"Confined Spaces" a short profile of Bryn Harrison by James Saunders
Right click here to download pdf of my doctoral thesis.
Bryn Harrison (born 1969) studied for an MA in composition with Gavin Bryars at De Montfort University, Leicester. His music has been performed extensively in the UK at most of Britain’s leading festivals and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He has established a particularly close association with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival receiving prizes there in 1993 and 1995 and commissions from the festival in 1999 and 2002 and again in 2008 where he was a featured composer.
In 1999 he was selected to compete for the International Gaudeamus Prize in the Netherlands and since then he has received many performances throughout Europe, USA and Japan, including those at festivals such as Wien Horgange, Ultraschall, Hannover Biennale, Festival Klangspuren, Europaischer Musikmonat, Wittener Tage and the Paris Festival Automne. In 2001 he attended the Ostrava New Music Days in the Czech Republic where he studied briefly with Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier and, in the same year, was invited to attend the ISCM World Music Days in Yokohama, Japan.
Commissions include those for the London Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Recherche, Apartment House, Plus-Minus, Klangforum Wien, Ixion, London Sinfonietta, Suono Mobile, 175 East, Chroma, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Asamisimasa as well as performances from duos and soloists such as Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea, Duo Contour, Anton Lukoszevieze, Irvine Arditti and Mieko Kanno, Susan Knight, Clive Williamson, Andrew Sparling, Jonathan Powell, Philip Thomas, Teodoro Anzellotti, and ELISION Ensemble.
He has a particular interest in the relationship between painting and music and has collaborated extensively with painter and printmaker Mike Walker. Bryn is currently Head of Composition at the University of Huddersfield. He lives near Halifax, West Yorkshire with his wife Jane and three children Harry, Dillon and Erica.
Bryn Harrison: Time, memory and recursive structures
Much of my recent compositional output has been largely concerned with the exploration of musical time through the use of recursive musical forms which challenge our perceptions of time and space by viewing the same material from different angles and perspectives. Pieces such as four cycles (2004-6) for large ensemble and shifting light (2006) for orchestra make use of circular pitch structures to create a musical continuum that operates largely outside the confines of a more conventional goal-orientated approach to form and structure.
More recent pieces such as Repetitions in Extended Time (2008) and four studies for the musemes (2009) attempt to take this idea a stage further by dealing directly with the opposition of static and mobile structures. Exploring high levels of repetition that draw on the pretext that exact repetition changes nothing in the object itself but does change something in the mind that contemplates it, these works deal explicitly with aspects of duration and memory; near and exact repetition operate in close proximity throughout and provide points of orientation and disorientation for the listener.
Bryn Harrison (2009)
Confined Spaces: a short profile of Bryn Harrison 
In July 2006, Bryn Harrison invited thirty composers whose work he admired to create new pieces to be placed in a time capsule, where they will remain in sealed envelopes for the next twenty-five years before being opened and performed for the first time in 2031. The concept for this project is apt for a composer whose principal interest is in the passing of time, exploring how it might operate in a non-teleological way, trying to slow it down, or suspend it momentarily. His music often presents a series of quasi-repeating panels, moments in which similar material might be marginally stretched or compressed. In his Listenings I (2001), a single repeating violin gesture, superimposed on a sequence of densely chromatic pedalled piano chords, is subtly altered on each hearing. Although the music is repetitive, it never repeats. Harrison uses the space created by this near cloning of material to interrogate our perception of change, a questioning which underpins all of his work. Recent pieces take this a stage further: Piano Set (2005) comprises six literal repeats of the same, complexly notated material and the single-page ensemble piece a leaf falls on loneliness (2007) is repeated 27 times. As Harrison states, ‘All of our expectations tell us that something needs to change but I'm equally interested in finding out what happens when things don't. What's that Eno Oblique Strategy? – ‘overtly resist change’.’ Whilst this year’s hcmf commission Repetitions in Extended Time (2008) is not directly repetitive to this degree, its 43-minute duration and concentration on a single event emphasise this precarious situation, challenging us to consider the narrow space between difference and repetition. Although of extended duration, these recent pieces mark a distinct break from his earlier work with its nod to late-Feldman. Whereas before they were like evolving things, now they’re like objects that are obsessively re-examined.
