Gavin Bryars

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 1998

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the experimental composer Gavin Bryars. One of his best-known works, The Sinking of the Titanic, pays tribute to the band which continued to play as the ship went down. It poses the question what if they hadn't stop playing; how would their music have sounded under water? His most popular composition, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, features a tramp singing the same verse again and again, building up layer upon layer of emotion.

Composing is a craft he learnt as an assistant to John Cage, after hearing his work Four minutes, thirty-three seconds - of silence. Today he is both established and establishment - the ENO are soon to stage his latest opera and if you look closely at the orchestra, you'll spot him on the bass!

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: My Foolish Heart by Bill Evans Trio Book: Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham Luxury: Gravity chair

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:09.1	The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a composer. He came from a musical family, went to the Royal Northern
0:36.5	College of Music and was happily studying and playing in a working men's club when his true
0:41.4	musical calling began to develop. He wanted to experiment.
0:45.0	He was one of the founders of the Portsmouth symphonia whose members tried but failed to play the right notes
0:51.0	and in works like The S sinking of the Titanic, dismissed when
0:54.7	first written but now taken seriously, he achieved recognition as an important
0:59.0	artist. Later this year his second opera Dr Ox's experiment will be staged by the ENO and televised by the BBC.
1:06.7	I've always believed that music is a social activity, he says.
1:10.5	It's about playing in company with people with whom you feel on a wavelength.
1:15.0	He is Gavin Briars.
1:17.0	Your titanic piece is topical again, of course, Gavin, and a good example of the kind of music that you create.
1:23.4	How did it come about?
1:24.4	Tell me about it.
1:25.4	Well, I was writing all sorts of things at that time.
1:27.9	I think this is the only piece from that period that I've kept.
1:30.1	I've burnt the rest.
1:32.1	But this was a piece where I'd been impressed by the
1:34.3	reported behavior of the ship's orchestra, the eight musicians, and the way they
1:38.8	conduct themselves in the last, especially the last five minutes of the ship's
1:42.3	sinking.
	...

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