Words Without Music Quotes

“If you don't know what to do, there's actually a chance of doing something new.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“The past is reinvented and becomes the future. But the lineage is everything.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“I didn’t sleep at all that night. Soon after leaving the station, the lights were out. It was just an old passenger train from Dixie to the Midwest, with no amenities of any kind. No lights, no reading, nothing to do but make friends with the sounds of the night train. The wheels on the track made endless patterns, and I was caught up in it almost at once. Years later, studying with Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s great tabla player and music partner, I practiced the endless cycles of 2s and 3s that form the heart of the Indian tal system. From this I learned the tools by which apparent chaos could be heard as an unending array of shifting beats and patterns. But on this memorable night, I was innocent of all that.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“IN A CLEAR WAY, WE ARE BOUND TO OUR CULTURE. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“an authentic personal style cannot be achieved without a solid technique at its base.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“In the scene when Belle begs La Bête for permission to visit her father, La Bête, moved by her plea, decides to let her go, but requires her, at the cost of his own life, to return in a week. He explains to her that his magic exists by the force of five power objects—the rose, the key, the mirror, the glove, and the horse. These five are the root of La Bête’s creativity and magic. The point is, if a young artist were to ask Cocteau directly what he would need to pursue the life and work of an artist, these five elements would be the answer. The rose represents beauty. The key represents technique—literally, the means by which the “door” to creativity is opened. The horse represents strength and stamina. The mirror represents the path itself, without which the dream of the artist cannot be accomplished. The meaning of the glove eluded me for a long time, but finally, and unexpectedly, I understood that the glove represents nobility. By this symbol Cocteau asserts that the true nobility of mankind are the artist-magician creators. This scene, which leads directly to the resolution of the fairy tale, is framed as the most significant moment of the film and is the message we are meant to take away with us: Cocteau is teaching about creativity in terms of the power of the artist, which we now understand to be the power of transformation.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn’t have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“And, between teaching with love and teaching with fear, I have to say the benefit of each is about the same.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“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.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“I was on my way to college with two friends from high school, Sidney Jacobs and Tom Steiner, both of whom I knew quite well. But our going out to the Midwest together was unplanned, sheer chance. They were part of a local, self-made club they called the Phalanx—a group of superbright, geeky teenagers who banded together for mutual company and entertainment. I knew them from the Maryland Chess Club, though, being several years younger, I was tolerated to a degree but had never been a part of their highly introverted and intellectual group.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music

“Esos innovadores del teatro, Jerzy Grotowski, el director polaco de teatro experimental y autor de Hacia un teatro pobre, Peter Brook, el director inglés, y el Living Theater, el grupo de teatro experimental fundado por Julian Beck”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)

“Albert Fine murió en 1987,”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)

“movimiento Fluxus.”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)

“En mi caso, elegí la Novena sinfonía de Mahler y, literalmente, la fui copiando nota por nota en grandes hojas de notación orquestal. Mahler es famoso por su maestría en los detalles de orquestación y, aunque no completé la transcripción de la obra, aprendí mucho de aquel ejercicio. Es exactamente de ese modo como los pintores de antes y de ahora han estudiado pintura (todavía hoy se puede ver a algunos en los museos copiando obras clásicas). Este método de copiar del pasado es una de las herramientas más poderosas a la hora de practicar y desarrollar una sólida técnica orquestal.”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)

“En el mundo de la pintura, todos esperaban innovaciones e ideas nuevas, pero, en el mundo de la música, con un entorno mucho más conservador, no había espacio para las nuevas ideas. El mundo de la música seguía obsesionado por una «música moderna» que tenía más de cincuenta años. Aquella reflexión supuso para mí un momento de liberación.”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)

“Así, el estudio de la ciencia se convertía en el estudio de la historia de la ciencia, lo que me permitió empezar a entender cómo debía ser la personalidad científica. Esa temprana revelación se ve reflejada en Galileo Galilei, que compuse cuarenta y cinco años más tarde, en la que sus experimentos se transforman en una pieza de danza donde aparecen las bolas y los planos inclinados. Encontraba los aspectos biográficos de los científicos profundamente interesantes y las óperas sobre Galileo, Kepler y Einstein rinden homenaje a todo lo que aprendí durante aquellos años sobre los científicos y la ciencia.”
― Philip Glass, Palabras sin música: Memorias (Cultura Popular)