Igor Stravinsky quotes

Igor Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor who became one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. His groundbreaking compositions, such as "The Rite of Spring," transformed modern music with their bold rhythms and innovative harmonies. He is remembered for his diverse style and lasting impact on classical and contemporary music. Here are 45 of his quotes:

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.

Igor Stravinsky

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

Igor Stravinsky

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Igor Stravinsky

I am an inventor of music.

Igor Stravinsky

The one true comment on a piece of music is another piece of music.

Igor Stravinsky

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

Composers combine notes, that's all.

Igor Stravinsky

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

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

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.

Igor Stravinsky

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

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

Igor Stravinsky

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

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

Igor Stravinsky

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

Igor Stravinsky

In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?

Igor Stravinsky

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

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

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

What force is more potent than love?

Igor Stravinsky