Philip Glass Quotes

I think that the melodic piece of the puzzle in music is the most esoteric and difficult to quantify.

I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.

You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.

This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion.

I want to know exactly how the first few measures are going to go, and the rough shape of a movement or the whole piece and its essential character.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

The songs come along at their own pace when they are ready.

What a song is is a subjective thing. There's no one real definition for it.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

I'm driven by the idea of characters and the song-cycle form is similar to a musical.

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

There definitely isn't a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I'll just write down a phrase, or I'll have an idea that's attached to just a few chords. Other times, it's work.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

I've got so much material; like, it feels as if every day I'm coming up with so many riffs.