Igor Stravinsky

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1882 age 0

   Born

2. 1924 age 42

   CreditAelitacomposer

3. 1940 age 58

   CreditFantasiacomposer

4. 1971 age 88

   Died

5. 1999 age 88

   CreditFantasia 2000composer

• JAJames Algar2 titles
• PDPaul Dukas2 titles
• LBLudwig van Beethoven2 titles
• LSLeopold Stokowski2 titles
• DTDeems Taylor2 titles
• IMIrene Mecchi1 title
• DHDon Hahn1 title
• WJWilfred Jackson1 title
• BSBen Sharpsteen1 title
• PSPaul Smith1 title

• 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, CC BY-SA 4.0

• As for myself, I need music for hygienic purposes, for the health of my soul. Without music in its best sense there is chaos. For my part, music is a force which gives reason to things, a force which creates organization, which attunes things. Music probably attended the creation of the universe.

  Igor Stravinsky, CC BY-SA 4.0

• 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, CC BY-SA 4.0

• My music is best understood by children and animals.

  Igor Stravinsky, CC BY-SA 4.0

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

  Igor Stravinsky, CC BY-SA 4.0

• 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, CC BY-SA 4.0

Nationalities

France, Russian Empire, United States, Switzerland

Cause of death

heart failure

Languages

Russian, French, English

Instruments

piano

Record labels

RCA Victor, Columbia Records, CBS

Genres

opera, symphony, chamber music, 20th-century classical music

Notable works

The Rite of Spring, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, Symphony in E-flat, Scherzo fantastique, Petrushka, The Firebird

Education

Saint Petersburg State University, The Second Saint Petersburg Gymnasium