Art & Creativity Quote by Terry Riley

Riley is describing a pivot that quietly rewrites the usual story of “experimental” music: not retreating into machines and studios, but dragging the experiment back onto the stage where bodies, breath, and nerves complicate every clean idea. The intent is practical and utopian at once. He wants the rigor of repetition and the control of fragments - the laboratory logic of loops - without the dead perfection of tape. “Live musicians” aren’t just performers here; they’re the variable that makes the system humane.

The subtext is a challenge to the mid-century hierarchy that treated abstraction as something purified by technology and authorial control. Riley’s repetition isn’t meant to flatten expression; it’s meant to redistribute it. A repeated cell becomes a commons: players lock in, drift, re-align, and the “piece” emerges as a social event rather than a monument. That’s why “make it live” lands like a manifesto. He’s not abandoning structure; he’s betting that structure can survive contact with spontaneity.

Context matters. Riley comes out of a moment when composers were testing minimal materials against maximal attention, when jazz, Indian classical music, and tape experiments were all in the air. His language - “abstract fabric of sound” - frames music as texture and environment, not narrative. It also hints at politics: a fabric is woven, collective, interdependent. In Riley’s hands, repetition becomes less a mechanical trick than a way to hear time itself as elastic, shared, and newly inhabited.