Terry Riley
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"Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley" is an American composer and performing musician intrinsically associated with the minimalist music/minimalist school of Classical music/Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement. His work has been deeply influenced by both jazz and Indian classical music.

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People really have stepped up to the plate.

It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people. Everyone seems to be in a kind of accelerated time mode that is beyond their own control.

Pran Nath always encouraged me to do my own composition and experiments with Western classical music, along with the pure study of Indian classical music. I think he also felt that something of this depth could also be assimilated in America and would be uniquely our own, since it's been transplanted here.

This morning I was practicing raga, and at one point I was singing a long tone and I became very peaceful and still. I thought this is really the highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else, just to be in a state of being to the highest point.

The danger is not so much in an assault or robbery at the airport, but an airport is a good place for the thieves to target their victims.

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.

The incredible thing about the human mind is that is didn't come with an instruction book.

A lot of things are happening. We've had people who arrived here on one day and on the next day have found a job. A lot of these people are hungry for jobs.

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.