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February 17, 2005
Of the Refrain: Tramp with Orchestra
(maybe this will make it up to JC :)
I am eternally grateful to Robert Elms for introducing me to Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet. To hear this piece of music, so extraordinary in itself, emerge from the radio one morning was a truly astonishing experience. Elms apparently made a principle of playing the piece a couple of times every year, and the station was always inundated by listeners phoning up in tears asking for the title of the piece. Hearing it was a "life changing experience", not in the sense that it led to any momentous decisions or sudden realisations, but simply that it divided time into a distinct before and after, hearing it altered you somehow. It was not actually for some years that I found the CD, and earlier this year Eleutheria and I were lucky enough to see Bryars conducting a live performance of one of the very few pieces of 20th-century orchestral music that have touched me in any way.
In 1971, Bryars had isolated a small loop of tape from the offcuts of a documentary he had done the sound for, about the vagrant population who lived in the ramshackle 'cardboard city'in the centre of the roundabout at Waterloo. This, of course, was, until they were evicted and replaced in the centre of the roundabout by an Imax cinema, an architecturally null steel-and-glass number, and almost always empty of custom, a real symbol of (as the marketing has it) LondOn (presumably capital of Cool Britannia).
Having left a tape loop of one of the tramps giving an impromptu rendering of a (still unidentified, and possibly extemporised) hymn, playing in his studio, he returned five minutes later to find
the normally lively room unaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man's unaccompanied singing.
It was obvious that, if his idea of creating an orchestral piece around this repeated phrase was to work, it would have to be treated with great sensitivityin order not to overwhelm whatever subtle magic was frozen forever in the medium of those few seconds of magnetic tape.
Posted by robin at February 17, 2005 10:44 AM