Time & Perspective Quote by Gavin Bryars

Music history, in Gavin Bryars's framing, isn't a museum you tour; it's a river you keep failing to step into the same way twice. The phrase "flowed under the bridges" carries a double charge: it shrugs off the fantasy of perfect recovery (you can't wade back and retrieve what passed) while insisting that what’s gone on moving still shapes the banks. For a composer associated with porous boundaries between classical, experimental, and vernacular sound, that metaphor isn’t casual. It’s a quiet argument against the idea of musical progress as a clean staircase of masterpieces, and against nostalgia as a form of expertise.

The intent feels partly defensive, partly liberating. Bryars is nudging listeners and critics away from a gatekept timeline - the canon as a toll booth - toward a more ecological sense of influence: currents, tributaries, debris, eddies. Music history "flowing" implies that genres aren’t sealed containers but leaky infrastructures, built and rebuilt by performers, technologies, recording practices, and social memory. The bridge is the institution (the academy, the concert hall, the label, the archive) that wants to stand above the mess and declare a view. Underneath, the real action keeps happening without permission.

There’s subtextual weariness too: years of debate about authenticity, lineage, and avant-garde novelty look faintly absurd when placed beside the long, indifferent movement of time. Bryars’s line invites a more modest posture: compose and listen as if you’re joining a current, not issuing a verdict.