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Marvellous AphorismsRoss Parfitt reflects on private messages in the early work of Gavin Bryars |
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| “First it was like Harpo Marx”; “The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls”; “’The Sybil with raving mouth utters solemn unadorned unlovely words’”. These phrases and titles are found in Bryars’ pieces from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. More abstract than the types of comments found in pieces by most other composers, these phrases, which are “for the eyes of the performer only”, are not necessarily evocative of anything, and where they are it is hard to tell their relevance to the rest of the piece. Something about them keeps these phrases tethered to the score and the performer cannot help but return to them, but these private elements embody the piece with something to which the audience has no access. The audience’s perception of the character of the piece is therefore totally different to the performer’s. Seth Josel, Ulrich Krieger and Anton Lukoszevieze’s performance
of five of Bryars’ pieces from this period, at this year’s
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, was a welcome re-exploration
of hidden systems within them. 'The Squirrel and the Ricketty-Racketty
Bridge’ appears to be a simple exercise in experimental extended
guitar technique, but beneath the external beauty of this piece
are some extremely daunting and complex performance instructions.
These uber-practical explanations at the beginning of the score
eventually give way to the notation which, almost to contradict
the just-about-graspable logic of the previous section, is heavily
interspersed with extracts from jazz critical writing: some bizarre
metaphor and descriptions of musicians; others poetic and resonant
phrases. How the performers handle these latter hidden elements,
which are not otherwise mentioned in the score, is entirely up to
them. One can imagine them concentrating on one or another fragment
for the duration of the piece, perhaps reading one whilst playing
an adjacent section, or trying to ignore them altogether. ‘Marvellous Aphorisms Are Scattered Richly Throughout These Pages’ contains further examples of similar phrases: “A bottomless mine of useless information” and the basis of the title, “I saw it like a prince among poets, constantly seeking out marvellous aphorisms”. The simultaneous performance of this piece alongside ‘Private Music’ in Huddersfield dealt with a more explicit side of hidden music. The audience was a fly on the wall as Krieger listened to his walkman just loud enough for us to catch fragments of music, occasionally humming along and tapping his foot, at one point making a phone call of which only his side of the intriguing conversation was audible. At all times during his performance the sound sources were clear but the content was hidden, whilst the reverse was true for his seedy-looking friend who leaned against a pillar making sounds from deep within his trenchcoat – the sounds were clear but the source hidden. The Harpo Marx comment near the beginning comes from ‘Marvellous Aphorisms’ and sums up the serious and ridiculous nature of the performance. The ‘bottomless mine of useless information’ describes the long coat of ‘Private Music’, its deep pockets filled with hidden sound objects. But what should we make of the comment about the prince among poets? More of this later. Bryars suggested that the interest in these early pieces did not lie in the “literary, political, social, [or] situational, and hence tangential”, but in the “logical and hence necessary”. These pieces do not revolve around a simple insider’s joke or the experience of performer/audience division. These pieces are interesting, Bryars suggests, largely because of the practical challenge involved. Working in fine-art departments when he wrote these pieces, Bryars needed material that didn’t require musical skill to perform but would appeal to people with creative and practical skills. As John Cage ‘invented’ the prepared piano to overcome the problem of a tiny orchestra-pit, Bryars’ private imperatives challenged his students to equal invention. ‘Made in Hong Kong’, for example, is a piece in which sound-producing toys are improvised with and, whilst musically and technically challenging in itself, the most impressive aspect is obtaining the toys. Toys can only be used if they have been obtained in a specific way which, one imagines, must involve extremely amusing/ difficult conversations with the child-owners. This is the genius of the piece, setting conditions on the performer who must treat the toys responsibility so they can be returned to the children intact (or else face the consequences). It is difficult to decide whether the Huddersfield performers should have provided documentary evidence of this process or, as they did, kept it private. This idea of a hidden practical challenge peaks in the most beautiful of Bryars’ early pieces, ‘Far Away and Dimly Pealing’. It requires that a sound be produced one mile away from the performer yet audible to them, without being made by anybody else or by using explosives. Whilst planning how this challenge might be realised is itself fascinating, the beauty of the piece is in the subtle, poetic clues of the title and the last line of the score. The last line reveals that Bryars’ only attempt at its performance failed dramatically and it manages to give away only the sparsest details of what he did. By framing this solid, barely surmountable problem within such ambiguous lines he sums up the sweetness of the situation the performer is in and makes this situation part of the music itself. In this light, the seemingly bizarre opposition of the practical and poetic in Bryars’ instructions forces the performer to reach beyond what is required to solve the practical challenge, and to make music. Inconsistencies and contradictions bring about great art. Without such oppositions what gets produced is no different to the kitsch ‘art’ that is found in any office reception, hotel foyer, or fast-food restaurant. At a time when minimialist-styled artworkalikes are bought en masse across the counter it is ridiculous that there is a real suspicion of artists for fear of being duped by them. But this seems to be the case and Bryars’ early pieces take on a further relevance in this context. “I saw it like a prince among poets, constantly seeking out marvellous aphorisms” – a call to the genuinely poetic hidden within the practical. |
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