Gavin Bryars: The Church Closest to the Sea; Eight Irish Madrigals

Epilogue from Wonderlawn

Eight Irish Madrigals

The Church Closest to the Sea

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Susan Hamilton

Nicholas Mulroy

Gav IN Bryar S

1 Epilogue from Wonderlawn (1994) [7:49]

Eight Irish Madrigals (2004)*

2 He asks his heart to raise itself up to God

3 He wishes he might die and follow Laura

4 He considers that he should set little store on earthly beauty

5 He finds comfort and rest in his sorrows

6 He is jealous of the Heavens and the Earth

7 He understands the great cruelty of Death

8 Petrarch is unable to contain his grief

9 Laura waits for him in Heaven

10 The Church Closest to the Sea (2007)*

dedicated to Mr McFall’s Chamber Total playing time

Gavin Bryars’ music is published by Schott Music Ltd

Gav IN

(b. 1943)

BryarS

Susan Hamilton soprano

Nicholas Mulroy tenor

rick Standley double bass

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Recorded on 12 & 13

January 2009 in St Mary’s Parish Church, Haddington

Producer: Paul Baxter

Engineer: Ben Seal

24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

The Soviets airbrushed ideological enemies out of the photographic record. We are more inclined to leave them in, along with the forgotten friends, passers-by, and humble footsoldiers who find themselves in front of the camera at a particular moment but are fated to remain unknown among the captioned names. The crime writer John Harvey – also a fine poet and jazz lover – has a short story about such a photograph. The protagonist is the ‘unknown’ figure in the middle of the image, the one who has fallen out of the official record of events but who has become the keeper of stories.

The bass hasn’t been airbrushed out of musical history, but its role is often blurry and uncaptioned. Part of the explanation is technical – Chubby Jackson may have pioneered amplification of the bass, but few recording engineers knew what to do with the instrument – and part of it a symptom of the resentful suspicion that the double bass is the reason why jazz ceased to be a marching and dancing music and became a listening music. Actually, it’s the other way round. The string bass only replaced the more portable tuba or E  when the music came indoors, but in the process a remote resentment – as well as a score of bass solo jokes – was born.

Cover image: Chris Humphreys Photography

www.chrishumphreys.net

Design: John Christ

www.johnchristdesign.com

Booklet editor: John Fallas

Delphian Records Ltd

Edinburgh – UK

www.delphianrecords.co.uk

Something similar happened in real life to Gavin Bryars. In a published discography of saxophonist Lee Konitz, there is an entry for several north of England appearances in the early ’60s, giving location, dates and full personnel, except for one instrument: ‘(b) unknown’. Such references are far from uncommon. Anyone who collects bootleg records or obscure live recordings by American musicians going single round Europe will encounter these lacunae often. Usually, it’s because a little-known local musician stood in. Often, too often, it’s because the bass is so badly recorded not even the musician himself would recognise the technique or playing style.

How differently might we hear the emergence of bebop if Tommy Potter, say, or Curley Russell were actually audible? Few doubt that the bass has exerted a significant influence in the stylistic evolution of jazz. Duke Ellington’s most creative line-up is known as the ‘Webster-Blanton band’, with a bass player given equal standing alongside the saxophone’s most gracious exponent. Similarly, much later, with the Bill Evans trio, in which the tragically short-lived Scott LaFaro shone bright; the bass there is an integral part of the music’s harmonic movement. If drum solos are traditionally showy, even histrionic, bass solos are instinctively caricatured as introspective, ruminatory, dully self-obsessed, even when they are no such things. In the

history of jazz, some of the most turbulently creative personalities have been bass players: Wilbur Ware, Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus, and in free music, Peter Kowald. The advent of CD revealed that there really was a fourth man in the John Coltrane Quartet and that Jimmy Garrison was playing some of the most interesting music. Ornette Coleman’s earlier experiments remained insecurely understood for a couple of decades because recording practice of the time subordinated Don Cherry’s trumpet to the leader’s saxophone, and, more relevant to the present context, buried Charlie Haden’s bass somewhere in the aural backlot.

Jazz forms an important part of Gavin Bryars’ history and hinterland. In addition to those uncredited appearances with Konitz, he played with the improvising trio Joseph Holbrooke, briefly revived before guitarist Derek Bailey’s death in 2005, and has on occasion incorporated material drawn from modern jazz, notably by LaFaro but also by guitarist Bill Frisell, in his composition. Composers seldom attempt full-scale concertante writing for the double bass – Einojuhani Rautavaara, Robin Holloway and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies are the most obvious exceptions – but only perhaps because of a lack of confident exponents. This may be a cultural thing, an Anglo-Saxon attitude. The clarinettist Jack Brymer says in his memoir From Where I Sit that while

German bassists are academic and precise, the Americans play like a row of line-backers, and the British cheerfully concede themselves to the doghouse and indulge no airs whatsoever.

