Quotations on composition

“Inspiration, art, artist – so many words, hazy at least, that keep us from seeing clearly in a field where everything is balance and calculation through which the breath of the speculative spirit blows. It is afterwards, and only afterwards, that the emotive disturbance which is at the root of inspiration may arise – an emotive disturbance about which people talk so indelicately by conferring upon it a meaning that is shocking to us and compromises the term itself. Is it not clear that this emotion is merely a reaction on the part of the creator grappling with that unknown entity which is still only the object of his creating and which is to become a work of art? Step by step, link by link, it will be granted to him to discover the work. It is this chain of discoveries, as well as each individual discovery, that give rise to the emotion – an almost physiological reflex, like that of the appetite causing a flow of saliva – this emotion which invariably follows closely the phases of the creative process.” (50-51)

“The very act of putting my work on paper, of, as we say, kneading the dough, is for me inseparable from the pleasure of creation.”(51)

“The idea of work to be done is for me so closely bound up with the idea of the arranging of materials and of the pleasure that the actual doing of the work affords us that, should the impossible happen and my work suddenly be given to me in a perfectly completed form, I should be embarrassed and nonplussed by it, as by a hoax.”(53)

“As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. ... However, I shall not succumb. I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that strong and weak accents 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 ...” (63-64)

“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.” (65)

(Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, ‘The Composition of Music’)