Early Works of Gavin Bryars/Maria de Alvear's "Asking", at Roulette

The third of four concerts in this season’s Interpretations series took place at Roulette on November 8th and featured the music of Maria de Alvear and Gavin Bryars, presenting material from recently issued CDs on Mode Records.

This was my first exposure to the music of de Alvear. Before the performance, the composer gave a brief talk about the work, titled “Asking”, a 50-minute piece for solo piano played by Eve Egoyan. That the work involved the various uncomfortable and awkward psychologies around the act of asking turned out to be less interesting than her described compositional method. De Alvear apparently roughs out the general structure of the piece then proceeds to compose in “stream of consciousness” fashion, notation tumbling out of her, and a given composition can be completed by the end of the day. Without begrudging the possible effectiveness of this attack, I have to say that in this case, it sounded exactly like that.

“Asking” had a very improvisational feel which might have been a good thing except that here, words like “meandering”, “rambling” and “melodramatic” kept coming into my head. It began with slow, falling patterns of single notes, generally of a tonal nature with only occasional forays into mild dissonance. There was something of a noodling aspect which, given the description of her procedure, made some sense and could easily be accepted as a process element as long as it either led to something or acquired a mysterious and unexpected life of its own. However, it occupied pretty much the same territory from start to finish. Vaguely melancholy passages would lead to a loud, dramatic chord that would signal a slight turn in direction, though a few minutes later you’d be back at the same juncture, leading to another heavy chord, more discursive rambling, etc. Later in the piece, the chords had their own portion, ringing out disconsolately, reminding me of similar motifs in Satie’s Rosicrucian period, though with less starry-eyed intensity. While there was little if anything that referred directly to jazz, I began to hear a touch of kinship with Jarrett’s solo marathons, though without the faintest trace of gospel of rhythmic intrigue. Some funereal thematic material was introduced in the work’s second half, a couple of very attractive, somber passages that would have been welcome to have extended their stay. There was also, late in the piece, a section of intense pounding chords that recalled Cecil Taylor a bit but more so, and oddly, the Ron Geesin of “Patruns”, but sans his melodic invention and insane complexity. This led to some fine, roiling playing, easily the most exciting point in “Asking” and led toward a gradually diminution of soft, long notes that effectively and subtly closed out the work. Overall, however, it was a something of an aimless amble, never for this listener achieving the kind of rapturous dreaminess as heard in, say, Robert Ashley.

I had high hopes for the early Bryars compositions. Though I have a distant memory of having heard “The Squirrel and the Ricketty Racketty Bridge”, I never owned the recording and only knew “1, 2, 1-2-3-4” very well, it having been a favorite of mine since first encountering it on the old Obscure LP. As all four works arose from the period 1970-71, I was looking forward to more at the same level of inventiveness. However, while I’m tempted to ascribe a good portion of the blame for what followed to the ensemble on this particular night, I also find it somewhat difficult to imagine, with the exception of the abovementioned piece, that very much more could have been achieved.

First up was “Pre-Mediaeval Metrics” (1970) with Seth Josel and Eli Friedmann on electric guitars and Ulrich Krieger on tenor saxophone. A kind of one-note minimalist samba, the players iterate that note in unison throughout, in steady patterns of two, three or four beats with a couple of attacks (the notes held normally or clipped off, accented differently). Interspersed among these brief phrases are rests of the same varying number of beats though their variation followed no pattern I could discern. You’re left with a Swiss cheese minimalism, as though a basic fabric of single notes (though differing slightly in enunciation) had had exactly measured holes torn into it. A mildly interesting conceit, played with a clarity and cleanliness that seemed appropriate at the time, perhaps going on a tad too long, its point having been achieved after five or so minutes.

“The Squirrel and the Ricketty Racketty Bridge” (1971) was written for Derek Bailey and originally recorded by the late guitarist on his “Solo Guitar Volume One” (Incus). Though intended for an individual guitarist playing, via finger taps, two guitars lying flat, here Josel (on the two guitars) was accompanied by Friedmann and Robert Poss (electric bass) who seemed only to add adornment to the main body of the piece. As mentioned above, I can’t quite recall the sound of the original but I’d bet decent money it was much less clean and orderly than this performance. The score seems to indicate a series of ten 2-note figures for the left hand that wander up and down scales on the open fret board, while the right hand remains more free—soloing, as it were. The sound of the Josel’s guitar itself strongly recalled that of Fred Frith, especially the timbre of “No Birds” from his own first volume of solo work. It was quite liquid and a bit characterless. When Josel ran into some dextral trouble toward the ending, one almost wished that such “troubles” were more present throughout as the steady rhythm had long since acquired a sense of plodding. A kind of “ta-da!” ending was presumably intended to be wry but fell flat.

