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

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

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
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
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