Bryars, Gavin
Entry updated 27 June 2025. Tagged: Music, People.
(1943- ) UK bassist and composer, widely recognized since the late 1960s for orchestral, chamber and vocal works such as The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) (see Titanic) and Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971). His large body of work blends minimalism, improvisation and an attachment to a romanticism that is unafraid of sentimentality, in a distinctive manner that makes comparisons to any established genre inexact. Doctor Ox's Experiment (1998) is an opera with a libretto by Blake Morrison, based on "Une fantaisie du docteur Ox" (March-May 1872 Musée des Familles) by Jules Verne, about a Scientist whose experiments with the effects of oxygen affect the entire population of a Flemish town. The purposefully low-key music seemed to catch opera critics off guard; it has not yet been recorded. Bryars has also used Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870 2vols; trans 1872 as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) as a setting for several shorter works, including The Black River (1991) and The White Lodge (1992). [CWa]
Richard Gavin Bryars
born Goole, Yorkshire: 16 January 1943
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