Bryars has done much to redress that, placing his own instrument at the heart of much of his writing, and providing it with a strong dramatic and lyrical role. But he has also retained much of the improvisatory edge of his earlier music. In By the Vaar he wrote a bass concerto for Charlie Haden, a player who does not read music, and elsewhere he has included improvising bass parts in otherwise formalised scores. A second double bass concerto, Farewell to St Petersburg, was dedicated to Duncan McTier and premiered in Glasgow in 2002. A version of Epilogue from Wonderlawn was one of two works for bass ensemble performed in Canada in 2007 under the auspices of bass guru Gary Karr. There is a solo bass part in The Church Closest to the Sea, written for Mr McFall’s Chamber and performed near the sea in Crail, in the Kingdom of Fife. The Irish madrigals were written at the same time, and while their proximity does not necessarily reflect any specific cross-over in language, it does highlight important aspects of Bryars’ vocal writing as well.

even dominant importance in recent years and has drawn on a remarkable, polyglot range of sources, though perhaps with an emphasis on Celtic, Nordic and Baltic languages. The discovery of profound bass voices in Estonian choirs and the rich tones of Rœni Brattaberg and other low-toned singers has exerted a strong pull on Bryars’ writing; he included bass voices divisi in Farewell to St Petersburg. The lower frequencies resonate deepest in the imagination and they complete a certain expressive logic in Bryars’ work.

Such is his imagination – ’pataphysical or not – that not only does factual research represent a significant background, as in his ongoing engagement with the Titanic sinking and its strange, shifting signifiers, but so too does a complex synergy of aesthetic forms. Recent years have seen Bryars very much concerned with text, and text drawn from a striking range of sources, but also with the art of photography, the whole seemingly wrapped inside an ongoing engagement with the idea and practice of improvisation. How do, or how might, these different parameters engage?

words, and other devices to create a body of song that has both incredible solidity of purpose and presence but also a kind of improvisatory looseness and elasticity –precisely the qualities that Bryars’ recent vocal writing has shared. The imagery and metaphor of photography is relevant here, because the photograph is the perfect signifier of temporality asserted and denied. The image is fixed, but it catches something in motion.

He came to word-setting relatively late in his career, but it has assumed a major, perhaps

It seems clear that in his vocal writing, Bryars is very much in the line of Thomas Campion, the brilliant 17th-century poet and composer whose work shows a striking balance of fixity and flux, utilising ideational rhyme, ultra-subtle variation of background notes against similar

In terms of emotion, the photograph retains something of the spirit of those we wish to recollect, but it also enacts our desire to suppress and forget people, faces, locations: just who is that? where was that taken? when was this? A mnemonic art often deals in forgetfulness or exclusion, and Bryars’ creative processes have often worked in the same way, though it is part of his great gift to draw attention to the unnameable face in the back row, the unexpected instrumental sound or the word that jumps out of dialect or idiolect into music context. In the age of Photoshop and the digital studio, manipulation has never been easier, but there is still a hand-printed art that insists on placing words exactly, and the right words, too – Bryars has said he is often put off setting a particular text because of a single word – marshalling the smiling or unsmiling personnel and timing the shutterclick, that most profoundly ambiguous of aesthetic acts. Just as recording changes

the nature of improvised music, so the photograph has changed how we see ourselves and our environment. It proposes new kinds of coherence and order. As was Campion’s, Bryars’ work is a shifting network of live relationships between parts and patterns. The unlikeness, even unlikeliness, of material and the contention of voices is what provides the drama, as it does in jazz. There, and in the shadows of photograph, the occluded elements provide much of the dynamism. It is in those parts of the sound-picture where the only available caption is ‘unknown’ that the most profound music occurs.

Mr McFall’s Chamber is a Scottish ensemble which has for a long time been fretting away at the conventions of genre. Founded in 1996 as a string quartet which was prepared to play for no fee in smoky (yes, they were in those days!) clubs, it soon recruited a bass player and pianist and started to work with singers, drummers, pipers, percussionists, artists, video jockeys, jazz musicians and dancers.

Brian Morton is a writer and broadcaster with a particular interest in contemporary music and in jazz. His publications include The Blackwell Guide to Recorded Contemporary Music (1996) and, as co-author (with Richard Cook), The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings (9th (revised) edition, 2008).

