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Igor Stravinsky
13 quotes
“As for myself, I need music for hygienic purposes, for the health of my soul. Without music in its best sense there is chaos. For my part, music is a force which gives reason to things, a force which creates organization, which attunes things. Music probably attended the creation of the universe.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Musical Digest (1946)
“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.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Expositions and Developments (1959), pp. 113-114
“My music is best understood by children and animals.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Igor Stravinsky. The Observer, Oct 8, 1961.
“One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1962, quoted in Andriessen and Schoenberger, The Apollonian Clockwork (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“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 (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in DeLone et. al. (Eds.) (1975). Aspects of Twentieth-Century Music. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. , Ch. 3. from Igor Stravinsky' Autobiography (1962). New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 54.
“Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Géza Szamosi, The Twin Dimensions: Inventing Time and Space (New York, 1986), p. 232.
“Much of the music is a Merzbild, put together from whatever came to hand. I mean, for example...the Alberti-bass horn solo accompanying the Messenger. I also mean the fusion of such widely divergent types of music as the Folies Bergeres tune at No. 40 ('The girls enter, kicking') and the Wagnerian 7th-chords at Nos. 58 and 74.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Composers combine notes, that's all.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) said by 1971 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Igor Stravinsky (1936). An Autobiography, p. 53-54.
“The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (1962). Expositions and Developments.