Igor Stravinsky idézet

„Nem szeretem az operát. A zene összeházasítható a gesztussal vagy a szöveggel, de mindkettővel egyszerre bigámia nélkül nem.”

„A zeneszerzők kombinálják a hangjegyeket. Ez minden. Arról, hogy a világ eseményei miként és milyen formában érintik zenéjüket, arról nem az ő dolguk beszélni.”

„Én nem élek sem a múltban, sem a jövőben, én a ma gyermeke vagyok. Nem tudom, mi lesz holnap, s csak azért szállhatok síkra, amit ma igaznak tartok. Ennek az igazságnak elfogultság nélkül szolgálni: ez az én hivatásom.”

„Vége már annak az időnek, amikor én gazdagítani akartam a zenét, most már építeni akarom. Már nem azért harcolok, hogy kiterjesszem kifejező lehetőségeim körét, ehelyett inkább a zene valódi tartalmát próbálom elképzelni.”

„Úgy vélem, a tiszta ellenpont az egyetlen lehetséges anyag, amelyből valódi és időtálló zene kovácsolható.”

„A zene mint jelenség arra az egyetlen célra adatott nekünk, hogy rendet teremtsen a dolgok között, beleértve legelsősorban a rendet az ember és az idő között. Hogy ez a rend létrejöhessen, ahhoz szükségszerűen és kizárólag konstrukcióra van szükség. Ha a konstrukció megvan, és a rend létrejött, mindent megtettünk.”

„Poussin egész helyesen mondta, hogy a művészet célja a gyönyörködtetés. Nem mondta, hogy ez a gyönyörködtetés a művész célja, aki csak a létrehozandó mű követelményeinek kell hogy alávesse magát.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“My music is best understood by children and animals.”

“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.”

“Composers combine notes, that's all.”

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

“What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.”