Obstacles & Accidents

No one has yet made a movie showing Igor Stravinsky (played by Robert Walker) sitting at the piano and getting inspiration for a symphony by looking into a pair of pretty blue eyes. Stravinsky was never inspired that way.

In a book out last week, called Poetics of Music (Harvard; $2.50), Igor Stravinsky tried to explain how he does write music. He found it hard to be explicit, but he did succeed in being unromantic. Wrote he: "This appetite [for composing] is not at all a fortuitous thing like inspiration, but as habitual and periodic ... as a natural need." Stravinsky prefers to call himself an inventor rather than a composer. "For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find. ... A composer improvises aimlessly, the way an animal grubs about. . . . I suddenly stumble upon something unexpected. At the proper time, I put it to profitable use. ... An accident is perhaps the only thing that really inspires us. . . ."

The man who once shocked the world with the percussive rhythms of his Rite of Spring is a great respecter of convention. Actually, wrote Stravinsky, "the more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free. If everything is permissible to me, the best and the worst, then any effort is inconceivable. . . ." The anarchic modern composer has become "a monster of originality, inventor of his own language, of his own vocabulary. ... So he comes to the point of speaking an idiom without relation to the world that listens to him.

"We can make use of academic forms without running the risk of becoming academic ourselves. ... Far from implying repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures."

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