Terry Riley Quotes

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.

Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Music deals with time and timing. It's so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it's critical, so critical. And if it's not there, it not only feels wrong, but it ruins things.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

And if you are playing in several meters at once, there has to be a - not a rigid - but there definitely has to be a reference to a common pulse in the band.

There's not much music I'll listen to if it doesn't have pretty heavy swing. Rhythm is so important. Punk rock would have more power and feeling if it had swing.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.

The core of all the music I love is a good bass line and a good rhythm.

When you use a metronome, you'll start to notice where the notes are falling, if they're on the beat, behind the beat, between the beat, and so on.

My playing is always just a little on top of the beat. I can't lay down the kind of groove that Brad Wilk can. I'd really have to lay back to do that; it just doesn't feel natural to me.

Rhythm is the pulse of music.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

I like rhythmic things that butt up against each other in a cool kind of way.

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

Yeah, one of the main ways is for songs that make me want to move.

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

I learned to play drums to the 'Blue Album.'

Our songs all carry the same way.

Most drummers are covered with a million drums, and everyone is like, 'What are you doing back there?'

I can't hear rhythm.