Igor Stravinsky Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

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
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Igor Stravinsky
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
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
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
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

Igor Stravinsky
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
I was…attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing simple music, blamed for deserting modernism, accused of renouncing my true Russian heritage. People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried sacrilege : The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone. To them all my answer was and is the same: You respect, but I love.

Igor Stravinsky
Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all…music expresses itself.

Igor Stravinsky
Vivaldi is greatly overrated — a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.

Igor Stravinsky
Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance…Tradition presupposes the reality of what endures.

Igor Stravinsky
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
To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell.

Igor Stravinsky
For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.

Igor Stravinsky
Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures.

Igor Stravinsky
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
The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

Igor Stravinsky
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
All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

Igor Stravinsky
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.

Igor Stravinsky