Like Feldman, Harrison has maintained an interest in painting, particularly the work of Bridget Riley and friend Mike Walker, and it has taken a central role in his work since the ground (2000). In 2003 his fascination with Riley’s curve-drawing techniques led to devoting a considerable amount of time to learning to draw them himself, resulting in Six Symmetries (2004) for large ensemble. These sketches formed the basis for developments in his own compositional techniques, whereby pitch patterns proliferate across an ensemble texture with a wave-like motion which makes an audible link to their initial source. Pitch in his music has been almost exclusively organized in a cyclical way. Meandering sequences are typically looped at different rates with registral displacement in the individual voices of an ensemble texture, blurring the focus and suggesting fields rather than lines despite its explicitly contrapuntal construction. Rhythmic material is normally separately conceived, using repeating frames of action in which the disposition and density of events is in flux. The mismatch between these two domains creates a drifting heterophony, perhaps most clearly heard in the In Nomine After William Byrd, a hcmf commission in 1999.
Harrison was born in Bolton in 1969, and studied first at Leeds College of Music (1988-91). There he developed an interest in composition, spurred on by his yearly attendance at hcmf, beginning in 1991. In addition to deepening his knowledge of contemporary music, the festival gave him some early performances of his work, most notably Frozen Earth played by Irvine Arditti and Mieko Kanno in 1995. From 1994-6 he studied for an MA with Gavin Bryars, before freelancing until his appointment as a lecturer at the University of Huddersfield in 2006, with a PhD following in 2007. He is currently Head of Composition at the university. His work has been performed by many of the leading European ensembles, including ensemble recherche, Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, [rout], Ixion, Klangforum Wien, asamisimasa, plus-minus ensemble and London Symphony Orchestra, and at festivals including Wien Horgange, Ultraschall, Hannover Biennale, Gaudeamus, Festival Klangspuren, Europaischer Musikmonat, Wittener Tage, Ostrava, Paris Festival Automne and the ISCM World Music Days (Yokohama, 2001).
Whilst the scores of timepieces 06/31 have only completed a tenth of their internment, Harrison has already shown a propensity for change that is reductive in nature, consistent with the fabric of the music itself. As work which seeks to alter our experience of time, it is perhaps appropriate that he continues to examine the beauty inherent in near stasis.
James Saunders
September 2008
Reproduced by kind permission of the author and the 2008 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
“"surface forms (repeating)" was a wonderful meeting point (not a compromise) between Harrison and ELISION. The players were in perpetual, rapid motion for the full ten and a half minutes. The dynamic level always stayed low. There was a tremendous tension sustained throughout. And for me, part of the complete focus that it commanded was the continual asking of the question, what is it? The sound world seemed to me to be either microscopic or cosmic in its dimensions. Finally I landed on the image of a tiny nucleus controlling the action of an entire planet of water. The form of the whole is constant and unchanging, but everything within that form is constantly changing. There is a very useful interview with Harrison in the new book edited by James Saunders: The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Without quoting too extensively, these couple of sentences about his working process shed some light on the piece I heard on Thursday: "I began to see each bar almost as an area of compression, in which I could subtly contract, expand or in some way distort the rhythms. I would then overlay, combine or link material into longer chains of note values to form whole sections of music or even entire pieces." It was awe-inspiring to watch any one of the players, but there was no way to get away from the fact for more than a moment that they were operating as a collective unit.
