Art & Creativity Quote by Luciano Berio

Berio’s line is a quiet rebuke to the lazy sport of ranking art like consumer tech: Version 2.0 is “better,” Version 1.0 is “obsolete.” For a composer who made a career out of splicing past and present - folding folk material into modernist textures, turning Mahler into a hall of mirrors, treating the orchestra like an archive you can remix - “progress” is the wrong metaphor. Evolution is not a ladder; it’s mutation, adaptation, survival under new pressures.

The throwaway parenthesis, “as I find myself forever saying,” matters. It frames the remark as a recurring argument, the sort of thing you repeat because the culture keeps demanding winners and losers: tonal vs. atonal, serialism vs. lyricism, “difficult” music vs. “accessible” music. Berio’s impatience suggests he’s heard the moral panic before: that new music is decay, that modernism is a dead end, that tradition is being vandalized. His counter is slyly democratic. If music “transforms itself,” then Beethoven isn’t a sacred peak; he’s one moment in a longer metabolism.

There’s also self-defense in the phrasing. Berio is protecting experimentation from the charge of arrogance. He’s not claiming the avant-garde is superior; he’s claiming it’s necessary, because the world changes and sound responds. The subtext: taste can be conservative, but history isn’t. Music doesn’t ask permission to become what it needs to be.