Welcome to our collection of quotes by Igor Stravinsky. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Stravinsky's compositional career was notable for its stylistic diversity. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The last transformed the way in which subsequent composers thought about rhythmic structure and was largely responsible for Stravinsky's enduring reputation as a revolutionary who pushed the boundaries of musical design. His "Russian phase", which continued with works such as Renard, L'Histoire du soldat, and Les noces, was followed in the 1920s by a period in which he turned to neoclassicism. The works from this period tended to make use of traditional musical forms (concerto grosso, fugue, and symphony) and drew from earlier styles, especially those of the 18th century. In the 1950s, Stravinsky adopted serial procedures. His compositions of this period shared traits with examples of his earlier output: rhythmic energy, the construction of extended melodic ideas out of a few two- or three-note cells, and clarity of form and instrumentation.
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
He was a six and a half foot scowl.
(on Rachmaninov).
The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.
The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.
Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
Hurry? I have no time to hurry.
Composition is frozen improvisation.
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
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.
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.
Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos.
Composition is selective improvisation.
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
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.
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one.
What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.
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.
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.
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
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.
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.
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.
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.
Music is...the coordination between man and time.
I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.
All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.
An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.
One lives by memory ... and not by truth.
The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.
There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.
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.
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.
Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?
The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.
I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk!
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street any more 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.
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.
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
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.
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
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.
I am an inventor of music.
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.
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: 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.
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
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.
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.
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
What force is more potent than love?
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
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.
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.
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
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.