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All Music Guide:
Arguably the most important British post-minimalist composer, Gavin Bryars mixes classical, jazz, and modern influences in his intellectually engaging (yet still emotionally touching) music. Though his style has changed somewhat since his first major piece, 1969's "The Sinking of the Titanic," Bryars has remained a provocative yet accessible composer capable of working in a variety of settings.
Born in the small Yorkshire village of Goole, England, in 1943, Bryars' first musical love was jazz. Beginning in 1963, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Sheffield, Bryars played bass with free jazz guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley in the nonsensically named improvisatory trio Joseph Holbrooke. (An 11-minute excerpt from a 1965 Joseph Holbrooke rehearsal was released on CD in 1999, but the group remains otherwise undocumented.) Joseph Holbrooke broke up in 1966 when Bailey and Oxley moved to London to form the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and at that point, Bryars abandoned improvisatory music.
After a period spent studying in the United States under John Cage, whose theories inspired much of Bryars' early work, Bryars returned to England and became a Fine Arts instructor at Portsmouth College of Art in 1969. While studying with renowned composers Cornelius Cardew and John White, Bryars wrote the original sketch of "The Sinking of the Titanic" to accompany a student art exhibition. Bryars originally thought of the piece as a musical equivalent of conceptual art and did not originally intend for the piece to be performed. It wasn't until 1972 that Bryars wrote the first performance score for the piece, and he revised the piece in 1975, 1990, and 1994.
Bryars wrote his second major piece in 1971, "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet." Like "The Sinking of the Titanic," "Jesus' Blood" is based on a piece of church music slowly transmogrified, but this piece, based on a tape recording of a London tramp singing the titular hymn, is an additive work that builds slowly into an explosive orchestral climax.
Although Bryars wrote his first two major pieces in Portsmouth, probably the most lasting and important project of his time in that town was his founding of the legendary Portsmouth Sinfonia. Half-art project, half-put-on, the Portsmouth Sinfonia was a community orchestra that anybody could join, regardless of skill. The resulting mix of virtuosi and people who had never picked up an instrument before in their lives is oddly fascinating, as heard on the group's two albums, 1973's The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics and 1975's Hallelujah!: Live at the Royal Albert Hall.
Brian Eno was a member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia from 1970 to 1974, and through that connection, Bryars became the first artist signed to Eno's Obscure label, whose first release was of the original recordings of both "The Sinking of the Titanic" and "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" in 1975. Bryars also appears on the label's second release, Ensemble Pieces, with his "1, 2, 1-2-3-4," alongside pieces by John Adams and Christopher Hobbs. The following year, Bryars' "The Squirrel on the Ricketty-Racketty Bridge," a piece for eight guitars played by four guitarists, was performed by Bryars, Eno, Bailey, and Henry Cow's Fred Frith and appeared on the Obscure compilation Machine Pieces.
In 1977, Bryars collaborated with librettist Fred Orton on the opera Irma, which was staged by Tom Phillips and released on Obscure with an orchestra conducted by Bryars. Thus inspired, Bryars began composing his first solo opera, Medea, which was staged by Robert Wilson in Paris and Lyon in 1984. Bryars' second opera, Doctor Ox's Experiment, was based on a story by Jules Verne and was staged by Canadian film director Atom Egoyan in London in 1998.
In 1981, Bryars began a decade-plus association with the Belgian art pop label Les Disques du Crepuscule, releasing the chamber music album Hommages. In 1986, the tone poem "Three Viennese Dancers" was released on the influential ECM label. Crepuscule released a celebrated revision of "The Sinking of the Titanic" in 1990, followed by the new "After the Requiem" in 1991. Bryars revised both "The Sinking of the Titanic" and "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" (in a new recording featuring Tom Waits singing the hymn) for Point Music in 1993 and 1994. A remix project with Aphex Twin, Raise the Titanic, was released in Japan in 1995. In between those projects, Bryars released the eclectic Vita Nova, with four new pieces performed by four different ensembles.
