Igor Stravinsky Quotes

86 quotes in 952 categories

• It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
• 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…
• 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
• A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
• 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…
• My music is best understood by children and animals.
• Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
• The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
• To continue in one path is to go backward.
• Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.
• One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
• The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.
• 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…
• What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators....
• Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?
• I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.
• Consonance, says the dictionary, is the combination of several tones into a harmonic unit. Dissonance results from the deranging of this harmony by the addition…
• There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.
• 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…
• What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

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