Greg Sandow -- Gavin Bryars

We know we’re hearing a CD of contemporary classical music, so we surely don’t expect the speaking voice, self-contained and just a little sad, addressing us in English with a European accent. "Good evening," it says. "Welcome once again to a man in a room gambling."
"This evening," the voice continues over a single line of music, ‘we will teach you one of the best things that can be done at a gambling table." The music, calm and uninvolved, played in the luminous middle register of a cello, fills the space around the speaker, adding its own loneliness, but otherwise making no comment. This is "A Man in a Room Gambling," a work by the British composer Gavin Bryars (released earlier this year on Philip Glass’s Point Music label) in which we learn how to cheat at cards.

We begin by learning how to deal from the bottom of the pack. Our teacher is the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz, who also wrote the texts and who worked with Mr. Bryars on 10 of these pieces, each just five minutes long and designed for radio broadcast whenever a station needs to fill some extra time. "Knowing two or three cards at the bottom of the pack is a big advantage for the expert gambler," Mr. Muñoz tells us. It’s important, then, to notice which cards remain on the table after a hand has been played, and, when you’re dealing, to pick a few to stash at the bottom.
Now we learn how to put them there. ‘Take your pack of cards," says Mr. Muñoz, speaking without emphasis, as if somehow time had stopped, as it does in a gambling casino where you can’t tell night from day. But even in a room with no time, we're doing something new, taking the cards ourselves, and the music marks our activity, spreading with a hint of quiet tension into several clashing notes. It smoothes itself again, but remains more urgent, as Mr. Muñoz tells us what we have to do.
When we’ve accomplished what Mr. Muñoz describes as our "artifice," the music marks a climax, dropping to its lowest note so far, a note that anchors what turns out to be the ending. "The cards are on the bottom," says Mr. Muñoz, and, affirming his finality, the music stretches in a definitive melodic arc, tracing each note like a finger with a sure touch exploring the contours of a face with no expression anywhere but in its deep and all but unfathomable eyes.

"Now you can start dealing," Mr. Muñoz tells us, and the music puts a period on its final sentence with a soft chord, somehow conclusive because for the first time, as if the gambling table had been touched by something inexplicable and radiant, we’re hearing a halo of high notes. Our lesson is finished. "Thank you," says Mr. Muñoz, "and goodnight."
This is remarkable. The music sounds both spare and lush, emotional and uninvolved, expressionless and melancholy. Its style is classical, in a uniquely modern way, but the ambiance is not. Classical music, as its very name might imply, hasn’t touched much of modern life, especially the underground territory of film noir, the beats, contemporary eroticism or even a dark Bruce Springsteen album like "Nebraska."
Mr. Bryars, though, inhabits his own slice of that territory. I first heard him back in the ‘70s, when he recorded a piece called "Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet" on a record label with the proud and lonely name Obscure, run by Brian Eno, an artist on the outer edge of rock who worked with Roxy Music and later produced albums for U2 and Talking Heads. "Jesus’ Blood," rerecorded in a much longer version for Point Music in 1993, has sold around 200,000 copies in its two versions, an amazing number for a modern classical work.
Not that I was keeping score when I first heard it; I was simply overwhelmed. Barely audibly at first, a derelict from a London street, with a scratched and broken voice, sings a fragment of a hymn. Over and over, the hymn repeats, and an instrumental accompaniment slowly takes shape, until by the end the voice is embraced by a glowing full ensemble. It’s hard to imagine anything simpler, more compelling or more lovingly human. The voice alone, Mr. Bryars has said, made people weep when he accidentally left it playing with the door of his recording studio open, and the finished work goes even deeper.
On the other side of the old "Jesus’ Blood" LP was "The Sinking of the Titanic" (also re-recorded for Point, and not connected, obviously, to the recent movie); it blended the voices of Titanic survivors with old hymns, creating a view of the disaster as if seen from a great distance, underwater. Other striking works include "Farewell to Philosophy," a shadowed elegy in the form of a cello concerto, also on the Point label, and the four pieces on "Vita Nova," an ECM release, two of which take the sound of Renaissance music and make it both modern and timeless.

That timelessness is one key to Mr. Bryars’s work, and I’d trace it to his harmony, which functions much like people in the paintings of Edward Hopper. They are accurately drawn, but also removed from daily life, never changing, never going anywhere. In a similar way, the richness of Mr. Bryars’s harmony echoes older classical music, but the chords don’t go where older music teaches us they should. Mr. Bryars says he relishes "the full and satisfying effect of a single chord," while having no formulae to tell him how one sound is connected to the next. His chords are taken intact from somewhere else, and given a new and changeless life.
Harmony like that gives "A Man in a Room Gambling" its oddly touching stasis -- along with an unchanging form, which also gives the five episodes on the CD (half of the complete 10-part work) their unity. Always Mr. Muñoz introduces himself; always he says goodnight; always he instructs us to take up our cards, and always the music notes when he does that. In the end -- a noir touch -- he sounds like he’s alone, the other gamblers serving only as objects of what he calls his "artifices."
Rory Johnston, who runs Point Music, explains why only five of the complete 10 parts are on the CD. For marketing reasons, he says, the CD needed to reflect two kinds of Bryars's work already established on the label: "concept" pieces like "Jesus’ Blood" and purely instrumental music like "Farewell to Philosophy." So half the gambling suite was combined with three fine new instrumental compositions.
I can understand that, but the very mention of marketing makes me wonder why Mr. Bryars is so little known in America. He’s familiar enough in Britain to have had an opera, "Dr. Ox’s Experiment," given a major production in London this past June. But in the U.S., apart from "Jesus’ Blood," he has hardly any presence. His ensemble, which for years has toured his music in Britain and Europe, has never even played here.
That’s too bad. Mr. Bryars is one of the most distinctive composers alive, and one of the few who takes new classical music out of its self-imposed ghetto. May I urge you to help him do that? Lose yourself in a "A Man in a Room Gambling," and cast your vote for the future of music.

Wall Street Journal, October 1, 1998

Listen to this marvelous music, and judge for yourself. Or you can download the RealAudio file. Note, though, that the harmony in this passage -- the end of the piece I've described in my review -- is relatively traditional. The odd wandering chords so typical of Bryars' work are found elsewhere.