This forum looks at how the interaction between music - both composition and performance - and architecture, can open new areas for imaginative response. Composer and performer Gavin Bryars converses with musician, writer and sound curator David Toop, exploring the overlap between form and space in audible and visible terms.

Gavin Bryars is a curious persona in the world of contemporary music. Having had a baptism of fire in Joseph Holbrooke, he has since pursued a path of making music that is characterised by both an awareness of the avant garde and a formal rigour attributed to quasi-classical minimalism. Fortuitously, this would seem to have made him a kind of spiritual half-brother to what Brian Eno would later term ambient music. From here on in, it is perhaps easier to see his musical work in the context of its commissioning and we suspect this is really the intended theme of this talk. The pairing with David Toop would also seem apt, as to a certain extent they both share a similar contextual predicament, with Toop's own work as a musician essentially given credence by his primary status as a writer and curator. Given this predilection for thematic re-invention, it is significant that the term "architecture" appears to be used here only in a suitably vague sense, bereft of any specific connotations or repercussions, invoked with the transparent intent to provoke a conversation that desires its gravitas but which in truth seems fit to only serve up an anaemic distillation of its aesthetic concerns.

Gavin Bryars and David Toop will be in conversation with Iain Fenlon, Professor of Historical Musicology at Cambridge University and a Fellow of King's College.