Gavin Bryars: The Fifth Century

The Crossing, PRISM Quartet

EN / DE
The music of English composer Gavin Bryars has long managed the distinction of being both “accessible and defiantly personal” (The New York Times). A deep yet unsentimental emotional resonance and a patient, contemplative view of time – whether relating to harmonic rhythm or human experience – are complementary characteristics that run through his instrumental, vocal and theatrical catalog like a red thread, the composer inspired by disparate spirits from Wagner and Satie to Cage and Silvestrov. The ECM New Series released multiple recordings of Bryars’ music in the 1980s and early ’90s, including the classic albums After the Requiem and Vita Nova. The first full ECM album from Bryars in decades is The Fifth Century, which includes the seven-part title work: a slowly evolving – yet immediately involving – setting of words by 17th-century English mystic Thomas Traherne, performed by the mixed choir of The Crossing with saxophone quartet PRISM. The album also features Two Love Songs, luminous a cappella settings of Petrarch for the women of The Crossing.
Die Musik des englischen Komponisten Gavin Bryars besticht seit langem dadurch, „zugänglich und dabei doch trotzig persönlich“ (so die New York Times) zu sein. Eine tiefe und doch unsentimentale emotionale Resonanz und ein geduldiges, kontemplatives Verständnis von ‚Zeit‘ ziehen sich als komplementäre Charakteristika durch sein Instrumental-, Vokal- und Bühnenwerk wie ein roter Faden, wobei der Komponist von unterschiedlichsten Geistern, von Wagner und Satie bis hin zu Cage und Silvestrov, inspiriert ist. ECM New Series veröffentlichte in den 1980er und frühen 1990er Jahren eine ganze Reihe von Aufnahmen mit seiner Musik, darunter die Albumklassiker After the Requiem und Vita Nova. Nach mehreren Jahrzehnten ist nun The Fifth Century das erste ECM-Album ausschließlich mit Musik von Bryars. Es enthält zunächst das siebenteilige Titelwerk – die sich langsam entwickelnde – und dabei doch sofort fesselnde – Vertonung eines Texts des Mystikers Thomas Traherne aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, hier von dem gemischten Chor The Crossing zusammen mit dem Saxophonquartett PRISM vorgetragen. Dazu noch Two Love Songs, leuchtende Petrarka-Vertonungen für die weiblichen Stimmen von The Crossing.
Featured Artists Recorded

July 2014 & June 2015

Original Release Date

18.11.2016

  • The Fifth Century
    (Gavin Bryars, Thomas Traherne)
  • 1We see the heavens with our eyes09:47
  • 2As sure as there is a space infinite05:37
  • 3Infinity of space is like a painter's table03:54
  • 4Eternity is a mysterious absence of times and ages06:42
  • 5Eternity magnifies our joys exceedingly03:17
  • 6His omnipresence is our field of joys05:50
  • 7Our bridegroom and our king being everywhere07:14
  • Two Love Songs
    (Gavin Bryars, Francesco Petrarca)
  • 8Io amai sempre03:59
  • 9Solo et pensoso03:47
Bryars’ settings are sung by the 30-voice choir The Crossing, accompanied by the Prism Saxophone Quartet, the latter’s tones used both as section prologues and threaded alongside the voices, their cycling lines serving as minimalist stitches sewing together a vocal tapestry. It’s a beautiful, meditative piece, which with its eliding vocal parts, long reed tones and mystical character, shares spiritual and musical affinities with John Tavener’s late choral works.
Andy Gill, The Independent
 
The otherworldly surface calm of the composer's setting, for chamber chorus and saxophone quartet, of texts by the 17th century English poet and theologian Thomas Traherne, belies the intense spirituality beneath. A fine premier recording brings us a glimpse of the infinite.
John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune
It’s a work that shapes itself slowly, as if it had all the time in the world – the eternity and infinity of the texts? – to move through a slow-motion universe where sounds linger and the present tends to blur before the past has faded. The musical style also blends past and present. The slightly haunted quality is reinforced by the often creamy smoothness of the saxophones, though the lines of both instruments and voices do at times stretch intro extended high ecstasy.
Michael Dervan, Irish Times
 
