Songs The Smiths Build Right Up

The British composer Gavin Bryars

http://www.gavinbryars.com/Pages/jesus_blood_never_failed_m.html

talks movingly of the development of his 1971 piece 'Jesus Blood Never Failed Me' - using a recording tape of a homeless old man singing a hymn in a rough side of London. The song appeared only after long gestation. While working on it, Bryars accidentally left the tape to loop away, going briefly out of his recording room, and later commented,

"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".

Suppose the tramp had sung e.g., 'Incey Wincy Spider', doubtless the song would have gone the way of all spider webs, instead of becoming a classic, causing millions to weep with deeply touched heart. Would the composer have been even moved to surround the tramp's hymn-singing with gradual building of strings, brass etc until the tramp is somehow universalised, like Charles Chaplin's tramp, and becomes almost a star performer? (Sadly, the old homeless man died before the work was finished). What would have been common, as with so many fine songs (and okay even awful ones, too), was melodic simplicity, but the emotional-cultural dimension would have been absent.

Compare the Gavin Bryars piece with two, also well-crafted but 'commercial', crowd-pleasers of tunefulness: 'Taller Stronger Better' sung by the Australian Guy Sebastian and 'Breakfast at Eight' by the American singer-composer Rufus Wainwright. Melodic simplicity plays against (relative) orchestral complexity, and a certain power of repetition is present in all three songs. A repetition unsurprising in Bryars case because he was right into minimalism. (His song first surfaced on the minimalist Brian Eno's Obscure record label, 1975). The meticulous building of all three songs is maximally at the service of the capable performer, who is liberated along with the singer - and we 'singers' along with the artist, because we are all singers, most of us rather stealthily.