A good composer does not imitate; he steals.
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.
Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.
I am an inventor of 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.
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.
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I've felt it.
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.
I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God.
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Just as appetite comes from eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
My childhood was a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
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.
The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
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.
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.
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
What force is more potent than love?
What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators.
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
Is generally regarded as the father of "modern" classical music; a riot ensued at the 1913 premiere of his ballet Le Sacre du Primtemps.
Recorded a number of his works with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s, all of which he conducted.
Settled in the United States in 1939 after having become a French citizen in 1934. Became a U. S. citizen in 1946.
Was very much opposed to 12-tone writing, or serialism, early in his career, then turned to that style of composition in the 1950s.
He is considered by many to the greatest composer of the 20th Century, largely on the strength of his ballet "The Rite of Spring". Stravinsky was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His star, awarded for his work on radio, is located at 6340 Hollywood Blvd. He is the only classical composer to be so honored.
His 1913 ballet,"Le Sacre du Printemps" (The Rite of Spring), caused the greatest single revolution in classical music since Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony in the early 1800s. It was a complete break from the Romanticism of the nineteenth century with its strange and dissonant rhythms and sounds. It was a fiasco upon its premiere, but began to win wide acceptance as a concert piece just a year later.
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