The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Igor Stravinsky

Musicians

Igor Stravinsky

Born near Saint Petersburg in 1882, Igor Stravinsky later became a French and then American citizen, standing as one of the twentieth century's most important composers. His ballet The Rite of Spring provoked a near-riot at its 1913 Paris premiere and fundamentally changed how composers understood rhythm. Traversing three distinct creative periods, Russian, neoclassical, and serial, he drove the development of modernist music and was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of the century.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1947)Verified

Igor Stravinsky's Other Quotes

To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.

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.

Related Quotes

Every painter paints himself.

-- Raphael

Every painter paints himself.

-- Caravaggio

What beauty is, I know not.

-- Albrecht Dürer

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.

-- Henri Matisse

People often complain that music is too ambiguous... whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse... what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.

-- Felix Mendelssohn

Let us return to the old: that will be progress.

-- Giuseppe Verdi