A chance encounter between the group’s double bassist, Rick Standley, and Gavin Bryars, himself a bass player, sparked the idea of a commission which would feature jazz bass. The use of tam-tam and bass drum adds a further layer of low sonority which at times hangs in the air like the sea mist, or haar, so typical of the Scottish east coast. In the middle section of the piece vibraphone and piano are used to set up bell-like repeating figures, while the final passage uses bowed vibraphone, violin harmonics and sustained very quiet trills to create a translucent effect. The piece begins and ends with a slow wavelike rising and falling figure in the violins.

The Church Closest to the Sea was commissioned with funding from the Scottish Arts Council, the Esmée Fairbairn Trust and the PRS Foundation. The first performances were hosted by the East Neuk Festival (June 2007) and the Aldeburgh Proms (August 2007). Meurig Bowen (who was then working

at Aldeburgh), Sven Brown (of the East Neuk Festival) and Ben Lane (who was at the PRS Foundation at that time) were all instrumental in putting forward the idea of our commissioning The Church and bringing the project to fruition. Numerous others, of course, helped in various ways. I would also like to thank Gavin Bryars himself for generously allowing us to record and release this CD in advance of his own recording of some of the same material.

— RMcF

electric bass – an instrument which he plays beautifully, but which I loathe.

The ‘church closest to the sea’ is the very lovely 750-year-old St Monan’s Church, built on the rocks by the Firth of Forth, on the east coast of Scotland. Many years ago I attended a friend’s wedding there, conducted in English and Scots, and I remembered this when thinking of the ensemble’s Scottish origins, and of the location of the work’s premiere in the East Neuk.

— GB

The Church Closest to the Sea (2007) dedicated to Mr McFall’s Chamber

Although ostensibly for a quite conventional instrumentation, the piece reflects something of the unusual character of the ensemble that commissioned it – Mr McFall’s Chamber – and its eclectic approach to repertoire. It features the solo pizzicato double bass, employing the subtly free rhythmic approach of the jazz ballad, with cameo solo parts for the other string instruments. The impetus to write the piece came from a chance meeting with bassist Rick Standley on a flight from Valencia in 2002, which alerted me to the group’s ethos. As bassists we found that we had a great deal in common, although we have diametrically opposed views on the

© 2009 Brian Morton

Epilogue from Wonderlawn (1994)

Eight Irish Madrigals (2004)

He asks his heart to raise itself up to God

be my first day with herself in Paradise?

In May 1994 I worked with the choreographer Laurie Booth on a full evening piece called Wonderlawn, for which I employed a small string group (drawn from my own ensemble) consisting of viola, cello, double bass and electric guitar. In the original dance the final section was accompanied by a version of this Epilogue. I have subsequently modified the instrumentation and made a few other changes to the piece. For live performance I usually add a part for a second viola, as well as a bass clarinet to reinforce the double bass part. In the published score as well as for the recorded version I include two additional cellos, and specify piano as an alternative to the guitar. The piece begins with a simple series of harmonies played as guitar – or piano – arpeggios, sustained by the bowed strings. It then evolves into an extended melody, a kind of song-withoutwords, for the solo viola supported by occasional duet material for the cello.

The piece is dedicated to my daughters Ziella and Orlanda, both of whom are cellists and both of whom have played this piece with me on many occasions.

The text of this work is a prose translation by the Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909) of sonnets from Petrarch’s collection ‘in morte di Madonna Laura’. Synge was one of the most important writers of the Irish literary revival in the early twentieth century. His wonderful ear for colloquial Irish English, which is one of the joys of his plays, is also in evidence here. Synge worked on these translations in the final years of his life and left them unfinished. Some of them were published posthumously; some were subsequently completed and edited by the Canadian poet Robin Skelton, to whose memory Bryars’ settings are dedicated.

In choosing to set Petrarch, Bryars is placing himself close to the world of the late 16th-century Italian madrigal. Bryars has cited Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613) as a composer in whom he has a particular interest, and Gesualdo’s chromatic word-painting and shifts of harmony are obviously one, at least, of Bryars’ starting points in developing the very personal and expressive musical language which characterises these settings.

— RMcF

What is it you’re thinking, lonesome heart? For what is it you’re turning back ever and always to times that are gone away from you? For what is it you’re throwing sticks on the fire where it is your own self that is burning?

The little looks and sweet words you’ve taken one by one and written down among your songs, are gone up into the Heavens, and it’s late, you know well, to go seeking them on the face of the earth.

