Philip Glass Quotes
-
Finally, ultimately, you write music for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolation. But finally the man that writes the music is alone. And I have to respond to those criteria which are almost like inner needs or inner responses.
-
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.
-
It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.
-
You practice and you get better. It's very simple.
-
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.
-
What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world.
-
If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.