Igor Stravinsky Quotes

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

Igor Stravinsky
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
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

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

Igor Stravinsky
The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.

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

Igor Stravinsky
We have a duty towards music; namely to invent it....Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality; whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out.

Igor Stravinsky
Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.

Igor Stravinsky
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Igor Stravinsky
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
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
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
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Igor Stravinsky
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.

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

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

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

Igor Stravinsky
Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.

Igor Stravinsky
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
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
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
Academism results when the reasons for the rule change, but not the rule.

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
The phenomenon of music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man [sic] and time.

Igor Stravinsky