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Contemporary Classical Music

Goole, Portsmouth Sinfonia, 1970

Gavin Bryars

Gavin Bryars was born on 16 January 1943 in Goole, Yorkshire. While studying philosophy at Sheffield University he became a jazz bassist, playing with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley in the trio Joseph Holbrooke. He moved from improvisation to composition, and in May 1970 he was a founding member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia. A 1969 piece uses sound sources connected with the sinking of the RMS Titanic. A 1971 work is built on a recorded loop of an old homeless man singing a fragment he had improvised. Brian Eno's Obscure Records released his music in 1975, and in 1982 Robert Wilson directed his first opera, Medea. He founded the music department at Leicester Polytechnic, and in 2024 he received the Ivor Novello Award for Innovation.

From Baltimore to Avignon, 1976

Philip Glass

Philip Glass was born on January 31, 1937, in Baltimore, Maryland. He entered the University of Chicago at 15, studied at Juilliard, and worked with Nadia Boulanger in Paris from 1964 to 1966. A 1966 film score with Ravi Shankar was another big influence. He founded the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1968 and still worked as a plumber and cab driver between 1973 and 1978. Einstein on the Beach, made with Robert Wilson, premiered at the Festival d'Avignon in 1976. Satyagraha followed in 1980 and Akhnaten in 1984. The 1982 album Glassworks got his music to a wider public, and his film scores have picked up three Academy Award nominations.

Los Angeles, the prepared piano

John Cage

John Cage was born on September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. He studied with Henry Cowell and with Arnold Schoenberg, who called him not a composer but an inventor of genius. In 1940 he invented the prepared piano, originally for a room too small to fit a percussion ensemble. From 1951 the I Ching was his standard tool for chance-based composition, and in 1952 David Tudor premiered a piece in which the performer plays nothing at all and the sounds of the room become the content. Merce Cunningham was his partner for the rest of his life. Cage was a keen mycologist and the author of Silence (1961). He died in Manhattan on August 12, 1992, aged 79, after a stroke.

Honfleur, Montmartre, Arcueil

Erik Satie

Erik Satie was born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy. After the Franco-Prussian War his family moved to Paris. A teacher at the Paris Conservatoire called him the laziest student in the place, and he left without a diploma, playing piano in the café-cabarets of Montmartre instead and becoming resident pianist at the Chat Noir. He became close friends with Claude Debussy, and in 1905 he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum as a mature student. Parade, his 1917 ballet with designs by Pablo Picasso, was a succès de scandale. He also coined the term furniture music. Satie died in Paris on 1 July 1925, aged 59, of cirrhosis of the liver. Scores thought to be lost turned up in his room in Arcueil.

From Colfax to Yamanashi

Terry Riley

Terry Riley was born on June 24, 1935, in Colfax, California. He studied at San Francisco State University and became friends with La Monte Young. He was working with tape loops from the 1950s, and with a sound engineer's help he built something he called a time-lag accumulator. His 1964 work of 53 short modules, for any number of musicians over a steady pulse of Cs on the piano, was first performed by Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick and others. A Rainbow in Curved Air came in 1969. From 1970 he studied with the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath, and from 1971 he taught at Mills College. He has written 13 string quartets for the Kronos Quartet. Since 2020 he has lived in Yamanashi, Japan.

The Collection