Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Igor Stravinsky (Russian-born American Composer)

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882–1971) was a Russian-born American composer. He was regarded as not only the most cosmopolitan of Russian artists but also the greatest composer of the twentieth century.

Born near St. Petersburg to a family of opera singers, Stravinsky began studying music at the age of twenty after finishing a university law course. In 1910, the thirty-year-old left tsarist Russia and settled in Paris. In 1939, as the Nazi army was pressed forward on France, he relocated to the United States and became a citizen in 1945.

Stravinsky wrote more than one hundred compositions. His ballets The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913) surprised Parisian audiences with their irregular rhythms and recurrent dissonances. Subsequently, Stravinsky created a neoclassical style exemplified by the opera The Rake’s Progress (1948–51) and experimented with the serialism compositional technique in such works as the cantata Threni (1958.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Igor Stravinsky

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.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Mistakes, Wisdom, Failure, Knowledge

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
Topics: Music

I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: The Present, Present

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

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Listening

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.’
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Art

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

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

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Music

What force is more potent than love?
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Love

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Freedom

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

I was made a revolutionary in spite of myself… [A]ll creation presupposes as its origin a sort of appetite that is brought on by the foretaste of discovery. This foretaste of the creative art accompanies the intuitive grasp of an unknown entity that will not take definite shape except by the action of a constantly vigilant technique. This appetite that is aroused in me at the mere thought of putting in order musical elements that have attracted my attention is not at all a fortuitous thing like inspiration, but as habitual and periodic, if not constant, as a natural need… The very act of putting my work on paper, of, as we say, kneading the dough, is for me inseperable from the pleasure of creation. So far as I am concerned, I cannot seperate the spiritual effort from the psychological and physical effort; they confront me on the same level and do not present a hierarchy…What concerns us here is not imagination itself, but rather creative imagination: the facultyy that helps us to pass from the level of conception to the level of realization. In the course of my labors I suddenly stumble upon something unexpected. this unexpected element strikes me. I make note of it. At the proper time I put it to profitable use… The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation. And the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note… The least accident holds his interest and guides his operations. If his finger slips, he will notice it; on occasion, he may draw profit from something unforeseen that a momentary lapse reveals to him. One does not contrive an accident: one observes it to draw inspiration therefrom.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Effort, Labor, Act, Discover, Inspiration, Spiritual, Give, Work, Spirit, Habit, Action, Attention, Music, Rest

Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Sin

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
Topics: Music

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