Up until about two months ago, it seemed that 65-year-old British composer Gavin Bryars had practically done it all. From co-founding the deliberately ragtag Portsmouth Sinfonia to creating the found-sound wonder of “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” Bryars “ who’s been called everything from neoclassic to post-minimalist to avant-ambient ” has had an enviable career. He’s been idolized by Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Aphex Twin, and nearly everyone in between. After ten major works in 2006, Bryars remains as prolific as ever, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
What brings Bryars to my attention now is a new realization of perhaps his best-known piece: “The Sinking of the Titanic.” The original piece, which Bryars wrote in 1969, was inspired by the story of the doomed ocean liner’s chamber group, which mythically played on until the very last possible moment. The semi-indeterminate piece weaves lines of the heart-wrenching Episcopalian hymn “Autumn” underneath veils of echoes, bells and other ethereal sounds. Often filed under the ambient header, it is important to remember that this piece was created before “ambient” was even regarded as a genre, making it avant-garde in the truest sense of the phrase.
As a relatively new fan of Bryars’, I was instantly struck by the new realization of “Titanic.” The new recording mixes the sonic ash of pioneering turntablist Philip Jeck with the masterful orchestration of the Alter Ego ensemble. Fittingly recorded three years ago in the sinking city of Venice, this version is even more horrifyingly beautiful than the original. In an act of brilliant prescience, Bryars anticipated the advances in electronic music and provided room for future elaboration on the piece, which is what allows Jeck’s and Alter Ego’s contributions to flourish so convincingly. These new textures reaffirm the original’s conceptual genius, and Bryars’ main obsession has never been so clear: modern technology’s failure to trump nature strikes more deeply than ever before.
This concept is certainly enough on its own, but pitting it against Bryars’ disarmingly simple thoughts on technology yield even more interesting results. “I enjoy the net,” the composer said in an interview with Culture Kiosque. “My eldest daughter plays around all the time with the net . . .you can use it as a serious research tool in visual arts, historical things, museum catalogs, or for e-mail as a mode of communication. You can download sounds. I use it all the time now. I have a colleague who met his wife on the Internet and has now acquired a family. They had been talking for months. When they finally met it wasn’t like a blind date where you don’t know what to say. He is also a composer and he has created works by downloading digital resources from the net to synthesize pieces and sounds.”
To be fair, this interview was conducted in 1996, but even still, such understated reverence for technology is positively crushing when you hear the electronic prowess of Bryars’ work. This is surely due to the composer’s focus on fluid classical aesthetics in experimental music (he has cited Schoenberg’s “Verklarte Nacht” as an example of his favorite experimental tonalism), but owes much to a rare and often overlooked understanding about the harmony between synthesis and natural sound.
To try to better comprehend exactly how Bryars could timelessly blend the two, I looked no further than the composer’s latest press release. Looking backward to another pioneer of sound, Bryars found his inspiration for the new realization in the Italian inventor, Guglielmo Marconi.
“Towards the end of his life, Marconi became convinced that sounds once generated never die, they simply become fainter and fainter until we can no longer perceive them,” Bryars explained. “Marconi’s hope was to develop sufficiently sensitive equipment, extraordinarily powerful and selective filters I suppose, to pick and hear these past, faint sounds. Ultimately, he hoped to be able to hear Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Curiously enough, one of the rescue ships, the Birma, received radio signals, apparently originating from the Titanic, 1 hour and 28 minutes after the ship had finally gone beneath the waves.”
In this scenario, there is literally no end to a sound. Even in the loftiest terms, this legitimizes the latest version of “Titanic” as not just valid, but perhaps, by virtue of its endurance, more resonant than ever.
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