Philip Glass Quotes
Best 20 Words Without Music Quotes by Philip Glass
Words Without Music Quotes
“An authentic personal style cannot be achieved without a solid technique at its base.”
“As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.”
“At the end of my third year as a full-time student, when I won a $750 prize, I immediately went to a BMW motorcycle shop in the Eighties on the West Side and bought a used BMW R69 500-cc motorcycle, all black and, though used, in great shape.”
“Between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.”
“I wasn’t going to medical school — what did I care? I didn’t think the grades mattered. They weren’t a systematic appraisal of what I knew.
I was more interested in hanging out with someone like Aristotle Skalides, a wandering intellectual and would-be academic who wasn’t a student but who liked to engage young people in the coffee shop in discussions about philosophy.
Spending an hour with him at the coffee shop was like going and spending an hour in the classroom. I was more interested in my general education than the courses.”
“If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new. As long as you know what you’re doing, nothing much of interest is going to happen.”
“In a clear way, we are bound to our culture. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see.”
“In my case, I chose Mahler's Ninth Symphony and literally copied it note by note onto large sheets of orchestral notation. Mahler is famous for his mastery of orchestration details, and although I did not complete the transcription of the work, I learned a great deal from that exercise.
It is exactly in this way that the painters of before and now have studied painting (some can still be seen today in museums copying classical works). This method of copying from the past is one of the most powerful tools in practicing and developing solid orchestral technique.”
“In the world of painting, everyone expected innovations and new ideas, but in the world of music, with a much more conservative environment, there was no room for new ideas.
The music world was still haunted by a 'modern music' that was over fifty years old. That reflection was a moment of liberation for me.”
“Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The 'out there' stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.”
“One night, for example, I picked up Salvador Dalí on Fifty-Seventh Street and took him to the St. Regis Hotel, not that far away. It was really him, moustache pointing straight up — the whole picture-perfect Dalí.
I was flabbergasted. I only had him for a few blocks, and I was dying to say something to him, but I was completely tongue-tied.
He paid me, tipped me, and a doorman came to sweep him away.”
“One of Allen Ginsberg’s T-shirts said: Well, while I’m here, I’ll do the work. And what’s the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”
“The actual sound of Central European art music, especially the chamber music, was a solid part of me from an early age but maybe not audible in my music until almost five decades later, when I began to compose sonatas and unaccompanied string pieces as well as quite a lot of piano music.
Though I did write a few string quartets for the Kronos Quartet, and some symphonies besides, these works from my forties, fifties, and sixties didn’t owe that much to the past. Now that I’m in my seventies, my present music does. It’s funny how it happened this way, but there it is.”
“The Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny — you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing.
But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.”
“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.”
“The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”
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“I don't want to be in the mainstream. I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.”
“The people there were obsessed with gold. They were convinced they were going to make a fortune, and some of them did, but they also spent it.”
“The point was that the world of music — its language, beauty, and mystery — was already urging itself on me. Some shift had already begun.
Music was no longer a metaphor for the real world somewhere out there. It was becoming the opposite. The 'out there' stuff was the metaphor and the real part was, and is to this day, the music.”
“The study of science became the study of the history of science, which allowed me to begin to understand what the scientific personality should be like.
That early revelation is reflected in Galileo Galilei, which I composed forty-five years later, in which his experiments are transformed into a dance piece where balls and inclined planes appear.
He found the biographical aspects of scientists deeply interesting, and the operas on Galileo, Kepler, and Einstein pay homage to everything I learned about scientists and science during those years.”
“Truth be told, I was far from horrified by the prospect of 'traveling from city to city and living in hotels'.
I was rather looking forward eagerly to that — a life filled with music and travel — and completely thrilled with the whole idea.”
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