Disquiet

The fourth and final segment of a wide-ranging BBC interview with composer Gavin Bryars (Sinking of the Titanic) has been posted on its website (here). The occasion for the interview was provided by a formidable new Bryars work, From Egil’s Saga, which involves using technology to reproduce architectural acoustics. This portion of the conversation includes discussion of his earliest “auditory memory” (his mother playing the cello); the composer, living or dead, he’d most like a lesson from (Gesualdo, the Renaissance figure); his primo “desert island disc” (a Bill Evans Trio chamber-jazz set); and his current reading habits (largely detective fiction, plus Petrarch’s poetry, which he is setting to music). A former member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Bryars compares a detective’s work with the research that goes into his own compositional endeavors.

By Marc Weidenbaum