Bang on a Can

In 1971, when I lived in London, a friend, Alan Power, was making a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. He asked me to help him with some of the audio tapes from the film and during the work I came across the original source for this piece. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes folksongs, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one old man, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (Alan recalls that during the filming he played a game of swapping hats with the film crew). This footage, however, was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all unused tape, including this extract.

When I played through the tape again at home, I found that his singing was in tune with my piano and I improvised a simple choral accompaniment. At the time I had made a number of pieces using tape loops, and I noticed that the first section of the song formed a curiously effective loop which repeated in a slightly unpredictable, but inevitable way. At the time I was working in the Fine Art Department at Leicester Polytechnic, and I took the tape loop there to copy it on to a continuous reel in the recording studio. For some time, I had had the idea of making a piece of music which repeated in a gradually incremental way but which had something of the emotional tone of the late 1950's American war films. I had in mind in particular, the end of a film called, I think, The Sands of Iwo Jima, where, approaching the closing credits, we hear the distant sound of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir humming John Brown's Body Lies a-mouldering in the Grave as the faces of the dead heroes appear superimposed on the clouds above the desert. For me at the time, this idea related to both Pop Art and Minimal Art: a kind of non-abstract repetition but with emotional overtones. However, I soon found that Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet was far too complex and rich a resource for such a simple idea.

When I copied the loop onto the continuous reel in Leicester, I left the door of the recording studio open (it opened onto one of the large painting studios) while I went downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realized that the tape was still playing and that they had become overcome by the old man's unaccompanied singing. This demonstrated to me the emotional power of the music, but also alerted me to the need to approach very carefully anything I did to the tape. I had already thought about a gradually added orchestral accompaniment and I realized that this needed to be simple, to gradually evolve, yet at the same time respect the tramp's humanity and simple faith.

Although the old man died before he could hear what I had done with his singing, the piece remains as a restrained testament to his spirit and optimism. The rhythm of his vocal line may be erratic and there is considerable irony in the relationship between what he is singing, and his circumstances at the time. But for me there is great poignancy in his voice and, though I do not share the simple optimism of his faith, I am still touched by the memory of my first encounter with what Grainger would call the "human-ness" of his voice, and through this piece I try to give it new life. -Gavin Bryars