Champ d' Action

Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman were active on the British experimental music scene for some considerable time before they became known to the general public; we are talking about the 60s and early 70s. Bryars was a much-talked-about figurehead with his imaginative conceptual pieces, while Nyman was first and foremost a chronicler. His book 'Experimental Music: Cage and beyond' is today still regarded as a very worthwhile study of the spirit of those times. The concert shows how, while both hailing from an experimental backwater, they took those initial steps into the style which some years later led to their success. Interestingly enough, this coincided with the integration of historical references: Nyman's 'Hypertonal Walzes', and the assimilation of Percy Grainger's harmonic progressions into Bryars' 'Hi-Tremolo', the dissection of a number by Bill Evans in 'My First Homage' and the equally unorthodox treatment of Webern in Nyman's 'Initial Treat/Secondary Treat'. The pièce de résistance of this concert is Bryars' 'The Sinking of the Titanic', which was initially written as a conceptual work, but rapidly grew into the prototype for Bryars' elegiac meditations. The hymns, morse code and underwater atmosphere bear the typical, uncompromising Champ d'Action sound.