Let you not be giving new life every day to your own destruction, and following a fool’s thoughts for ever. Let you seek Heaven when there is nothing left pleasing on the earth, and it a poor thing if a great beauty, the like of her, would be destroying your peace and she living or dead.

He wishes he might die and follow Laura

In the years of her age the most beautiful and the most flowery – the time Love has his mastery – Laura, who was my life, has gone away leaving the earth stripped and desolate. She has gone up into the Heavens, living and beautiful and naked, and from that place she is keeping her lordship and her reign upon me, and I crying out: Ohone, when will I see that day breaking that will

My thoughts are going after her, and it is that way my soul would follow her, lightly, and airily, and happily, and I would be rid of all my great troubles. But what is delaying me is the proper thing to lose me utterly, to make me a greater weight on my own self.

Oh, what a sweet death I might have died this day three years today!

He considers that he should set little store on earthly beauty

I was never any place where I saw so clearly one I do be wishing to see when I do not see, never in a place where I had the like of this freedom in myself, and where the light of love making was strong in the sky. I never saw any valley with so many spots in it where a man is quiet and peaceful, and I wouldn’t think that Love himself in Cyprus had a nest so nice and curious. The waters are holding their discourse on love, and the wind with them and the branches, and fish, and the flowers and the grass, the lot of them are giving hints to me that I should love forever.

But yourself are calling to me out of Heaven to pray me by the memory of the bitter death that took you from me that I should put small store on the world or the tricks that are in it.

He finds comfort and rest in his sorrows

Sweet spirit you do be coming down so often to put a sweetness on my sad night-time with a look from those eyes death has not quenched, but made more deep and beautiful.

How much it is a joy to me that you throw a light on my dark days, so that I am beginning to find your beauty in the places where I did see you often.

Where I did go long years, and I singing of yourself, I go now, making lamentations for my own sharp sorrows.

It is when I have great sorrow only that I find rest, for it is then when I turn round I see and know you, by your walk and your voice, and your face, and the cloak around you.

He is jealous of the Heavens and the Earth

What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms about her, and is holding that face away from me, where I was finding peace from great sadness. What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are after taking her, and shutting her in with greediness, the Heavens that do push their bolt against so many. What a grudge

I am bearing the blessed saints that have got her sweet company, that I am always seeking; and what a grudge I am bearing against Death,

that is standing in her two eyes and will not call me with a word.

He understands the great cruelty of Death

My flowery and green age was passing away, and I feeling a chill in the fires had been wasting my heart, for I was drawing near the hillside that is above the grave. Then my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp sorrow. The time was coming when Love and Decency can keep company, and lovers may sit together and say out all things are in their hearts. But Death had his grudge against me, and he got up in the way, like an armed robber, with a pike in his hand.

Petrarch is unable to contain his grief

There was one time maybe when it was a sweet thing to love – though I would be hard set to say when it was – but now it is a bitter thing and there is nothing bitterer. The man who is teaching a truth should know it better than any other, and that is the way I am with my great sorrow.

Cruel Death has taken every good thing from me, and from this out no good luck could make up for the loss of that beautiful spirit that is set free.

I used to be weeping and making songs, and I don’t know at this day what way I’d turn a verse, but day and night the sorrow that is banked up in my heart, breaks out on my tongue and through my eyes.

Laura waits for him in Heaven

The first day she passed up and down through the Heavens, gentle and simple were left standing, and they in great wonder, saying one to another: ‘What new light is that? What new beauty at all? The like of herself hasn’t risen up these long years from the common world.’

And herself, well pleased with the Heavens, was going forward, matching herself with the most perfect that were before her, yet one time, and another, waiting a little, and turning her head back to see if myself was coming after her.

Epilogue from Wonderlawn

viola Brian Schiele

cellos Su-a Lee

David Watkin

Donald Gillan

double bass Rick Standley

piano John Cameron

Eight Irish Madrigals

soprano Susan Hamilton

tenor Nicholas Mulroy

viola 1 Brian Schiele

viola 2 Robert McFall

cello Su-a Lee

double bass Rick Standley

The Church Closest to the Sea

violin 1 Claire Sterling

violin 2 Robert McFall

viola Brian Schiele

cello Su-a Lee

double bass Rick Standley

piano John Cameron

percussion Iain Sandilands

Herself that was the honour of our age, and now is in the heavens where all cherish her, made my times of ease in her days short and rare, and now she has taken all rest from me.

It’s for that I’m lifting up all my thoughts and will into the Heavens, because I do hear her praying that I should be making haste for ever.

