Daily Inspiration Quote by Igor Stravinsky

Stravinsky’s jab lands because it’s ruthlessly anti-romantic about art: sound enters the ear whether you deserve it or not. “To listen is an effort” turns what audiences like to treat as a passive pleasure into work, discipline, even moral posture. Then he twists the knife with that dunk of a punchline: “A duck hears also.” If you’re offended, good. Stravinsky is policing the boundary between mere consumption and actual engagement, and he’s doing it with the kind of dry contempt that mirrors his music’s reputation for precision and control.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the idea that music’s value is guaranteed by “feeling” alone. Hearing is biological; listening is cultural. Listening implies attention to structure, rhythm, timbre, form - the choices a composer makes that can’t be reduced to mood. When Stravinsky insists listening is effort, he’s also defending difficulty as a feature, not a flaw. That matters in a 20th-century landscape where his work (and modernism broadly) was accused of being cold, mechanical, or elitist. He’s basically saying: the supposed coldness is your laziness speaking.

Context sharpens the intent. This is the composer of The Rite of Spring, a work remembered for provoking a riot and for rupturing expectations of what music should “do” emotionally. The duck is the perfect insult: it punctures the audience’s self-image as refined patrons. If you want merit, Stravinsky implies, earn it - by listening like your intelligence is part of the instrument.