Bryars Quotes

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

Gavin Bryars

#2. Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years.

Gavin Bryars

#3. The crowds are very important for tennis. It makes you play better, but it can also make you nervous and that's the beauty of it.

Roger Federer

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

Gavin Bryars

#5. 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

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

#8. Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Joseph Conrad

#9. The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician, especially on a project for radio.

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

#15. I think the most important thing for an artist is to stay true to who you are. I want to stay as authentic as possible, as that's how we're going with our team.

Daya

#16. When I was climbing, I built up a close relationship with the Sherpa people.

Edmund Hillary

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. Any man will be able, after sufficient practice, to accomplish remarkable feats of strength, but he may go only so far and no farther. There is a limit to human physical strength that no one can exceed.

Gichin Funakoshi

#20. 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

#21. There is something of value in trying to put the world into words.

Ariel Levy

#22. One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces.

Gavin Bryars

#23. Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

James Carroll

#24. What was once underground is now coming to the surface.

Gavin Bryars

#25. When Philip Glass asked me if I would be interested in doing a new recording of Jesus' Blood he assumed that I would do something similar to the first version and wanted to know what other pieces would be on the same CD.

Gavin Bryars

#26. 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

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

Gavin Bryars

#28. Craft is part of the creative process.

Gavin Bryars

#29. Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

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

Gavin Bryars

#32. It makes sense to invest in new work. It's almost like having a research department in a scientific laboratory. You have to try things out. You'll make some bad mistakes. Some things will fail but at least you'll energise the organisation.

Gavin Bryars

#33. Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?' 'Kill me, I guess.' 'That idea has been said already. Got'ny other ones?' 'Help me. Ain't nobody said that idea yet, have they?

Daniel Woodrell