Igor Stravinsky Quotes - Page 2

Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

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

Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.

All you have to do is close your eyes and wait for the symbols.

My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.

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.

Music is...the coordination between man and time.

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

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

One's belief that one is sincere is not so dangerous as one's conviction that one is right. We all feel we are right; but we felt the same way twenty years ago and today we know we weren't always right.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

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 of tones foreign to it. One must admit that all this is not clear. Ever since it appeared in our vocabulary, the word 'dissonance' has carried with it a certain odor of sinfulness. Let us light our lantern: in textbook language, dissonance is an element of transition, a complex or interval of tones that is not complete in itself and that must be resolved to the ear's satisfaction into a perfect consonance.

Revolution means turning the wheel.

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

Mediocrity borrows, genius steals.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

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.

What force is more potent than love?

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

The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one