Terry Riley famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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
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
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 #Would Be #Fabric
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 #Rainbow
Acceleration is finite, I think, according to some laws of physics.
-- Terry Riley

#Thinking #Law #Physics
The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.
-- Terry Riley

#Book #Mind #Incredibles
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 #Understanding #Break
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 #Matter
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 #Patterns
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
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 #Craving
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 theyâ€™ve developed together as a group.
-- Terry Riley

#Writing #Player #Intuition

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