but eventually worked as a
professional jazz and improvising player, and then moved into composition, and
in a way I sort of learnt about composition by composing. I wrote my first
opera really knowing little about opera, but found myself writing an almost
five hour opera for the Opera of Paris and Lyon, and it was a very fast
learning curve. By working with particular people I find I learn a lot from
that, and I think any composer worth his salt has to be humble enough to accept
that most performers know a darn site more about their instrument or their
voice than you ever will. I just happen to have fallen into the company of a
lot of early music singers, partly through writing operas, partly through
working with them as specialist people, but a lot of early music people are
interested in new music. That combination is a really interesting one, because
you find that most early music people are very intelligent, they have to deal
with sources which are very sketchy, very questionable often, so they have to
bring a lot of invention and creativity and musical intelligence to working out
just how they perform these rather sketchy manuscripts. If they bring that same
kind of commitment and intelligence to a new piece then you get a level of
collaboration which is unlike what you’d get with a more routine player.”
Given his close
contact with early music people, does he also have an interest in early music?
“Oh I do, I’ve always liked early music but I didn’t know it terribly well as a
specialist subject, and got to know more once I started writing madrigals – I
felt obliged to really know the repertoire. If you get to know more about
Monteverdi and Gesualdo and all those people, and about the way they approached
setting text, then you’re a little bit further down the line, and I have for
most of the madrigals tended to use rather classic texts. In fact the madrigals
that we’ll be doing in Ireland, the ‘Irish Madrigals’, are John Millington
Synge’s translations of Petrarch which he did at the end of his life. This is a
very special thing which I’ve done specifically for Dublin, because I thought
it would be great to bring these back. He wrote it at the end of his life,
while he was writing ‘Deirdre of the Sorrows’, it has this wonderful climate of
melancholy and I thought, well if I’m going to do it anywhere, I should do it
in Dublin first.”
Much of Bryar’s
recent work has been for voices, something that will be reflected in his Dublin
concert. “Writing for voices is something I’ve become more and more committed
to. I’ve done three operas, and in doing that I got to know the different
characters of voices. One has a general concept of the soprano or the bass or
the tenor, but you realise that you’ve got some thirty or forty different
varieties of each, there’s different kinds of timbres and different ways people
approach sound, and you realise that voice is not a general concept it’s a very
specific thing, and each person has a kind of unique sound; and the voice is of
course probably the most personal form of musical utterance. You can’t hold a
voice at arms length like you can a violin – it’s you, and if you’re having an
off night that happens to the voice. Whereas I worked as a jazz bass player for
many years, and as a bassist if I was feeling a bit rough I could still get
through the night.”
For someone who
has a huge catalogue of recorded work, live performance remains the most
important element of Bryar’s music. “For me that’s what the essence of music
is, it is essentially a live and rather social event. You’re dealing with a
number of very real interactions in real time between people who are working
together on stage, and people who are listening and there’s a kind of very
dynamic process going on. In a sense recording is something of a second best.
I’ve always avoided as far as I could working in film because it seems to me
that there you freeze the music in one particular form and it’s stuck forever. I’d much rather work in live ballet
or opera where at least there’s that kind of frisson, that on a given night
things might get out of gear or whatever, you can adjust things, someone will
take something a different way one night and you’ll learn something. But if
it’s frozen in one way then it’s stuck forever, there’s a danger of being too
hooked on to the recording. At the same time I have been committed to making
recordings because I’m well aware I can’t perform everywhere.”
The question
regarding his favourite instrument is met with a chuckle and a somewhat
unexpected reply: “Well, I have my least favourite instruments – the
instruments I like least are the oboe and the bass guitar, I hate them. It’s
almost pathological, so I try and avoid those if I can.” And what have those
unfortunate instruments done to deserve such dislike? “The bass guitar probably
because I was a jazz bassist, and I found that the bass guitar started to take
over the jazz bass in the ‘60s. It’s sound has no soul, it has no kind of
resonance, it’s a kind of entirely artificial hybrid, and I think it’s better
for it to be burnt, frankly. The oboe I always find a rather kind of squawky
mingey sort of instrument, there’s something about the sound of the oboe that
I’ve never enjoyed, but the bass clarinet is one of my favourite instruments.
Low strings, violas downwards, I really love, I think the combination of viola,
cello, bass is my favourite sound.”
Despite his
preference for the more mellow instruments, his music does have quite a bite,
but it also has an underlying meditative quality that is at times irresistible.
“I do naturally prefer music which is more reflective, and moves to a pace
which is the listener’s pace, so there is a sense in which the listener can
follow the unfolding of ideas rather more straightforwardly than if the ideas
are flying about and you’ve got to go back and listen to it a thousand times.
For example I always preferred playing jazz ballads, the slow pieces to the
fast ones, because the choice of notes is so critical. If you’re playing very
fast, you play a thousand notes and maybe 40 of them are not so good, whereas
if you’re playing really slow, one wrong note is a nightmare. Things are either
right or wrong, and at a slow pace that’s more exaggerated. There is a sense
too in which a more reflective approach to contemporary music has become more
prevalent in the last 20 years, with the music of Arvo Part and so on. People
become aware that contemporary music doesn’t have to be fast, disjunctive,
abrasive; it can take other directions. And not all I do is like that, for
example if I’m writing an opera, then clearly there’s things in the dramaturgy
which demand exaggeration, high pace, aggression – and I do that, but my
general tendency is towards a more reflective music. Maybe it’s my temperament;
maybe it’s old age creeping up. It’s always been there actually, so maybe I was
born old!”
©TrishM 2014
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