Art & Creativity Quote by Gavin Bryars

Bryars is puncturing a very 20th-century myth: that “serious” music is a gated community, and the average listener should feel lucky to be allowed near the fence. The phrase “somehow… an idea has developed” is doing quiet but pointed work. He’s not blaming a single villain; he’s indicting a whole ecosystem - conservatories, critics, grant culture, and the modernist prestige economy - that trained audiences to hear confusion as sophistication and to treat pleasure as suspect.

“Man in the street” is a deliberately blunt, almost journalistic stand-in for the non-specialist. Bryars isn’t romanticizing a pure public taste; he’s challenging the condescension embedded in the claim that music requires expert translation. Calling it “arrogant” flips the usual hierarchy. The arrogance isn’t in the listener’s lack of training, but in the creator’s assumption that difficulty automatically equals depth, and that incomprehension is the listener’s moral failure.

The second sentence is the real tell: “and not necessarily a true one.” He doesn’t declare the public always understands; he rejects the certainty of exclusion. That hedge matters. It suggests a composer who knows complexity can be real, but also knows how often “complexity” functions as a social alibi - a way to protect institutions, reputations, and careers from the messy test of being heard.

Contextually, Bryars comes out of a postwar landscape where avant-garde music often positioned itself against mass culture. His jab is less anti-modern than anti-snob: a demand that composers stop hiding behind the fantasy of the enlightened few and reckon with listening as a shared human competence, not a credential.