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Igor Stravinsky Quotes
1882–1971 Russia
Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky (Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a Russian-born composer. His musical language evolved over the years through many stylistic periods including neoclassicism and serialism, though he is perhaps most remembered for his early works, written in a primitive style for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; L'Oiseau de Feu (The Firebird), Petrushka and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).
Russia Academics Composers Conductors Pianists Also known as: Stravinsky, Stravinsky, Igor, The Rite of Spring
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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.
Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.
What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.
Themes and Conclusions (1982)
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Composers combine notes, that's all.
Themes and Conclusions (1982)
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.
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: 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.
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
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.
Themes and Conclusions (1982)
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.
Expositions and Developments (1959)
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