Time & Perspective Quote by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky isn’t offering mindfulness; he’s staking out an aesthetic jurisdiction. “I am in the present” reads like a refusal to be trapped by the two great cages artists get shoved into: prophecy (“where is music going?”) and autobiography (“what does your work reveal about you?”). He won’t pretend to know tomorrow’s verdict, and he won’t let posterity draft him into a narrative he didn’t choose.

The phrase “the truth is for me today” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s modest: no grand metaphysics, no universal manifesto. Underneath, it’s a hardline defense of artistic authority. Stravinsky is famous for reinvention and for antagonizing the romantic ideal of the composer as emotional confessor. This quote aligns with the Stravinsky who insisted on craft, form, and clarity over self-expression, the modernist who could write The Rite of Spring and later pivot to neoclassicism without apologizing for “inconsistency.” The “truth” here is not a feeling; it’s a working principle.

“That is what I am called upon to serve” sounds almost religious, but the object of devotion isn’t God or audience approval. It’s discipline: the daily demand of making something precise. Then he lands the blade: “in all lucidity.” Lucidity is the anti-mystique. No tortured-genius fog, no romantic blur. In the early 20th century, when composers were being asked to embody national destinies or ideological futures, Stravinsky’s insistence on present-tense service reads as both self-protection and provocation: a declaration that art’s responsibility is to the exactness of its own moment, not to anyone’s storyline.