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Soulima Stravinsky was born September 23, 1910 in Lausanne, Switzerland, the third generation of a famous family of Russian musicians. His grandfather was chief bass of the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg; his father was the composer Igor Stravinsky.
Surrounded by his father's music, Soulima began to play the piano at the age of five. Later he would study for eight years with Isidore Philipp, at the same time that he learned theory and composition from Nadia Boulanger. Soulima played his first professional concert in the north of France in 1930; in 1934 he debuted in Paris playing Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Solo Pianos alongside his father. Throughout the 1930s, the two toured South America and Europe, the son playing, the father conducting.
With the outbreak of World War II, Soulima Stravinsky joined the French army. He married Francoise Blondlat in 1944; their son, John, was born in 1945. Soulima resumed concertizing after the war, and before moving to the United States, he made his farewell appearance in Paris in 1948. Following a series of U.S. concerts in the late '40s, Stravinsky was appointed to the music faculty at the University of Illinois in 1950. Over the succeeding twenty-eight years, he would combine touring with teaching obligations.
Soulima Stravinsky's interest in composition was stimulated when he started copying his father's manuscripts at age twelve; his own earliest composition was a minuet, written when he was fifteen. In the early 1940s, he wrote a number of film scores for French documentaries, followed by a sonata in 1946 and a group of songs (Chante-Fables). Soulima's first work for Peters Editions came in the form of replacing missing Mozart Cadenzas. It was at the request of Walter Hinrichsen that Stravinsky began composing music for children in 1957. Among his works in the genre are The Art of Scales, The Art of Fingering, Music Alphabet, Piano Music for Children and Sonatinas for Young Pianists.
Stravinsky continued to compose after retiring from teaching and performing. He moved to Siesta Key, Florida in 1978, and it was there that he would write his Cello Sonata, The String Quartets, Trio, and Three Etudes for Violin and Piano. He died November 28, 1984 in Sarasota, Florida.