Terry Riley Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him.”