Igor Stravinsky Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

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

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
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
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
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
Much of the music is a Merzbild, put together from whatever came to hand. I mean, for example... the Alberti-bass horn solo accompanying the Messenger. I also mean the fusion of such widely divergent types of music as the Folies Bergeres tune at No. 40 ('The girls enter, kicking') and the Wagnerian 7th-chords at Nos. 58 and 74.

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

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

Igor Stravinsky
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

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

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