Gavin Bryars took piano lessons until the age of 18. He then discovered jazz and began learning the double bass while studying philosophy at the University of Sheffield. With guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Oxley, he formed the Joseph Holbrooke Trio in 1964, a leading European free jazz group. In 1966, he turned away from both double bass and improvisation to focus on composition. He studied with John Cage in the United States and with two figures of British experimental music, the composer Cornelius Cardew and the pianist John Tilbury. Starting in 1969, he taught at Portsmouth College of Art, where he was one of the founders of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra mixing musicians and non-musicians and whose iconoclastic re-readings of the classical repertoire were unexpectedly successful. In 1972, he took over the management of the Experimental Music Catalogue founded by Christopher Hobbs, until its closure in 1981. His first compositions were influenced by Fluxus and conceptual art; they often incorporate magnetic tape and consist in text instructions for the performer to execute. In 1975, a recording of The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records label, quickly bringing Bryars international fame. Bryars was very close to the composers of the minimalist movement. Following their example, he founded his own ensemble in 1981, and in 2001 he created his own record label, GB Records.

The beginning of the 1980s marked a new point in Bryar’s career. In his first opera, Medea, staged in 1984 by Bob Wilson at the Opéra de Lyon, Bryars expressed his love for the post-Romanticism of Richard Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni, and Alexander Zemlinsky. From then on he undertook to revisit the nine centuries of the history of Western music, from Pérotin and Palestrina to [composer: 3334][Anton Webern], Tōru Takemitsu, and Bill Evans, via Franz Schubert, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Richard Wagner, and Camille Saint-Saëns. His approach was less postmodern than “posthistorical,” in David Christoffel’s word. As an example of Bryar’s work in traditional genres, his String Quartet No. 1, subtitled “Between the National and the Bristol,” was premiered in 1985 at the Vienna Festival by the Arditti Quartet, and recorded the following year for the ECM label on the CD Three Viennese Dancers. At the end of the decade, his encounter with the musicians of the Hilliard Ensemble inspired numerous vocal pieces, from Glorious Hill (1988) and Cadman’s Requiem (1989) to his first book of Madrigals (1998-2000), which are based on Petrarchan sonnets and now comprise six collections.

In 1986, Bryars became a professor at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), where he had founded the music department eight years earlier. He stopped teaching in 1994 (though he lectured at the Darlington College of Arts from 2006 to 2009) so that he could devote his energy to composing. He signed a contract with the publisher Schott that same year. Since then, his profuse and protean work, as erudite as it is iconoclastic, has developed in many unexpected directions. His output today includes more than 200 works, prominent among which are his chamber music and vocal music — imbued with his passion for the repertoires of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Bryars composed a cycle of fifty-four Laudes, begun in 1998 and based on the Laude Cortonese, an Italian manuscript from the second half of the twelfth century.

From among his many other compositions, it is worth mentioning his cello concerto Farewell to Philosophy (1995); Adnan Songbook (1996), which uses poems by Etel Adnan; New York (2004), a double concerto that inaugurated a rather friction-filled collaboration with the Percussions Claviers de Lyon; The Stones of the Arch (2006), composed for Steve Reich’s 70th birthday; and Dido and Orfeo (2011), inspired by Henry Purcell and Christoph Willibald Gluck. His fourth opera, Marilyn Forever, a chamber opera premiered in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2013, has been produced several times. Another chamber opera, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, with a libretto by Michael Ondaatje, was premiered in Lyon in 2018. In 2020, Quartet No. 4 was finished, twenty-two years after the previous quartet. Following his concertos for saxophone, cello, piano, violin, and double bass, his harpsichord concerto, Liverpool, was premiered in March 2023 in the city of the same name.

Bryars has collaborated with artists from other musical universes, such as jazz, folk, and rock, including Tom Waits, Natalie Merchant, Gavin Friday, Bertrand Belin, and the duo Midget! He has also worked regularly with choreographers, among them Lucinda Childs (Four Elements, 1990), Merce Cunningham ([work: 56572][Biped], 1999), Carolyn Carlson, and Édouard Lock, and with visual artists Juan Muñoz, Christian Boltanski, and Brothers Quay. He designed installations for the Tate Gallery Liverpool (1988), the Château d’Oiron (1993), and the Architecture Biennial in Valencia (2022). A man of panoramic curiosity and erudition, Bryars has also conducted extensive research on the eccentric figures who fascinate him: Lord Berners, Erik Satie, and Marcel Duchamp. His research earned him an invitation to join the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 1974. In 2015 he reached the top of the organization’s hierarchy as a Transcendent Satrap, like Jacques Prévert, Joan Miró, Man Ray, and Umberto Eco before him. Bryars is also a connoisseur of the works of Jules Verne, which inspired him to write several compositions, including his saxophone concerto, The Green Ray (1981); his second opera, Doctor Ox’s Experiment (premiered in 1998 at the English National Opera, directed by Canadian Atom Egoyan); and By the Vaar (1987), a piece for double bass and orchestra, written for the double bassist Charlie Haden.

Married to Russian-born filmmaker Anna Chernakova, Bryars lives and works between Leicestershire, England, and British Columbia, Canada.