Composition is selective improvisation.
IGOR STRAVINSKYNothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any.
More Igor Stravinsky 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 -
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa Lobos?
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
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 -
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
IGOR STRAVINSKY -
Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself.
IGOR STRAVINSKY