Igor Stravinsky > Quotes

“I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.”
― Igor Stravinsky

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

“I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite — matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities. And such matter presents itself to me together with limitations. I must in turn impose mine upon it. So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity. Well, in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible.
My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
I shall go even further: 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, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

“Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”
― 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

“my childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“To continue in one path is to go backward.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967]”
― Igor Stravinsky

“Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“He was a six and a half foot scowl.

(on Rachmaninov)”
― Igor Stravinsky

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.”
― 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, An Autobiography

“Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.
[Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990]”
― 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, An Autobiography

“There is no beauty in Music itself, the beauty is within the listener”
― Igor Stravinsky

“** همه ی مردان دیوانه اند

ایگور استراوینسکی
اپرای رکس پروگرس”
― Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex/The Rake's Progress: English National Opera Guide 43

“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

“فرد تنها هنگامی احساس رهایی می کند که نه در قید احساسش باشد، نه منطقش

ایگور استراوینسکی
اپرای رکس پروگرس*”
― Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex/The Rake's Progress: English National Opera Guide 43

“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, quoted in DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0130493465, Ch. 3. from Igor Stravinsky' Autobiography (1962). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 54.”
― Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography

“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

“I love ballet and am more interested in it than in anything else. . . . For the only form of scenic art that sets itself, as its cornerstone, the tasks of beauty, and nothing else, is ballet.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation.”
― Igor Stravinsky, Conversations With Igor Stravinsky

“My music is best undrstood by children and animals.”
― Igor Stravinsky

“The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.”
― Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

“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.”
― Stravinsky