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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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Philip Glass
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 31
Composer
Film Score Composer
Librettist
Musician
Pianist
Supporting Actor
Baltimore
Maryland
Philip Morris Glass
Rather
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Bigs
Changes
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Small
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Four
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More quotes by Philip Glass

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You practice and you get better. It's very simple.
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I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.
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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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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