Steve Reich Quotations

He was very good. He could sit at a desk and write this music and, unlike a lot of them who faked it, he could really hear it in his head.

I'm going for the brevity award this year, ... To receive this award among so many great artists is in deed an honor.

What I don't want to do is to go and buy a bunch of exotic-looking drums and set up an Afrikanische Musik in New York City.

I've learned over the years that geography is not that important, except that I seem to work better in the country than the city. I get more done. There's just less happening around me, and I have more time and concentration to work on music.

In the pop world, instead of saying I want to get an album by such and such a group, it's better to say I like this particular tune and that one I like less. I think it's much better to get involved with an artist instead of riding up and down the works you like and disregard the works you don't like.

I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.

All music does come from a time and place. I was born and raised in New York. I moved out of New York, but it's inside of me and it will be inside of me until they put me in a box in the ground.

Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

in serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.

It's very important for any artist, in any field, to take their own temperature and check out their own energy, and see what it is they ought to be doing to keep the energy up. Because if your energy is not up, you're going to come up with some really dreary piece of work that no one's going to enjoy.

I write music, and I want people to listen to it and care about it and have it make some difference in their lives. When I'm fortunate for that to happen, then of course I feel very, very good about it.

As a matter of fact, I personally would much rather hear Perotin than Mozart.

I don't care how much people understand what it is that I'm doing, except if they're players in my ensemble or other ensembles. I just want people to be moved by the music. If you're not moved by the music, then everything else falls away. You're not interested in the text, you're not interested in how it was done, and you're not interested in interviewing the composer and all the rest of it.

All great music is contemporary. If it's still alive and kicking, then it's contemporary. If it fades away, it was a period piece. It had its moment, and that was it.

I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other...