Art & Creativity Quote by Gavin Bryars

A quiet provocation hides inside Bryars's gentle phrasing: “another way” implies the dominant way of making music doesn’t bother with ordinary people at all. Coming from a composer associated with experimental and contemporary classical worlds, the line reads like a polite refusal of the prestige economy that still governs “serious” music - the conservatory pipeline, the grant circuit, the insider vocabulary that can turn listening into a test you either pass or fail.

His intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-exclusionary. Bryars isn’t saying complexity is bad; he’s saying complexity that never bothers to connect is a dead end. “Touching” does a lot of work here. It’s physical, intimate, almost unprofessional - the opposite of music as a sealed object to be evaluated. He’s pointing toward music as a relationship, not a product: you don’t complete it until it lands in someone’s life.

The subtext also pushes back against a common alibi in avant-garde circles: that difficulty is inherently virtuous. Bryars suggests a different metric of ambition - not how far you can push the form, but how precisely you can reach someone without condescension. “Ordinary people” is a loaded term, too: it challenges the way culture sorts audiences into the “educated” and everyone else, as if feeling were a lesser kind of understanding.

Context matters: postwar modernism often wore austerity as a badge, while later composers searched for new bridges - minimalism, community-based work, hybrid forms. Bryars’s line sits in that lineage, arguing that accessibility can be an artistic choice with teeth, not a retreat.