GBSR Duo on contemporary collaboration, reading reviews & SoundState

On 3 April we welcome the duo to our Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of our SoundState festival. Their percussion and piano will come together with organ, in a new piece by composer and organist Eva-Maria Houben. Dedicated specifically to the GBSR Duo, ‘together on the way’ represents a temporal landscape, an environment that slowly opens, before gently returning to the silence of darkness.

Ahead of this remarkable performance we caught up with Barton and Rhys, a duo described by BBC Radio 3’s Kate Molleson as ‘a wonderful, adventuresome, sensitive pair of musicians’.

Within musical duos, piano and percussion aren’t the most obvious of partnerships. How did you come to perform together?

We met at music college, initially to play a couple of ‘repertoire’ pieces – Stockhausen’s KONTAKTE, and Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston, the four-hour trio with flute. It pretty much went from there – it was quite slow at first when we were focusing mainly on building our individual careers as freelancers, but increasingly the duo is a big part of our overall work and is something that really matters to us.

How would you describe your music to someone new to it?

It’s pretty varied! We like to work with a broad range of different composers and collaborators. Some music we play is highly intimate, tactile, subtle; other things are brash, fast and loud, or with heavy electronic elements. Even just this piece with Eva-Maria Houben isn’t easy to describe. It’s a huge single organ chord that Eva-Maria builds up and breaks down. Against that we have passages of piano and percussion music punctuated by pauses. Sometimes (and to some listeners) it might seem serene, at other times (to others) charged with tension. It’s full of paradoxes like that – ethereal/embodied, human/environmental, architectural/tectonic. The overall effect is maybe like a little ecology, or like overhearing the sounds of a distant society.

How hard was it for you to continue rehearsing and creating as a duo during the Covid-19 lockdowns?

In many respects it was quite easy because we live together. Obviously a lot of performing opportunities fell away at several points over the last two years, but we put some of our energy into recordings instead when that was possible. Timing-wise we were incredibly lucky at the start – we were recording an album in March 2020 (Oliver Leith’s good day good day bad day bad day) and we had just wrapped when the first lockdown was announced – the sight of the studio door being padlocked behind us is quite a strong memory.

We carried on making recordings at home, one of which (CHAINES’ ‘so smol (hewwo)’) was released by Nonclassical, and then we managed to finish our Barbara Monk Feldman album Verses at the start of 2021, although that one was quite difficult to get over the finish line because of changing Covid-19 restrictions.

Time for some real honesty… do you ever fall out with one another over music?

On occasion. Of course! We’re not hurling instruments during rehearsals or anything, but there are occasional disagreements – there always have been, and probably always will be. Hope so anyway – if it’s ever too placid that might mean we stopped caring enough, or that we’d slipped into a very settled power dynamic where one member’s creative voice dominates.

‘There are occasional disagreements – there always have been, and probably always will be. Hope so anyway – if it’s ever too placid that might mean we stopped caring’

You’ve received some great reviews, both for your releases and performances. How much attention do you pay to reviews?

It’s nice to receive good reviews, of course. Ultimately reviewers are just people and it’s great to hear when someone has enjoyed what we’ve done or made. We usually have a pretty good sense after a performance what went well and what didn’t, so it’s interesting to see how that transmits. Perhaps the area where we feel more ‘vulnerable’ in terms of critical notice is with respect to the new works, because we have a different kind of creative investment in them.

You’re appearing at Soundstate to perform with Eva-Maria Houben on her piece together on the way – how did this collaboration come to happen?

Siwan met Eva-Maria in 2019 to perform her duo piece ‘a peaceful silent place’ at London Contemporary Music Festival. They hadn’t played together before so they scheduled a load of time for rehearsal, but once they started playing they struck up an instant rapport, and both of them loved the experience. It was natural to think of the idea of a trio for Eva-Maria with GBSR, particularly given the colouristic possibilities of combining these three instruments. We pitched the idea of a trio to Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, they got fully behind it and commissioned the piece, and we premiered it there in 2021.

Does performing together with the organ present any specific or unusual challenges?

Yes! Both of us are used to being presented with an instrument that isn’t your own and having to work with what it can do, but the organ is a whole other level of that. The kinds of delicate sounds that Eva-Maria makes from an instrument need coaxing out of it, and each organ is different, sometimes radically different. When we were in Huddersfield the construction of the organ in St Paul’s Hall meant that it wasn’t able to support some of the particular techniques that Eva-Maria often uses. We had two days’ rehearsal and throughout Eva-Maria was gradually adjusting the kinds of techniques she was using, and sometimes we were collaborating on this too. Eventually she figured out ways of half-depressing keys by putting foam wedges between the key and the key-bed; it’s quite an amazing, very human, sound. And as she gradually honed this technique, this of course meant we were adjusting how we played against her. 

We know in advance that the stops of the Queen Elizabeth Hall organ can be half-pulled, which gives Eva-Maria another tool for creating her particular sounds. But of course it will sound very different to the organ of St Paul’s Hall – it’s exciting for us to see how the piece will be altered by this change, and how we will have to change what we’re doing to fit.

‘Both of us are used to being presented with an instrument that isn’t your own and having to work with what it can do, but the organ is a whole other level of that.’

You’ve collaborated with a number of artists and composers; what do you look for in a musical collaboration?

We don’t really think about this analytically, we just naturally gravitate towards particular artists. But if you wanted to try to find a common thread, perhaps there’s something about wanting to work with someone where you’re both altering your practice to some degree – there has to be an openness, an entry point, for both parties. In the case of Eva-Maria we’re adapting our sounds all the time to her organ playing; and she’s also embracing Siwan’s inside-piano sounds and George’s more unusual instruments to incorporate perhaps darker timbres than those she has often gravitated towards in her compositions.

If you could collaborate with any musician or composer, who would it be?

Scott Walker.

How are you looking forward to your appearance in our Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of SoundState?

With all our beings! We’re really looking forward to the performance, and we’re so thrilled that the Southbank Centre wishes to programme this magical and unusual music.