Success Quote by Gavin Bryars

Innovation, Bryars implies, isn’t a vibe or a branding exercise; it’s a budget line with risk baked in. By likening commissioning and experimenting in music to a “research department in a scientific laboratory,” he smuggles art into the language institutions respect most: R&D, outcomes, iterative testing. It’s a canny move from a composer who has spent a career on the border between the concert hall and the avant-garde, where the difference between “important” and “unprogrammable” often comes down to whether an organisation can justify the uncertainty.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to cultural managers who treat new work as optional garnish while relying on the guaranteed returns of the canon. Bryars argues that failure isn’t an embarrassment to be concealed; it’s the admission price. “You’ll make some bad mistakes” reads like preemptive cover for boards and funders: if you want a living art form, you have to tolerate prototypes, dead ends, pieces that don’t land. He’s reframing “mistake” as evidence of seriousness, not incompetence.

The most revealing phrase is “energise the organisation.” The point isn’t only the artworks produced; it’s the internal effect of trying. New work forces ensembles, administrators, and audiences out of autopilot. It refreshes craft, conversation, and identity. Bryars is selling experimentation as organisational hygiene: without it, institutions don’t just get conservative. They get tired.