List of Philip Glass Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.