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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

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Philip Glass
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 31
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Philip Morris Glass
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More quotes by Philip Glass

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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.
Philip Glass
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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
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I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.
Philip Glass
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You practice and you get better. It's very simple.
Philip Glass
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I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.
Philip Glass
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Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.
Philip Glass
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In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.
Philip Glass
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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.
Philip Glass
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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
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I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in it's part of the music world.
Philip Glass
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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.
Philip Glass
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I'd say the differences are more interesting than the similarities at this point. Certainly no one would ever mistake my music for Steve's [ Reich].
Philip Glass
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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
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But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.
Philip Glass
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I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.
Philip Glass
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Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living in different worlds because were on different continents.
Philip Glass
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It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
Philip Glass
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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.
Philip Glass
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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
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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.
Philip Glass