— Petrarch, trans. J.M. Synge

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Susan Hamilton was born in Edinburgh and began her musical career as a chorister at St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and a pupil at St Mary’s Music School. She specialises in Baroque and contemporary music and is in demand as a soloist working with many conductors including Philippe Herreweghe, John Butt, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Raphael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jos van Immerseel, Robert King, Paul McCreesh, Masaaki Suzuki and Ton Koopman, and composers having included Harvey Brough, Pascal Dusapin, Gabriel Jackson, Witold Lutoslawski, James MacMillan, Peter Nelson, Ronald Stevenson, Bill Sweeney and Errollyn Wallen. She has sung with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, A Sei Voci, Collegium Vocale Ghent, Florilegium, Gabrieli Consort, The New London Consort and Cantus Cölln. She also performs regularly with Il Gardellino, Plus Ultra, Mr McFall’s Chamber, the Ricercar Consort and the Dunedin Consort, which she co-founded and of which she is an artistic director. She has appeared at major international festivals in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA including the Edinburgh International Festival, Boston Early Music Festival, Les Folles Journées in Nantes and Lisbon, Melbourne, St Magnus, Salzburg and Utrecht. Recent work has included a US tour with the

Flanders Recorder Quartet, Bach cantatas in Belgium and France with Il Gardellino, Ronald Stevenson’s Nine Haiku with the pianist John Cameron, Schoenberg’s Herzgewächse in Glasgow and a performance of Bach’s cantata Jauchzet Gott in Wells Cathedral directed by Matthew Owens.

Susan broadcasts regularly on both television and radio and has recorded for Astrée-Auvidis, Delphian, Flora, Harmonia Mundi, Hyperion, Linn, Ricercar and Virgin Classics. Her solo recordings include Haydn’s Scots songs on the Flora label, consort songs by Alfonso Ferrabosco with the Ricercar Consort, Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia’s Day with Philippe Herreweghe, Handel’s Messiah with the Dunedin Consort directed by John Butt for Linn Records (winner of a Classic FM Gramophone Award in 2007), and for Delphian Records, A’e Gowden Lyric (DCD34006, a recital of songs by Ronald Stevenson) and Dallapiccola’s Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado with David Wilde (DCD34020).

Zacharias, with the Staatskapelle Dresden (Haydn, Harmoniemesse), and in London with Sir Colin Davis, singing Le Récitant in Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ. He has great affinity with the Baroque repertoire, in which recent highlights include Septimius in Handel’s Theodora with Trevor Pinnock in Halle, Evangelist in Bach’s Weihnachts-Oratorium with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Premiere Parque in Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie at the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse with Emmanuelle Haïm and Bach’s Matthäus-Passion at the London Handel Festival with Laurence Cummings.

A committed recitalist, he has sung Janáˇcek’s Diary of One who Vanished with the Prince Consort in the Oxford Lieder Festival, Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge in Edinburgh and with the Badke Quartet, and, with regular collaborator John Reid, Die Schöne Müllerin, Schumann’s Op 24 and Op 39, Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance, and a recital at the Lichfield Festival comprising Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo and Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson.

Fagiolini, and a critically acclaimed Evangelist in the St Matthew Passion, also with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort.

Rick Standley is one of Scotland’s most versatile bass players. He has been principal double bass with the orchestra of Scottish Ballet since 1989, and at the same time has performed with big bands (Syd Lawrence, Ray McVay), folk performers (Dougie MacLean, Ross Ainsley), singers (Frankie Vaughan, Campbell Considine), in jazz and blues groups (D S Murray Quartet, Rev Doc and the Congregation, Bag O’ Cats) and in numerous sessions, many of which have required him to play his first instrument, bass guitar. He has a special connection with musical theatre and has participated in national tours of West Side Story, Miss Saigon, Guys and Dolls, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Barnum. He has played with all of Scotland’s orchestras, and in many festivals – notably Orkney (seven times) and Loch Shiel (four times). In November 2008 Mr McFall’s Chamber premiered his composition Cycles and Freewheels

Born in Liverpool, Nicholas Mulroy studied at Cambridge University and the Royal Academy of Music. Now in demand for a wide variety of engagements, he has appeared at Glyndebourne (Prokofiev, Betrothal in a Monaster y ) under Vladimir Jurowski, at the Cuenca Easter Festival (Schubert, Mass in A flat) with Christian

Recordings include a Gramophone Awardwinning Messiah with John Butt and the Dunedin Consort, Monteverdi Vespers 1610 with the King’s Consort and also with the Choir of New College, Oxford and Edward Higginbottom, Michael Finnissy choral works with EXAUDI, a Monteverdi series with I

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Gavin Bryars photo © Gautier Deblonde