Art & Creativity Quote by Gavin Bryars

Bryars is drawing a line in the sand against a whole ecosystem that’s supposed to be his natural habitat: the contemporary-music circuit that runs on residencies, panels, grant language, and premiere culture. Coming from a composer associated with experimental traditions, the remark lands as a quiet provocation. He’s not rejecting “new music” as sound; he’s rejecting “new music” as an academic category, a branded precinct with its own etiquette and gatekeepers.

The phrase “academic area” does the real work. It frames modern-music festivals less as public gatherings than as professional conferences in concert dress, where novelty can become an institutional requirement and listening becomes a credentialing exercise. Bryars’s refusal reads like an aesthetic and social preference: he’s interested in music that can breathe outside the seminar room, outside the expectation that it must announce its theoretical alibi. The blunt “at all” sharpens the point, suggesting not mild disinterest but an allergy to the atmosphere: the self-consciousness, the internal politics, the sense of art made primarily for peers.

Context matters: Bryars emerged in the postwar British experimental milieu (Cardew-adjacent, conceptually literate) yet built a career also rooted in collaborations and audiences beyond the specialist circuit. This line protects that identity. It’s also a critique of how institutions domesticate the avant-garde: once “new” becomes a department, the work can start serving the infrastructure meant to support it. Bryars is insisting that his compass points elsewhere: toward musicianship, encounter, and a kind of cultural life where modern music isn’t a niche with a badge scanner.