Gavin Bryars Quotes

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Gavin Bryars

Profession : Composer

Birth : January 16, 1943

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.

Gavin Bryars

Craft is part of the creative process.

Gavin Bryars

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

Gavin Bryars

What was once underground is now coming to the surface.

Gavin Bryars

There's another way of making music, by touching the lives and feelings of ordinary people.

Gavin Bryars

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

Gavin Bryars

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

Gavin Bryars

Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not comprehensible to the man in the street. This is an arrogant assertion and not necessarily a true one.

Gavin Bryars

Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly.

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

Over the years I have tried to develop something which is technically assured.

Gavin Bryars

Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years.

Gavin Bryars

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

Gavin Bryars

I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

Gavin Bryars

I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended.

Gavin Bryars

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.

Gavin Bryars

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology.

Gavin Bryars

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

Gavin Bryars

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Gavin Bryars

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

Gavin Bryars