Art & Creativity Quote by Terry Riley

Riley is describing a revolution in the plainest possible terms: take what Western concert music treated as background material - ostinato, accompaniment, the “mere” engine under melody - and promote it to the whole point. The provocation isn’t that repetition existed; Bach, Ravel, Stravinsky all used it. It’s that Riley strips away the alibi of tune and development, insisting that repeated patterns can carry meaning on their own, like a painting that refuses to turn into a story.

The subtext is a quiet jab at the prestige economy of European art music, where progress is typically measured by harmonic drama, thematic transformation, and the composer’s cleverness in “going somewhere.” Riley proposes a different metric: staying put long enough that time itself becomes the subject. Repetition stops being simplistic and turns into a perceptual test. Your ear starts hearing micro-changes, phase-y accidents, and the social texture of performance - how players lock in, drift, and re-align. In that sense, the “without anything” is less emptying out than clearing space.

Context matters: early 1960s America, with tape loops, jazz improvisation, and an appetite for non-Western cyclic forms in the air. Riley’s minimalism also anticipates the culture to come: the loop as a modern condition, from dance music to ambient to algorithmic feeds. He frames it as “my contribution,” but the line reads like a manifesto for a whole listening posture: surrender the demand for narrative, and pay attention to duration, pattern, and trance.