Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.
Born in Goole, in East Yorkshire, England, Bryars studied philosophy at Sheffield University but became a jazz bassist during his three years as a philosophy student.
The first musical work for which he is remembered was his role as bassist in the trio Joseph Holbrooke, alongside guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley. The trio began by playing relatively traditional jazz before moving into free improvisation. However, Bryars became dissatisfied with this when he saw a young bassist (later revealed to be Johnny Dyani) play in a manner which seemed to him to be artificial, and he became interested in composition instead.
Bryars's first works as a composer owe much to the New York School of John Cage (with whom he briefly studied), Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and minimalism. One of his earliest pieces, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), is an indeterminist work which allows the performers to take a number of sound sources related to the sinking of the RMS Titanic and make them into a piece of music.
Bryars's later works have included A Man In A Room, Gambling (1992), which was written on commission from BBC Radio 3 and Artangel. Bryars's music is heard beneath monologues spoken by the Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, who talks about methods of cheating at card games. The ten short works were played on Radio 3 without any introductory announcements, and Bryars is quoted as saying that he hoped they would appear to the listener in a similar way to the shipping forecast, both mysterious and accepted without question.
Bryars has written a large number of other works, including four operas, and a number of instrumental pieces, among them three string quartets and several concertos. He has written several pieces for choreographers, including Biped (1999) for Merce Cunningham. Between 1981–1984 he participated in the CIVIL warS, a vast, never-completed multimedia project by Robert Wilson, who also directed his first opera "Medea". He has also written a large body of vocal and choral music for groups such as the Hilliard Ensemble, the Latvian Radio Choir, the Estonian National Men's Choir, Red Byrd, Trio Mediaeval and has written a great deal for early music performers including 5 books of madrigals and a collection of over 40 "laude".
Bryars When Harry Met Addie (a tribute to jazz singer Adelaide Hall and saxophonist Harry Carney) was premiered at the Duke Ellington Memorial Concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London on 1 May 1999. The piece was performed by the London Sinfonietta Big Band and was commissioned by the baritone saxophonist/bass clarinettist John Surman. Cristina Zavalloni sang the soprano and the London Sinfonietta Big Band was conducted by Diego Masson·
Bryars founded the music department at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), and taught there for a number of years, but left in 1994 to concentrate on composition and performance. He lives in England, and, for part of the year, on the west coast of Canada.
