I remember being handed a ...

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.
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 Igor Stravinsky

Quotes from the same author

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
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 Igor Stravinsky
The true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.
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 Igor Stravinsky
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.
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 Igor Stravinsky
It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.
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 Igor Stravinsky
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.
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 Igor Stravinsky