The Fifth Century is a setting of verses from Centuries of Meditations, a mystical work by the 17th-century English theologian Thomas Traherne. […] One of its attractions is a peculiar trick of choral writing, heard most notably in the fourth movement, ‘Eternity Is a Mysterious Absence of Time and Ages,’ in which a line, or even a single word, begins in one voice (say, the sopranos), which may sustain a single syllable over several bars while another voice, and then another, picks up the text. The result is a shimmering setting in which the text moves restlessly, and seductively, through the choral fabric. Few choral techniques are untried here: Block harmonies, solo voices moving through the texture, and subtle shifts of balance and coloration, to say nothing of the score’s wide-ranging, richly chromatic melody lines, all contribute to making this a mesmerizing score, its consistently slow tempos notwithstanding. ‘Two Love Songs’, a pair of a cappella Petrarch settings that close the disc, also unfold slowly, but the aura of eternal mystery that shrouds ‘The Fifth Century’ gives way here to clarity of line and rich emotional undercurrent, which makes these short pieces as exquisite as the settings in the larger score.
Allan Kozinn, San Francicso Classical Voice
 
Gavin Bryars has always known how to touch the mind and the heart with equal power, and he does so again on this program of new vocal music. The title composition is a setting for choir and saxophone quartet of texts by the 17th-century English mystic Thomas Traherne, and the disc is rounded out by two settings of Petrarch for the choir’s female voices. […] it is viscerally gorgeous and deeply moving. The performances are exquisite.
Rick Anderson, CD Hotlist
 
The English composer Gavin Bryars, who began his career as a pillar of free experimentalism, is now deep into a neo-Renaissance phase, writing choral music that takes its formal and expressive cues from the polyphonic masters. ‘The Fifth Century’, a rich and probing new work for chorus and saxophone quartet, draws on texts from the little-known 17th century mystic poet and theologian Thomas Traherene. […] The saxophone music, perfumed here with graceful ardor by the Prism Quartet, serves as a sort of gilt frame, creating a beautiful and slightly glittery platform and then discreetly bowing out when the vocal writing grows more intense. The cumulative effect is at once modern and antiquarian.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle
 
Bryars ist einer jener Komponisten, denen die Genregrenzen zwischen Jazz, Zeitgenössischer Musik, Minimal Music und Ambient völlig gleichgültig sind, das hat er schon mit seinem fulminanten Frühwerk ‚The Sinking Of The Titanic‘ (1975) […] bewiesen. Diesem epochalen Stück Minimalkunst folgte ein lange Reihe weiterer Schönheiten, in die sich ‚The Fifth Century‘ nahtlos einfügt. Geschrieben für gemischten Chor und Saxophonquartett, steigert sich hier ein meditatives Element zur Ekstase […] Das Stück ist dem britischen Chor The Crossing gewidmet, der hier gemeinsam mit dem PRISM Quartet in feiner Ausgewogenheit und ohne jeden Makel singt.
Karsten Zimalla, Westzeit
 
‘The Fifth Century’ is a substantial setting of texts by the 17th century English poet and theologian Thomas Traherne for saxophone quartet and choir. Commissioned by the US ensemble The Crossing for performance with PRISM, ‘The Fifth Century’ receives an eloquent performance that captures the essence of Traherne’s (and Bryars’s) intimate spirituality. […] A hugely rewarding CD that serves Bryars and his music so well.
Philip Reed, Choir & Organ
The music of English composer Gavin Bryars has long managed the distinction of being both “defiantly personal” (The New York Times) and “utterly accessible” (The Guardian). A deep yet unsentimental emotional resonance and a patient, contemplative view of time – whether relating to harmonic rhythm or human experience – are complementary characteristics that run through his instrumental, vocal and theatrical catalogue like a red thread, the composer inspired by disparate spirits from Wagner and Satie to Cage and Silvestrov. The ECM New Series released multiple recordings of Bryars’ music in the 1980s and early ’90s, including the classic albums After the Requiem and Vita Nova. The first full ECM album from Bryars in decades is The Fifth Century, which includes the seven-part title work: a slowly evolving – yet immediately involving – setting of words by 17th-century English mystic Thomas Traherne, performed by the mixed choir of The Crossing with saxophone quartet PRISM. The album also features Two Love Songs, luminous a cappella settings of Petrarch for the women of The Crossing.
 
Both Two Love Songs and The Fifth Century underscore the primacy of gradually unfurling melody in Bryars’ music, the quality that both deepens his works and makes them distinctly approachable. He learned the art of vocal music by working closely with singers, especially The Hilliard Ensemble (including for such albums as Vita Nova). “I spent a lot of time with The Hilliards, particularly John Potter,” he recalls. “Learning from them the value of detail in vocal music – intonation, vibrato, diction, breathing – was an important process. Since then, I’ve written a few hundred vocal pieces, and I'm working on my seventh and eighth books of madrigals. Still, I continue to listen closely to what performers tell me about their craft, to both address practical considerations and come up with productive challenges. It’s a joy to work with Donald Nally and The Crossing, which is one of the finest North American choirs, to my mind.”
 