The blame for “Made in Hong Kong” (1970) must be placed at Bryars’ feet, I suppose, though I was imagining contexts in which it might have worked just fine. One would have been as a Scratch Orchestra “non-event”, where the dozen or so small wind-up toys might have been set in motion in some public space, the passers-by only dimly aware that an “art” performance was occurring. Another may have simply involved a performer with a more poetic understanding of choice-making, a Steve Beresford, perhaps. As it was, Ulrich Krieger sat at a table strewn with brightly colored, motorized toys, wound them up at will (apparently improvised), allowed them to scurry over the tabletop which had a good amount of resonance, blew into the toy saxophones hanging around his neck in a faint echo of Rahsaan Roland Kirk and generally amused himself for about 15 minutes. A large part of the failure had to do with the showmanship of the performance. When someone like Taku Unami sets his wandering toys skittering across a surface, they’re subsumed into the environment of the room and relate to his collaborator(s). Here, there was a bravura aspect that was somewhat off-putting on its own and combined with an insensitive disregard for sound placement and for the character of the room as a whole made for a tiresome and overlong piece of work.

I still held out that the evening’s finale, “1, 2, 1-2-3-4” (1971) could make everything worthwhile. On the original recording (which included Cornelius Cardew and Bailey), the musicians were sonically isolated by headphones which allowed them to only hear music coming from a cassette player, which music had been composed by Bryars in a given mode (e.g. jazz) and along with which they’d try to duplicate their part in the piece. The bassist would play the bass part, the drummer the drum part, etc. Some of the musicians might be fairly familiar with the score, having previously played it, some not, making their entrances wonderfully and naturally clunky. The cassette players themselves would be started roughly at the same time (though not quite exactly) and might not be entirely consistent as to tape speed, so the piece heard over the headphones would drift a bit in relation to the ones others were hearing. This combination of hesitancies and asynchronies, on the Obscure recording, resulted in a lovely, dreamy, giddily awkward piece that, especially given the nature of the source material, anticipated the sound of Angelo Badalamenti’s music 20 years hence. It also might be said to be a partial and inadvertent antecedent to Rowe/MIMEO’s “sight”.

This night’s ensemble, the above named musicians augmented by pianist Ron Spitzer and drummer Mark Brotter, opted to go with a mélange of Beatles songs as their basis, automatically imparting a very different character to the music. They also, I’m sure, sourced from digital media (might they have programmed in asynchrony?) and, crowded together on stage, could presumably hear each other without problem despite the headphones or earplugs. There are pluses and minuses to these decisions. The audience will, one guesses, be pretty familiar with many of the melodies and rhythms that surface making for a fun identification game, Friedmann’s guitar providing the solidest clues, hammering out themes from “Helter-Skelter”, “Glass Onion”, “I Want You” and so on. Also, obviously, the overall tone was pop-rock, not smoky jazz. For the first ten or so minutes, this worked rather brilliantly, producing a surreal, off-kilter stew of fractured melodies, isolated rhythm guitar and bass lines and delightfully out of place drumming. Unfortunately, they went on for about a half hour. The original ran about 14 minutes and was just about perfectly timed. I had the disquieting notion here that the increased lengths of this and the other works had more to do with filling a CD’s capacity than any inherent musical judgment. Aside from a progression through the recorded material, converging on “Good Night”, little was accomplished by this extension, nothing new revealed aesthetically, no transcendence via repetition achieved. The welter of sound that had been initially bracing dulled to a matte sheen of insensate clatter as audience members began to discreetly file out.

In sum, a disappointing event. Aside from “1, 2, 1-2-3-4”, I’m uncertain if differently conceived performances could have invigorated the music or whether the ideas in the scores have simply palled over the intervening years; only additional renditions could determine that. But I do get the sense that the material would tend to suffer in contemporary interpretations simply because the zeitgeist that existed in England 35-40 years ago, as epitomized by the Scratch Orchestra, is impossible to recapture and is an utterly essential element of the music.