List of Terry Riley Quotes

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.

Everyone Seems To Be In A Kind Of Accelerated Time Mode That Is Beyond Their Own Control.

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.

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.

Acceleration Is Finite, I Think, According To Some Laws Of Physics.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It's Not What Happens To You In Life That Matters; What Matters Is How You Deal With It!