Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Maxwell Davies

The line lands like a quiet rebuke to the arts-industrial obsession with “knowing your audience” the way a brand manager knows a demographic. Coming from Peter Maxwell Davies - a composer who spent much of his career testing what concert culture would tolerate - it’s less modest shrug than strategic refusal. He’s pushing back on the idea that listeners are a stable, legible target you can design for, and he’s puncturing the flattering fantasy that artists can predict reception if they just study the room hard enough.

The phrasing matters: “can’t really” is doing heavy lifting. It concedes that composers can sense broad contexts (a festival crowd, a radio slot, an education project) while insisting that actual listening is messier: people arrive with private histories, varying attention, shifting moods, and wildly different reference points. “Audiences” is plural, too, hinting that the crowd is never one creature. It’s a swarm of micro-publics, each hearing a different piece.

In Davies’s world, this is also a defense of artistic risk. If you accept that audiences are fundamentally unknowable, you stop writing as if you’re taking orders. You write toward the work’s internal logic, not toward imagined approval. That stance made sense for a modernist who moved between establishment institutions and the far edge of the repertoire: the moment you think you’ve solved the audience, you’ve probably stopped composing and started catering.