Gavin Bryars’ New Composition for The Crossing

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

This Friday Navona Records will release the latest (24th) commercial album by the choir The Crossing. The album is devoted entirely to Gavin Bryars’ twelve-movement cycle of texts by Wendell Berry entitled A Native Hill. As usual Amazon.com is currently taking pre-orders for this new release. This was The Crossing’s second album of music by Bryars, the first having been The Fifth Century, which won a Best Choral Performance GRAMMY in January of 2018.

Bryars took his title from an essay that Berry wrote in 1968, a major shift from the metaphysical writings of the seventeenth-century English mystic Thomas Traherne that provided the libretto for The Fifth Century. In his program note for the album, Bryars observed that “Berry’s descriptions of the minutiae of his rural existence have a profound metaphysical and even political force.” He could also have observed that Berry wrote the essay at a time when only a handful of writers were committed to raising environmental consciousness. It is thus more than a little disappointing that Berry’s work is as neglected in these more “politically conscious” times than it was when he wrote it.

It is hard to tell from Bryars’ program note whether he appreciated the irony of the circumstances in which he was setting Berry’s words to music. He did, however, note that his score was the product of “a close reading of the text,” an effort that one does not encounter frequently in the composition of vocal music. It should therefore go without saying that Bryars’ essay is followed by a libretto of all twelve of the Berry texts that were set. This is definitely one of those cases in which the “metadata” are as important as the recorded music. Listeners deserve the opportunity to read those texts with the same level of attention that Bryars afforded, and the more curious will probably wish to examine the essay in its entirety.

Since The Fifth Century included a saxophone quartet, this was Bryars’ first a cappella undertaking for The Crossing. His sensitivity to sonorities is as acute as it was when he was working with the interplay between voices and instruments. Nevertheless, as his notes explain, he was still interested in exploring a wider scope of sonorities. Thus the “Animals and Birds” movement, appropriately enough, incorporates a “background” (Bryars’ word choice) of humming and whistling, while in the final movement, “At Peace,” he explores taking a vocal approach to tone clustering.

I fear that there may be those that will criticize A Native Hill for being too “cerebral;” but, things being what they are, the need for more cerebration seems to grow more urgent every day!