Quotes by Philip Glass - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
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You practice and you get better. It's very simple.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Get Better
Practice
Simple
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If you remember your lineage, you will never feel lonely.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Lineage
Lonely
Remember
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It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Needs
Written
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You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That’s the only secret.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Morning
Secret
Up Early
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I don't know what I'm doing and it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Creativity
Interesting
Knowing
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
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In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Order
Style
Technique
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What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Developing
Revelations
Rhythm
Structure
Use
Overall
Revelation
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What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Might
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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Done
Knows
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If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Bases
Choices
Style
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
People
School
Writing
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There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Language
Term
Use
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Ifs
Language
Technique
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Piano
Play
Writing
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I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Minimalist
Used
Years
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I like the idea that [Mahatma] Gandhi is appearing now in an opera hall in all these different places, and people kind of think about it again.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Ideas
People
Thinking
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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].
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Differences
Interesting
Mistake
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Focus
Listening
Talking
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Radical Change
Thinking
Years
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I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Travel
America
Mean
Melting
Melting Pot
Stew
Great World America
Great Travel World
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The hardest thing about traveling is that mostly you get to a point - and it always happens on every tour - where you can choose between eating and sleeping, but you can't do both.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Eating
Hardest
Sleep
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I'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
People
Thinking
Use
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Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living in different worlds because were on different continents.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Different
Together
World
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Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Continents
Different Worlds
Exploding
Everywhere
Pretend
Longer
Traditions
Worlds
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Cities
Nice
Piano
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So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Drama
Real
Writing
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But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Running
Differences
Musical
Pieces
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The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Cages
People
Real
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I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Age
Careers
Thinking
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Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Fifty
Mean
Names
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Men
Mean
Writing
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I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Band
Mean
Writing
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Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Thinking
Trying
Way
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Character
Dark
Thinking
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I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Different
Real
Trying
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The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't. There's too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it's a constant racket. In the same way we don't see, and in the same way we don't feel, we don't touch, we don't taste.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Listening
Too Much
Voice
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Pieces
Play
Thinking
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Play
Symphony
Writing
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I've been working in theater, really, since about 1965. I started working with the Mabou Mines about then, and in a way I've always worked in the theater, but it's never been a main part of my work. And it wasn't until Einstein that I kind of shifted into high gear with theater, working with Bob, with Bob Wilson. And since then I find it a very attractive form to work in. It's just an extension of my work.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Bob
Gears
Way
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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.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Beach
Thinking
Writing
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It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing smaller projects.[The opera] Akhnaten fits in with Gandhi and Einstein, so that forms a trilogy in a way.I picked people who were these kind of larger than life characters, who kind of changed the world they lived in by almost the force of their personality and their inventiveness. People that I think not only do I admire but I think they're admirable people.
Philip Glass / Film Score Composer
Character
Thinking
Writing
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