A collaboration with the renowned Balanescu Quartet, The Last Days, was released in 1995. Another varied collection of new works, Farewell to Philosophy, featuring a cello concerto commissioned by Julian Lloyd Webber, a piece for the Nexus percussion ensemble, and an orchestral solo for jazz bass legend Charlie Haden, followed the next year. A reunion with his own chamber music group, the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, was released as A Man in a Room, Gambling in 1997, with another orchestral work, "Cadman Requiem," appearing the next year. Bryars capped a productive period of his career with a self-titled collection of works in a variety of settings in 1998, followed by the CD reissue of his first album and the archival Joseph Holbrooke tape. In 2000, a Joseph Holbrooke reunion concert from 1998 was issued, as was Bryars' score for Biped, a Merce Cunningham dance performance. During this period, Bryars was also working on his third opera, G. Amjad, a collaboration with David Lang for the Canadian dance company La La La Human Steps, was issued in late 2008. In February of 2010, his Piano Concerto: The Solway Canal, a co-commission of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust and the Dutch radio was premiered. The year also saw the release of three new albums: I Send You This Cadmium Red, scored by Bryars for an ensemble that included the speaking voices of John Christie and John Berger; I Have Heard It Said That a Spirit Enters, a collection of songs and instrumental works performed by the CBC Radio Orchestra, conducted by Owen Underhill with soloists Holly Cole, Gwen Hoebig, and the composer; and Live at Punkt by the Gavin Bryars Ensemble with Arve Henriksen guesting on trumpet., Rovi
Wikipedia:
John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.
Education [edit]
Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was educated at St Edward's School, an independent school for boys in Oxford. His father, S.J.D. Berger, O.B.E., M.C., had been an infantry officer on the western front during the First World War. Berger served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; he then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London.
Life and career [edit]
Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career.
While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman. His Marxist humanism and his strongly stated opinions on modern art made him a controversial figure early in his career. He titled an early collection of essays Permanent Red, in part as a statement of political commitment, and later wrote that before the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States he had felt constrained not to criticize the former's policies; afterwards his attitude toward the Soviet state became considerably more critical.
After a childless first marriage, Berger has three children: Jacob, a film director; Katya, a writer and film critic; and Yves, an artist.
Literary career [edit]
In 1958 Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John. The book's political currency and detailed description of an artist's working process led to some readers mistaking it for a true story. After being available for a month, the work was withdrawn by the publisher, under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The novels immediately succeeding A Painter of Our Time were The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom; both presented an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. In 1962 Berger's distaste for life in Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in France.
In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing (directed by Mike Dibb) and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images. The work was in part derived from Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Berger's novel G., a romantic picaresque set in Europe in 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the Booker Berger made a point of donating half his cash prize to the Black Panther Party in Britain, and retaining half to support his work on the study of migrant workers that became A Seventh Man, insisting on both as necessary parts of his political struggle.
Many of his texts, from sociological studies to fiction and poetry, deal with experience. Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). His research for A Seventh Man led to an interest in the world which migrant workers had left behind: isolated rural communities. It was his work on this theme that led him to settle in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s. Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, seek to document and to understand intimately the lived experiences of their peasant subjects. Their subsequent book Another Way of Telling discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography both through Berger's essays and Mohr's photographs. His studies of single artists include most prominently The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), a survey of the modernist's career; and Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist, on the Soviet dissident sculptor's aesthetic and political contributions.
In the 1970s Berger collaborated with the Swiss director Alain Tanner on several films; he wrote or co-wrote La Salamandre (1971), The Middle of the World (1974) and Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 (1976). His major fictional work of the 1980s, the trilogy Into Their Labours (made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag), treats the European peasant experience from its farming roots into contemporary economic and political displacement and urban poverty.
In recent essays Berger has written about photography, art, politics, and memory; he published in The Shape of a Pocket a correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, and written short stories appearing in the Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His sole volume of poetry is Pages of the Wound, though other volumes such as the theoretical essay And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos contain poetry as well as prose. His recent novels include To the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis stemming from his own familial experience, and King: A Street Story, a novel on homeless and shantytown life told from the perspective of a street dog. Berger initially insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page of King, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.
Berger's 1980 volume About Looking includes an influential chapter, "Why Look at Animals?" It is cited by numerous scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies, a group that seeks broadly to consider human-animal relations and the cultural construction of terms such as "human", "animal" and so on. Collectively they took Berger's question to mean that scholars are surrounded by animals but often do not actually see them, and that there are good theoretical and ethical reasons to study animals in the humanities. The chapter was later reproduced in a Penguin Great Ideas selection of essays of the same name.
Berger's most recent novel, From A to X, was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize; Berger and Salman Rushdie were the only former winners to be nominated in that year. Bento's Sketchbook (2011), has been described as "a characteristically sui generis work, combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman and philosopher Baruch Spinoza with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches". His latest book is Cataract (2012), subtitled "Some notes after having a cataract removed."
