Gavin Bryars Quotes

Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.

People like Arvo Part would not have been taken seriously 20 years ago.

I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.

We have this really retro vibe and style of songwriting and, personally, I wasn't embracing the current state of music until I fell in love with hip-hop. It felt good to suddenly embrace where music was headed, and I think hip-hop is the best at that, because it feels so progressive and everybody wants to be the best.

New music is absolutely integral to classical music.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It's just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank goodness we're not obliged to be Modernist any more.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

But I can't really say there is too much modern music that I'm blown away by at this moment.

The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

But, on the other hand, if Schubert were alive today, he would find even richer fields to plow.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about... Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

If I can add, say, 10 great new violin concertos to the repertoire before I'm done, that will be truly exciting.

Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

I am so envious of my colleagues from 100 years ago who only sang new works, they hardly ever sang revivals.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

There are times when what's happening in rock is the best music in the world, and there are times when there is nothing worthwhile at all.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.