Terry Riley Quotes

20 quotes in 338 categories

• The highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else.…
• It's not what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is how you deal with it!
• Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical…
• I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how…
• We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is…
• The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.
• Acceleration is finite, I think, according to some laws of physics.
• I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then…
• Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and…
• Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to…
• Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.
• I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him.
• It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the…
• It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development…
• So, essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns,…
• Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break…
• I really didn't have a plan, I just went in and started playing. one of my specialties was to be able to play for a…
• Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60's with this little harmonium, and I…
• Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called…

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