Igor Stravinsky Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

Far from implying the repetition of what has been, 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
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
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
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
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
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

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
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
My music is best understood by children and animals.

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

Igor Stravinsky