Tag: Stravinsky

  • Searching for expression

    When my students compose, I prefer them to be mistaken if they must make mistakes, but to remain natural and free rather than wishing to appear other than what they are. I remember a day when Stravinsky was dining here. He took his neighbor at the table by the lapels, violently! His neighbor crushed, said…

  • Stravinsky and Charlie Parker

    There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously…

  • Stravinsky on Verdi’s Rigoletto

    “I say that in the aria ‘La donna è mobile’, for example, which the elite thinks only brilliant and superficial, there is more substance and feeling than in the whole of Wagner’s Ring cycle.” – Igor StravinskyCited in Brandenburg, Daniel (2012). Verdi: Rigoletto. Bärenreiter.

  • Composing for elephants

    Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant to be performed by young elephants (a collaboration with American choreographer George Balanchine. It ended up being performed by older elephants – the main star being Big Modoc (41 years of age). Each elephant wore a join pink tutu. Source: Dixon, Gavin “Igor Stravinsky’s pachyderm polka”, Classic…

  • The effect of audience reception on Stravinsky’s compositional process

    Stravinksy on the public not particularly liking his music: Their attitude certainly cannot make me deviate from my path. I shall assuredly not sacrifice my predilections and my aspirations to the demands of those who, in their blindness, do not realize that they are simply asking me to go backwards … I could not follow…

  • Communication with the audience

    Igor Stravinsky contemplates the ultimate goal of an artist versus reality: “Art postulates communion [between the artist and the audience], and the artist has an imperative need to make others share the joy which he experiences himself. But in spite of that need, he prefers to direct and frank opposition to apparent agreement which is…

  • Stravinsky on composition

    “For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I am compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that and cannot do otherwise … I am far from saying that there is no such thing as inspiration; quite the opposite. It is found as a driving force in every…