Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
IGOR STRAVINSKYThe performance has developed to such an extent in recent years that it challenges the music itself and will soon threaten it with relegation.
More Igor Stravinsky Quotes
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I never understood the need for a “live” audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
To continue in one path is to go backward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Composition is selective improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
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 -
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Revolution means turning the wheel.
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 -
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Good composers don’t borrow, they steal.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Hurry? I have no time to hurry.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Silence, which will save from shame, will also deprive me of fame.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
One’s belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one’s conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren’t always right.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I am an inventor of music.
IGOR STRAVINSKY