Top 85 Igor Stravinsky Quotes
#3. Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
Igor Stravinsky
#4. I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
#6. Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
Igor Stravinsky
#7. Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.
Igor Stravinsky
#9. Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
Igor Stravinsky
#10. I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.
Igor Stravinsky
#11. The profound meaning of music's essential aim ... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being
Igor Stravinsky
#12. Music is given to us specifically to make order of things, to move from an anarchic, individualistic state to a regulated, perfectly concious one, which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
#13. Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
Igor Stravinsky
#14. Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
#15. The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.
Igor Stravinsky
#16. One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
Igor Stravinsky
#17. To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
Igor Stravinsky
#18. A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
Igor Stravinsky
#19. Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.
[Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]
Igor Stravinsky
#20. A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
Igor Stravinsky
#21. Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
Igor Stravinsky
#22. Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.
Igor Stravinsky
#23. Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
Igor Stravinsky
#24. It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
Igor Stravinsky
#25. My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
Igor Stravinsky
#26. All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.
Igor Stravinsky
#27. I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky
#28. One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.
Igor Stravinsky
#31. There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.
Igor Stravinsky
#33. It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism
Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete
opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
Igor Stravinsky
#35. It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.
Igor Stravinsky
#36. Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
Igor Stravinsky
#38. I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.
Igor Stravinsky
#39. I live neither in the past nor in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
Igor Stravinsky
#41. A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
Igor Stravinsky
#42. Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.
Igor Stravinsky
#43. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
Igor Stravinsky
#44. The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
Igor Stravinsky
#45. I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.
Igor Stravinsky
#46. I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
#48. We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
Igor Stravinsky
#49. I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
Igor Stravinsky
#50. The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
Igor Stravinsky
#51. Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.
Igor Stravinsky
#53. My childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.
Igor Stravinsky
#54. The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
Igor Stravinsky
#55. The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
Igor Stravinsky
#56. Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
Igor Stravinsky
#58. The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.
Igor Stravinsky
#59. An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
Igor Stravinsky
#60. Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
#61. I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.
Igor Stravinsky
#62. The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
Igor Stravinsky
#64. The performance of performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.
Igor Stravinsky
#65. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
#66. I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
Igor Stravinsky
#67. The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.
Igor Stravinsky
#68. Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Igor Stravinsky
#70. The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.
Igor Stravinsky
#71. Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
Igor Stravinsky
#72. Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
Igor Stravinsky
#73. We can neither put back the clock nor slow down our forward speed, and as we are already flying pilotless, on instrument controls, it is even too late to ask where we are going.
Igor Stravinsky
#74. Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.
Igor Stravinsky
#76. Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Igor Stravinsky
#79. The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
Igor Stravinsky
#80. In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
Igor Stravinsky
#81. When I discovered that I had been made custodian of this gift, in my earliest childhood, I pledged myself to God to be worthy of it, but I have received uncovenanted mercies all my life. The custodian has too often kept faith on his all-too-worldly terms.
Igor Stravinsky
#82. What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.
Igor Stravinsky
#83. Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
Igor Stravinsky
#84. Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
#85. Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.
Igor Stravinsky
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