Stravinsky's Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Stravinsky's quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

You may not be aware of this but Leonard Bernstein won another award, for explaining the music of Igor Stravinsky ... to Igor Stravinsky! —
Victor Borge

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

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine. —
Patricia Highsmith

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune. —
Igor Stravinsky

The man has accumulated a repertoire of facial tics and blinks that demand nothing less than a complete musical score by Stravinsky. —
Anonymous

Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all whether there will be any. —
Igor Stravinsky

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being? —
Igor Stravinsky

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that. —
Esa-Pekka Salonen

Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it. —
Igor Stravinsky

Art postulates communion, and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself. —
Igor Stravinsky

A good composer does not imitate; he steals. —
Igor Stravinsky

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 audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor. —
Igor Stravinsky

My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey. —
Igor Stravinsky

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles. —
Igor Stravinsky

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music. —
Igor Stravinsky

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth. —
Igor Stravinsky

The profound meaning of music's essential aim ... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being —
Igor Stravinsky

We might as well swing boys, because Stravinsky cuts us all. —
Woody Herman

Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos? —
Igor Stravinsky

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it. —
Igor Stravinsky

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. —
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

That's the way Stravinsky was. Bup, bup, bup, bup. The poor guy's dead now. Play it legato. —
Eugene Ormandy

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received. —
Igor Stravinsky

To continue in one path is to go backward. —
Igor Stravinsky

New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky. —
Duke Ellington

The first music I was exposed to was Stravinsky and I loved it but I don't remember it. —
Leo Kottke

The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. —
Igor Stravinsky

Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music.
[Los Angeles Times. 26.02.1990] —
Igor Stravinsky

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. —
Igor Stravinsky

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also. —
Igor Stravinsky

My childhood was a peroid of waiting to the moment when i could send everyone in it to hell. —
Igor Stravinsky

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky. —
Esa-Pekka Salonen

There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse. —
Igor Stravinsky

You can rave about Stravinsky without the slightest risk of being classified as a lunatic by the next generation . —
George Bernard Shaw

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either. —
Igor Stravinsky

I never am sea sick, never. I am sea drunk! —
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

Art is the opposite of chaos. Art is organized chaos. —
Igor Stravinsky

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. —
Igor Stravinsky

To be deprived of art and left alone with philosophy is to be close to Hell. —
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

Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn. —
Igor Stravinsky

The perfection of performance has escalated to the extent that the music itself is threatened with relegation. —
Igor Stravinsky

Composition is frozen improvisation. —
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

I had no idea Stravinsky disliked Debussy so much as this. —
Ernest Newman

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully. —
Gyorgy Ligeti

Hurry? I have no time to hurry. —
Igor Stravinsky

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3. —
Igor Stravinsky

Revolution means turning the wheel. —
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