Philip Glass Quotes
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My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.
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I'd say the differences are more interesting than the similarities at this point. Certainly no one would ever mistake my music for Steve's [ Reich].
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What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.
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I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.
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Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.
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In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.
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It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
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I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.
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You practice and you get better. It's very simple.
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I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.
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I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world.
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If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.
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What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.
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A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.
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I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.
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I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice about being on the road and focusing on something you want to do.
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I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.
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The work I've done is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing.