My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor StravinskyRead
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
Interpretation
Music helps organize our experiences and connects us to the passage of time.
Igor Stravinsky's quote suggests that music serves a vital function in our lives by bringing order and structure to our experiences. It highlights the intrinsic relationship between music, human existence, and the perception of time, implying that music acts as a medium that harmonizes our emotions and actions with the rhythm of life.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of the arts, one might quote Stravinsky to illustrate how music organizes our lives.
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.
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.
Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.
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.
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.
If you're making music, you must want to turn other people on to it, whether you're number one in the charts or number 60. I don't know, that's a commercial thing, but just the fact that other people like you... there's no point in making music, otherwise. Otherwise, you might as well make it in your bedroom and leave it there.
My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
I always do the first line well, but I have trouble doing the others.
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