ABSTRACT
In 1970, the composer Gavin Bryars founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia so that works from the Western classics could be performed by musicians who had not been formally trained within that music’s normal traditions and were often quite unskilled on their instruments. The frequently carnivalesque egalitarianism of the concerts – Bryars has amusing anecdotes in this regard (Griffiths 1985: 151–2) – suggests that during this period the Portsmouth Sinfonia and Bryars were swept up in the sometimes rampant politicized iconoclasm that characterized the immediate cultural aftermath of the upheavals of 1968; it would encourage us to think of Bryars as an example of a far-from uncommon phenomenon – a post-1945 composer attempting to bring political transformation into coordination with musical practice. Indeed, it was at this time that Bryars became good friends with the pianist John Tilbury, who then subsequently became part of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, the famous experimental group that quickly politicized itself along the lines of the Maoist Marxism then prevalent in radical left-wing circles in Western Europe. Bryars, however, never joined the Scratch Orchestra, and when in the mid-1980s Paul Griffiths asked him whether he had not been tempted, he answered “Not really. I could sympathize politically, but I thought that the combination of politics and artistic activity was what in philosophy one would call a ‘category mistake.’ The criteria for evaluating excellence in each were different, and therefore to apply criteria from one to the other seemed to me inappropriate” (1985: 155).
