Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton, Irma, Obscure Records, 1978
In 1978 a version of Tom Phillip’s 1969 opera Irma was released on Obscure Records with, as the LP cover indicates, “Music by Gavin Bryars” and a “Libretto by Fred Orton”. Although the cover also specifies that the work is “by” Phillips, the composition’s open format led to certain disagreements. In his Works and Texts (Thames and Hudson, 1992) Phillips wrote that Bryars’ recording was “simultaneously correct and unfaithful”, and that in it the music has been “smoothed out…to fit the Bryars aesthetic” (p. 278). But Bryars’ sensuous strings beautifully suit Irma’s Victorian “feel”, and even the opening scene’s clumpy, pedestrian piano and vibes, awkward and dissonant as they are, seem exactly right. Ditto the taped sounds of the shingle and tide and, later, the further “noises off” of crickets, birds, and an eerie, crackly cat. The cryptically eclipsed, pseudo-cinematic imagery of the cover design, by John Bonis, also makes an important contribution to the mysterious attractions of Irma.
The libretto comes directly from Phillips’ score, which draws heavily upon his fifty-year project A Humument, begun in 1966. Adapting its title from W H Mallock’s 1892 novel, A Human Document, A Humument involved Phillips painting onto and otherwise altering the pages of Mallock’s book, connecting disparate portions of the text and extracting from it a second novel, in which “Irma” is a central figure. The work’s score (see Phillips, p. 279) includes some conventional musical notation but is dominated by around a hundred treated fragments of Mallock’s novel, divided into three categories: libretto, mise-en-scene, and sounds. In the third section can be found, for example, “the first parasol, sound” and “scratch form slowly”, this last probably alluding to its author’s involvement with Cornelius Cardew’s infamous Scratch Orchestra. In the recording some of Phillips’ phrases are sung verbatim by Howard Skempton and Lucy Skeaping, the opera’s lead performers. “I tell you/that’s Irma herself/watching the waves fall/steep from the sun” runs the opening chain of terms. A later passage reads:“In another moment/Rapidly surrounded by/Sinking lights of lamps…paper mirrors giving rise to strange reflections”. ”Love is help mate” is the opera’s concluding refrain.
Irma herself, of whom Phillips has made several paintings, stands looking out to sea like the figure forming the haunting central motif of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, also from 1969. With its trio of incompatible endings, Fowles’ novel also shares with Irma a studied compositional openness. It is difficult to entirely accept Phillips hostility toward Bryars’ Irma, which is, after all, only one of any number of potential renditions. In his extensive sleeve notes Bryars states that, “Irma needs to be re-composed rather than realised”, and he borrows elements of Brahms, Feldman, Schumann and others to do this. (In 1980 I attended a lecture by Bryars in which he claimed that his recording of Irma didn’t contain a single original musical note). Phillips proposes that Bryars had not “mined” the score thoroughly enough, and that the instructions show that “it’s really a rather tight piece, without lots of options” (Bryars and Orton, “Tom Phillips: Interview”, Studio International, Vol. 192, No. 984, November/December 1976, p. 294). However, inscribed within the score, and reiterated in Bryars’ text is the idea that Irma may be imaginatively interpreted as the rediscovered fragments of an ancient lost work, or a projection of something that has not yet occurred, so Bryars’ detective work is entirely apt.
The use of experimental writing techniques, influenced by Bryars’ association with theOulipo, also underpins his The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), a work in which plurality of execution and effect are also actively addressed.
Peter Suchin
The cover (top) and the reverse of the record sleeve from 1978.