The congruent mix of voices with wind instruments in The Fifth Century yields a haunting effect, human breath driving the musicality of each. About this, Bryars says: “I’ve always liked the saxophone quartet as a vehicle, and I wrote for it initially as a kind of surrogate string quartet in Alaric I or II, recorded on my ECM album After the Requiem, from 1991. And in my first opera, Medea, I replaced the oboes in the orchestra with saxophones. With my background in improvised music, I’ve always loved jazz saxophone players, from John Coltrane to Lee Konitz to Evan Parker. Percy Grainger’s transcriptions of early music for saxophones were also an inspiration – such pieces can sound beautiful on the saxophone, which is a relatively modern invention that can evoke much older sounds. With limited vibrato, a choir of saxophones and a choir of voices share a strange sort of purity, as well as that quality of human breath.”
 
As for the text of The Fifth Century, Bryars describes Traherne’s Metaphysical writings – a rediscovery of the late 20th century – as having “an intense spirituality, celebrating the glory of creation and an almost conversational relationship with his God. In many ways, Traherne’s work is astonishingly modern.” Brian Morton, author of this album’s liner notes, points out that T.S. Eliot believed that the power of the Metaphysical writers was that they experienced thought with the intensity of physical sensation, acknowledging “no gap between the sensuous and the intellectual.” That feeling – the sensuous and the intellectual synergistically in sync – comes out in the music of The Fifth Element as a kind of radiance, a warm glow. Bryars says: “My natural instinct is more toward the elegiac and melancholic, such as that Elizabethan regret in Dowland and Taverner. And a lot of religious writing can be dark, even doom-laden. But Traherne writes about ideas of time, eternity and omnipresence with a smile on his face, a kind of optimism. It felt absolutely fresh and inspiring to me.”
 
The mysterious kind of music within words speaks to Bryars, who has always been drawn to Petrarch’s sonnets for “the heartrending beauty of the poetry and their sheer technical brilliance,” he says. “As a composer, I live by commissions and these can take me in many different directions. But in an ideal world, where I could be free to write whatever I like, I would choose to write vocal music, especially settings of Petrarch.” With Two Love Songs, Bryars returns to the Italian humanist poet so beloved of Renaissance madrigalists, as well as to the sound of unaccompanied female voices. Prior to those of The Crossing, Bryars worked closely with Trio Mediaeval, the Scandinavian group having included pieces by him on their ECM New Series album Soir, Dit-Elle, from 2004. “There can be something very touching about the ethereal sound of high women’s voices,” Bryars says. “The spatial effect can be very beautiful. With the bass note way up there, the music lives on a higher plane.”
 
The sense of contemplative movement in Two Love Songs and The Fifth Century is characteristic of Bryars’ music and the way he thinks. “I do enjoy experiencing time in a way that is structured but not hectic or hyperactive,” he explains. “In choral music, I like to slow down the harmonic movement, not that it’s static but so that it’s gradually evolutionary. I like the effect of suddenly finding yourself in new harmonic territory without quite realizing how you got there. Most people think time is strictly objective, but it’s also subjective, a matter of perception. There’s a Zen-like idea that I appreciate: that time is going on forever, that time will go on whether you’re part of it or not. The challenge is to keep the focus concentrated. When that works, you can perceive a kind of eternity, one of infinite space.”
 
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Bryars, born in East Yorkshire in 1943, began his musical career as a double-bassist working in jazz, eventually collaborating with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley in the free-improvisation trio Joseph Holbrooke. Moving on to composition, Bryars began writing music influenced by the New York School of John Cage and Morton Feldman. One of Bryars’ earliest works, The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), became a classic of indeterminist minimalism, performed around the world; another early piece in this vein, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), blended a vocal tape loop with strings and brass, earning him another vintage success. In the years since, Bryars has broadened his style as he composed four operas, three string quartets, concertos for cello and for double-bass, works for his own instrumental ensemble, several pieces for choreographers and a long, ever-increasing sequence of vocal music, including six books of madrigals and a collection of more than 40 “laude.” His ECM New Series albums include Three Viennese Dancers (1986), After the Requiem (1991) and Vita Nova (1994), with pieces by Bryars having also been recorded for ECM by Trio Mediaeval and organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent.