Philip Glass Quotes

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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 Quotes: The hardest thing about traveling
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 Quotes: My biggest problem about writing
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 Quotes: What you hear depends on
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 Quotes: I consider the first 20
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 Quotes: I'm interested in what happens
What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.
Philip Glass Quotes: What came to me as
In one of our early conversations, Bob said to me, "I like Einstein as a character, because everybody knows who he is." In a sense, we didn't need to tell an Einstein story because everybody who eventually saw our Einstein brought their own story with them. In the four months that we toured Einstein in Europe we had many occasions to meet with our audiences, and people occasionally would ask us what it "meant." But far more often people told us what it meant to them, sometimes even giving us plot elucidation and complete scenario. The point about Einstein was clearly not what it "meant" but that it was meaningful as generally experienced by the people who saw it.
From the viewpoint of the creators, of course, that is exactly the way it was constructed to work. Though we made no attempt at all to tell a story, we did use dramaturgical devices to create a clearly paced overall dramatic shape. For instance, a "finale" is a dramaturgical device; an "epilogue" is another. Using contrasting sections, like a slow trial scene followed by a fast dance scene, is a dramaturgical device, and we used such devices freely. I am sure that the absence of direct connotative "meaning" made it all the easier for the spectator to personalize the experience by supplying his own special "meaning" out of his own experience, while the work itself remained resolutely abstract.
As to the use of three visual schemes, or images, Bob often mentioned that he envisioned them in three distinct wa
Philip Glass Quotes: In one of our early
When I work with Godfrey, I don't spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don't want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like "Buy these shoes" or "Go to this casino."
The strategy of art is precisely the opposite. I would describe it this way: When you listen to a piece of music and you look at an image at the same time, you are metaphorically making a journey to that image. It's a metaphorical distance, but it's a real one all the same, and it's in that journey that the spectator forms a relationship to the music and the image. Without that, it's all made for us and we don't have to invent anything. In works like Godfrey's, and in works, for that matter, like Bob Wilson's, the spectators are supposed to invent something. They are supposed to tell the story of Einstein. In Godfrey's movies Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, the words in the title are the only words there are. The journey that we make from
Philip Glass Quotes: When I work with Godfrey,
If you don't know what to do, there's actually a chance of doing something new.
Philip Glass Quotes: If you don't know what
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 Quotes: I've been called a minimalist
It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
Philip Glass Quotes: It doesn't need to be
In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.
Philip Glass Quotes: In retrospect, I think those
the point of writing music and experiencing music isn't to make people comfortable necessarily
Philip Glass Quotes: the point of writing music
Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.
Philip Glass Quotes: Years later, in 1987, I
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 Quotes: The work I've done is
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 Quotes: If you don't have a
I don't know what I'm doing and it's the not knowing that makes it interesting.
Philip Glass Quotes: I don't know what I'm
You get up early in the morning and you work all day. That's the only secret.
Philip Glass Quotes: You get up early in
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 Quotes: Traditions are imploding and exploding
The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.
Philip Glass Quotes: The music that I was
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 Quotes: A new language requires a
What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.
Philip Glass Quotes: What I've noticed is that
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