"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution"
About this Quote
Stravinsky is poking a finger into the romantic myth of the artist as a faucet of pure, boundless feeling. For a composer who helped detonate old musical certainties, he’s oddly unsentimental about “freedom”: he treats it less as self-expression and more as engineering. Constraints don’t cage the imagination; they give it traction. Without them, you don’t get liberation, you get mush - an infinity of options that dissolves into indecision, vagueness, and cliché.
The first sentence flips a modern instinct on its head. We tend to equate freedom with the absence of limits; Stravinsky argues the opposite because creativity isn’t a mood, it’s a set of choices made under pressure. When a form is tight - a fugue, a sonata, a fixed meter - every note has consequences. The work becomes legible, and so does the artist’s craft. Constraint is a sharpening device: it forces intention to show its work.
Then he twists the knife: “the arbitrariness of the constraint” isn’t a bug, it’s the point. A rule can be socially inherited (classical harmony) or willfully invented (a self-imposed ban on certain intervals). Either way, the arbitrariness prevents the artist from hiding behind “necessity.” If the rule is chosen, the execution has to justify it. Precision becomes the moral outcome: not sincerity, not spontaneity, but accountability to a system - even a system you made up.
Read in context of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, it’s also a manifesto against the era’s prestige of emotional overflow. He’s defending discipline as a kind of modern honesty: art that admits it’s constructed, then earns its intensity through control.
The first sentence flips a modern instinct on its head. We tend to equate freedom with the absence of limits; Stravinsky argues the opposite because creativity isn’t a mood, it’s a set of choices made under pressure. When a form is tight - a fugue, a sonata, a fixed meter - every note has consequences. The work becomes legible, and so does the artist’s craft. Constraint is a sharpening device: it forces intention to show its work.
Then he twists the knife: “the arbitrariness of the constraint” isn’t a bug, it’s the point. A rule can be socially inherited (classical harmony) or willfully invented (a self-imposed ban on certain intervals). Either way, the arbitrariness prevents the artist from hiding behind “necessity.” If the rule is chosen, the execution has to justify it. Precision becomes the moral outcome: not sincerity, not spontaneity, but accountability to a system - even a system you made up.
Read in context of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, it’s also a manifesto against the era’s prestige of emotional overflow. He’s defending discipline as a kind of modern honesty: art that admits it’s constructed, then earns its intensity through control.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Igor
Add to List
