Daily Inspiration Quote by Gavin Bryars

There is a polite provocation tucked inside Bryars's phrasing: “I’ve heard though” is classic composerly understatement, a way of floating a claim without turning it into a manifesto. He positions himself as both insider and slightly removed observer, signaling that what matters isn’t gossip but a shift in temperature. Then comes the real charge: “a younger generation” “reacting with vigour.” Reaction implies pressure. Vigour implies urgency. Put together, they read like a small aftershock in a culture that, for decades, treated “tonal” as either retrograde or insufficiently serious in the most prestigious corners of European new music.

The subtext is that French composition has long carried a particular institutional gravity: conservatoire lineage, state support, and the postwar prestige of avant-garde modernism (and later, spectralism) as the adult language of “serious” art. Bryars doesn’t name targets, but the implied opponent is a taste regime: the expectation that innovation must be audible as difficulty, that consonance is suspect unless justified by elaborate theory. By specifying “tonal French composers,” he’s not just describing harmony; he’s hinting at a generational renegotiation of permission.

Context matters because Bryars himself has always lived in the borderlands between categories: experimental roots, minimalist sympathies, a lyrical streak that never fully apologized for itself. His ear is trained to notice when the old taboos soften. The line’s intent is less to cheer a comeback than to mark a cultural correction: younger composers treating tonality not as a surrender to nostalgia, but as an available tool - one they can wield with the same intensity modernism once claimed as its exclusive property.