## Poetics of Music https://domleca.com/poetics-of-music Below are excerpts of _Poetics of Music in the form of 6 lessons_ by Igor Stravinsky. The creator’s function is to sift elements he receives from her, for human activity must impose limit upon itself. **The more art is controlled, the more it is free**. **If everything is permissible to me, if nothing offers me any resistance, then any effort is inconceivable, and consequently every undertaking becomes futile.** Will I then have to lose myself in the abyss of freedom? To what shall I cling in order to escape the dizziness that seizes me before the virtuality of this infinitude? However, I shall not succumb. I shall overcome my terror and be re-assured by the thought that I have the 7 notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that weak and strong accent are within my reach, and that in all of these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that had just frightened me. It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, full convinced that combinations which have at their disposal 12 sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust. So here we are, in the **realm of necessity**. Talking about art as the realm of freedom is an uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outsides the bound of ordinary activity. **My freedom consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself.** I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit. **One may say that the masters send out the rays of their genius well beyond their own day. In this way, they appear as beacons by whose light and warmth is developed a sum of tendencies that will be shared by most of their successors and that contributes to form a parcel of traditions which make up culture**. What is most irritating about artistic rebels is the spirit of systemization which under the guise of doing away with conventions, establishes a new set, quite as arbitrary and cumbersome than the old. **That is what André Gide so well expressed in saying that classical works are beautiful by virtue of their subjugated romanticism**.