Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinskywas a Russian-French-American composer, pianist, and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth17 June 1882
CityLomonosov, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
starting-over becoming principles
The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
path
To continue in one path is to go backward.
real thinking awareness
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
needs would-be music-is
I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one.
creating hands faculty
The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation.
religious exercise years
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
improvisation composition selective
Composition is selective improvisation.
children animal classical-music
My music is best understood by children and animals.
inspiration men profound
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
claims snob familiar
A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
music men order
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
age negative different
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.
ignorance cutting perfect
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.
dream inspiration artist
The past slips from our grasp. It leaves us only scattered things. The bond that united them eludes us. Our imagination usually fills in the void by making use of preconceived theories...Archaeology, then, does not supply us with certitudes, but rather with vague hypotheses. And in the shade of these hypotheses some artists are content to dream, considering them less as scientific facts than as sources of inspiration.