Terry Riley Quotes on Music (6 Quotes)

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.

Pran Nath always encouraged me to do my own composition and experiments with Western classical music, along with the pure study of Indian classical music. I think he also felt that something of this depth could also be assimilated in America and would be uniquely our own, since it's been transplanted here.

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.

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.

This morning I was practicing raga, and at one point I was singing a long tone and I became very peaceful and still. I thought this is really the highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else, just to be in a state of being to the highest point.

La monte's idea was just to have this one big form that were just long tones, I think that was the real essential heart of minimalist music.