Daily Inspiration Quote by Gavin Bryars

Speed, in Gavin Bryars's hands, isn’t haste; it’s a way of staying honest to the first spark before it gets sanded down by overthinking. “I work very fast” reads like a refusal of the romantic myth that serious composition must be slow, tortured, and monumental. Bryars is a composer associated with patience and duration in the listener’s experience (the long-breath atmosphere of his best-known work), yet here he admits that the making can be brisk. That tension is the point: a piece can feel spacious without having been built at a glacial pace.

The phrase “keeping the ideas flowing” frames creativity as momentum, almost physical. Flow isn’t just productivity-speak; it’s an aesthetic stance. Bryars has often worked with found material, improvisers, and open forms where the quickest route to something alive is to keep the channel open. When you stop too long, the idea turns into a concept; it becomes something you argue yourself into rather than something you hear.

Then comes the check on all that romantic spontaneity: “but making sure they come out the way I intended.” That “but” is the subtext. He’s defending craft against the cult of instinct. Fast doesn’t mean sloppy; it means decisive. Intention becomes the ethical core: the composer as editor, sculpting the rush of invention into a specific emotional and structural outcome. It’s a compact manifesto for a working method that prizes immediacy while insisting on control - the discipline required to make music that sounds inevitable rather than merely inspired.