Terry Riley Quotes

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Spiritual, Sex, Real

  54 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Music, Desire, Best Place

  12 Copy quote

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

  Terry Riley

  Book, Mind, Incredibles

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Gdp, Musical, Western Music

  16 Copy quote

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

  Terry Riley

  What Matters, Matter, Deals

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Fun, Writing, Play

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Tired, Play, Long

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Race, Break Through, Understanding

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Play, Musician, Sound

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Simple, Pieces, Village

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Air, Careers, Long

  7 Copy quote

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

  Terry Riley

  Kind, Seems

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Moving, Thinking, Important

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Writing, Player, Intuition

  7 Copy quote

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

  Terry Riley

  Thinking, Law, Physics

  30 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Technology, Dancer, Tape

  Interview with Gamall Awad and Ammon Haggerty, www.qaswa.com. October 9, 1992.

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  People, Feelings, Important

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Terry Riley

  Night, Talking, Delay

  4 Copy quote

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