Politics & Power Quote by Gavin Bryars

“Still” does a lot of work here: it’s a shrug that carries receipts. Bryars isn’t lobbing a manifesto; he’s registering a pattern in cultural history where the romance of Paris as an artistic refuge collides with the reality of gatekeeping. The line is modest on the surface, but its sting is in the understatement. “Pretty hard time” is the British way of pointing at institutional friction without turning it into melodrama.

The context matters because “American composers in France” is almost a genre: from the expatriate mythos (Paris as the place you go to become yourself) to the uneasy politics of taste. France has long treated music as part of its intellectual infrastructure, with conservatories, state patronage, and a powerful critical class. Drop an American into that ecosystem and they’re not just another artist; they’re an import, carrying assumptions about style, craft, ambition, even cultural volume. The subtext is that the problem isn’t talent, it’s translation.

Bryars, as a composer who’s moved between experimental scenes and European institutions, is signaling how “national identity” becomes an aesthetic problem. Americans arrive with jazz, minimalism, or a brash pragmatism; France responds with admiration, suspicion, or condescension, depending on the decade. That’s the hidden tension: France wants the glamour of international modernity, but often on its own terms, with outsiders expected to assimilate quietly.

The quote’s intent is less complaint than calibration: a reminder that artistic migration isn’t a postcard fantasy. It’s negotiation with taste-makers, funding structures, and the subtle xenophobia of “serious culture.”