Terry Riley Quotations

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 feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people.

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 a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

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 patterns.

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 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

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 to be a human being.

Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.

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 I just dropped out and went to India.

Acceleration is finite, I think, according to some laws of physics.

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 make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.

I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him.

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 really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn't seem to get tired.

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 much money you had.

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 or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking.

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, musical patterns.

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 also had saxophone taped delays.

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 would just play back the saxophone.

La monte's idea was just to have this one big form that were just long tones, I think that was the real essential heart of minimalist music.

Especially on trans-Atlantic flights, flights that take a long time, flights that happen at night when the cabin is dark,

Pran Nath always encouraged me to do my own composition and experiments with Western classical music, along with the pure study of Indian classical music. I think he also felt that something of this depth could also be assimilated in America and would be uniquely our own, since it's been transplanted here.

People really have stepped up to the plate.

A lot of things are happening. We've had people who arrived here on one day and on the next day have found a job. A lot of these people are hungry for jobs.

This morning I was practicing raga, and at one point I was singing a long tone and I became very peaceful and still. I thought this is really 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, just to be in a state of being to the highest point.

The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they’ve developed together as a group.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

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 is the best place you have ever been, and yet there is nothing there.

It's not what happens to you in life that matters; what matters is how you deal with it!

The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.

The danger is not so much in an assault or robbery at the airport, but an airport is a good place for the thieves to target their victims.