“A slightly younger British composer also producing interesting work is Bryn Harrison. His new commission Repetitions in Extended Time, a 40-minute work for the committed musicians of ensemble plus-minus, played out his interest in repetition and variation of a palette of deliberately restricted materials, which thus come to seem like the images in the bottom of a kaleidoscope. One is tempted to think of this as Feldmanesque, though, as someone commented to me after the concert, it is perhaps closer to the Italian composer Aldo Clementi’s sonic world of glinting instrumentation, material in slow but insistent evolution, canons so densely woven one no longer hears the individual lines…”
“As I listened to Bryn Harrison's portrait concert, I noticed one major similarity with the Malfatti installation from the day before. It is music that insists on losing me. It does untraceable things. Harrison's Repetitions in Extended Time was all the more enigmatic for its four identical beginnings. He called it "a form in search of itself." The sounds traveled in a different type of arc each time, at times moving from points to lines, slowly filling out, or merging on fuzzy unisons. The sound worlds that were explored had both space and depth. It was hard to tell the difference between what I was hearing, what I was remembering, and what I was imagining. As the form searched for itself, it lost me, and I realized that is exactly what I wanted.”
“Tantalising glimpses of timbres and unidentifiable instruments fade into view, providing some magnificent pitch/timbre ambiguities which quickly disappear again without resolution.”
“The quietly oscillating, hypnotic surfaces of Bryn Harrison’s music attempt to draw the listener into a delicate web of abstract patterns and near repetitions.
At once starkly simple, yet intricately complex, Harrison’s latest 40-minute piece is one of his most ambitious projects to date. Created almost as an abstract canvas, the piece draws on Harrison’s fascination with the passing of time, allowing the listener to become more and more absorbed in the texture of the music.”
“Harrison's Five Miniatures also presented music caught between disintegration and rebirth, but in a way that made better use of the multiple-short-movement structure. Essentially each miniature was the same: a ripple of notes that begins, looping with apparent freedom between three voices, until it stops. We are shown the same thing five times. But in reality we can hear that it’s not the same: the ripples are each different (do the loops just start in a different phase or is this actually new?). Nor are the processes as free as suspected: the synchronisations at the end of each are too distinct to be accidental. Each miniature is sharply alive at the thin boundaries of its beginning and its ending, but the rest, where the music and the development and the content should be, drifted again and again just out of grasp”.
“Bryn Harrison uses conventional means to achieve riveting and novel effects. He brought together tiny cut-outs of assorted musical shapes, playing and re-assembling their musical colours time and again- as if they were a kaleidoscope.
The first cycle reminded of nature’s sounds at night. Animals and insects came unexpectedly from over here or over there, isolated, in squeaks and croaks of different timbres, with the occasional freakish chorus, soon subsiding. The second cycle took steps towards being contrapuntal: several instruments played wisps of almost-phrases at the same time. In the third cycle, softer and very slightly longer almost-phrases presented themselves as almost-melodies. The last cycle reviewed what had gone before, in the manner of someone slowly and gently turning a multi-coloured glass ball in the palm of his hand. I was enchanted.”
“Bryn Harrison’s “the ground” for ensemble was the most notable debut: a tapestry of swoops and slides that owed a passing debt to Feldman.”
“The almost ritualized and incredibly subtle Guitar trio aimed to convey transparency…drawing the listener into a gossamer sound-world consisting entirely of harmonics…”
“Contributions by two of the more independent spirits produced the pieces I most enjoyed…Bryn Harrison’s Open 1 (first piece after Robert Motherwell) cajoled Sue Knight’s viola into producing a subtle sequence of shifting timbres and speeds within a repetitive context.”
“Bryn Harrison’s “the ground” was a perfect palliative and its subdued and controlled texture, in which notes are allowed to breathe, gave the impression of large watercolour brushstrokes.”
“…the music has a feeling of sculpted shape, of tactile sound hewn from a potential world…Time seems to pass slowly and nonlinearly, affording more opportunity to both focus and reflect on the moment…Bryn’s work is very much about the nature of a sound, drawing the listener into its heart, with inflective variations infecting his scores on many levels, transforming objects through a subtle altering of perspective.”