Gavin Bryars at 80: a composer who made his mark with collaborations

It’s a wonder that Gavin Bryars had time to celebrate his 80th birthday at all. The day itself, back in January, was marked by a family gathering at the same Venetian restaurant in Soho, London, that he, his wife and children visit every year.

“The rest of the time we are all over the place,” he says via Zoom from the US. “I live in a small village in the Midlands, my two eldest daughters are in London, my third is in Milan, my son is with me, and my wife, who is a film director, is in Russia. My wife and I have to spend long periods apart.”

Right through this year his diary has been packed. Starting this weekend at Britten Pears Arts’ “Summer at Snape”, he has concerts booked until the end of April 2024 for himself and his Gavin Bryars Ensemble. In addition, there is more music to write, including a big choral piece for a choir in Philadelphia. He says it is a pleasure just to have some time at home composing in his studio in the garden.

Bryars’ career defies easy definition. His life’s music has taken in a wide-angle view as if from the top of a big wheel, from which avant-garde experiments, jazz, minimalism, improvisation, choral purity and even a dash of rock-star glitz can all be seen on a fine day.

It seems an age since he made headlines with two genre-busting pieces — The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) — which still attract vast listener figures online. Rubbing shoulders with glam-rock royalty, he came together with Brian Eno, of Roxy Music fame, to record both as the first release for Eno’s Obscure Records in 1975.

In its various versions, lasting from 25 minutes to an hour-plus, The Sinking of the Titanic replicates the sound of the orchestra playing as the Titanic went down. In Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, a heart-rending off-cut from a documentary about the homeless at Waterloo Station features an unknown man singing in a quavering voice on a tape loop. A 12-hour, overnight version was performed by a homeless choir at Tate Modern in 2019.

The instrumentalists or singers will always know more about their art than the composer will’

These pieces can feel very moving today, but there was resistance to Bryars’ innovations at the time. Did that kind of openness hail from the unbuttoned 1960s?

“Absolutely,” Bryars says. “I did enjoy the 1960s, as I think everybody who lived through them did. Then, on January 1 1970, suddenly everything became gloomy. There had been so much optimism and craziness in the ‘‘ ’60s.”

It was also around that time that he worked for a while as assistant to American iconoclast John Cage. “What I learnt from Cage was not how to write music — nobody who worked with Cage ended up writing music like him — but to go away and become my own man. It was that generosity and open-mindedness I took away from him.”

Bryars’ start as a jazz musician will probably have helped. “I hadn’t studied music formally beyond school — I did a philosophy degree — so I was not musically educated like somebody who had gone to a conservatoire. One of my methods was to say yes to every project and then work out how I could do it.

“The most dramatic case came in 1981 when I was approached to write my first opera, Medea. I had written nothing for orchestra or for the stage, the opera was in ancient Greek, I was teaching full-time, and I was given eight months to write it. But I did it and made sure I listened to the people I was working with.

“I feel that the practitioners, the instrumentalists or singers, will always know more about their art than the composer will, however arrogant the composer might be — and some can be very arrogant. I am sensitive to their needs being a practising musician myself, still playing double bass and piano in my own ensemble.”

Collaborations with big names across the arts have been a striking feature of Bryars’ career throughout. He has worked extensively with visual artists such as Bruce McLean and Tim Head, architect Will Alsop, sculptors Bill Woodrow and Juan Muñoz, and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe.

Most recently, he collaborated with Italian artist Massimo Bartolini to create an installation in Prato, outside Florence. Bartolini created seven rooms, each with five large scaffolding tubes tuned like organ pipes. A music box mechanism set off the music in the different rooms, but with only five notes in each, Bryars says it was “a terrific challenge”.

Unsurprisingly, he can name only one isolated occasion when he was locked away alone to compose. “I was working on an operatic project called The CIVIL WarS, designed to open the 1984 Olympics [in Los Angeles]. It didn’t happen in the end, but would have been a massive opera with five different composers, each commissioned by a different country in the Olympic ideal. I was commissioned by France and was brought in very late. They were sketching the libretto in a monastery in the hills above Marseille, and this was already February for a premiere in June. I was sitting in a monastic cell with a piano, and they would feed the pages of the libretto under the door. I wrote the music and fed them back out again.”

These days, his favourite occupation is to write for an unaccompanied choir. “I don’t really take pride in any of my works,” he says with characteristic modesty, but he does own up to a favourite in A Native Hill, which he wrote for American choir The Crossing in 2019. They also recorded his radiant score The Fifth Century for choir and saxophone quartet, a piece that showcases their abilities.

“In Como recently I gave a lecture about the myth of the solitary composer in his ivory tower,” Bryars says. “In that case I was talking about my collaborations with fine artists and how working with them makes you think differently. In the early days we were not seen as employable by universities or conservatoires, but fine art colleges would have us, because they thought it healthy to have another perspective on art practice. It was good to be with people who were talking about ideals, not technique or making money like the musicians.

“For me, music is a profoundly social activity. The best kinds of jazz or chamber music involve paying close attention to each other, responding, respecting, not trying to dominate, and that seems to me an ideal way of making music. That has coloured the way I have moved forward. The result is perhaps that it took me longer to feel completely comfortable with my craft than if I had been to music college, but then I think I might have been a more boring composer than I already am.”

Gavin Bryars marks his 80th birthday at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, on August 13 and at the Barbican, London, on December 19

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