Daily Inspiration Quote by Virgil Thomson

There is a swagger in that line that only makes sense coming from a composer who watched fashions in “serious” music rise, harden into dogma, then crumble on schedule. “I don’t have to worry” isn’t laziness; it’s a veteran’s diagnosis that the piece has crossed a threshold from craft to object. Once a work is structurally sound - melodically clear, rhythmically inevitable, built on decisions that interlock - performers, critics, and institutions can misread it, dress it up, sand it down, even weaponize it in their own debates, and it still survives. The pronoun “it” does real work: he’s talking about music as an engineered thing, not an autobiographical confession.

Thomson’s subtext is also a quiet jab at the cultural machinery around classical music. “They” can be conductors with interpretive egos, academic tastemakers, patron-class philanthropists, or reviewers (Thomson himself was famously a critic). He’s acknowledging the indignities of reception - the bad performances, the faddish theories, the prestige politics - while refusing to grant them ultimate power. That cynicism is oddly consoling: it reframes the artist’s most common fear (being misunderstood) as background noise.

In the 20th century, when modernism often treated accessibility as suspect and composers were pressured to justify every note with ideology, Thomson’s confidence reads like an antidote. The line is a defense of durability over aura: if the work “works,” it doesn’t need you to worry. It needs you to play it.