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.He realized that if he limited himself, he was actually opening his mind to creativity. The quote came from a series of lectures he gave at Harvard during the 1939-40 academic year. Originally given in French, they were subsequently translated into English.
Stravinsky was famous for his ballet and orchestral work The Rite of Spring, which is by many musicians and music historians as one of the most influential pieces of music of the 20th Century. At the time, the piece stretched the rules of Western music both musically (tonality, rhythm, and meter) and through the choreography (dancers), and caused a near riot at its opening in Paris in 1913. It wasn't performed again after it's 1913 run (which was in Paris and London) until the 1920's.
By the time it was performed again Stravinsky had moved on to a different style of composing. His music career is roughly broken into three periods:
Russian period (1907-1919)
Neo-Classical period (1920-1954)
Serial period (1954-1968)
So while his most famous piece, The Rite, is seen as a visceral rule-breaking ode to Russian paganism, he moved on relatively quickly. By the time the piece was performed again he was writing in a "neo-Classical" style.
Neo-Classical is a loose term but roughly refers to music that combines characteristics of the Classical period with contemporary. The Classical period was circa 1750-1830 ... think Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven. So the idea was to take elements of music from that period and combine it with elements of the early 20th century. To someone in the 1920's with a trained classical ear it sounded jarring. Music that sort of sounded like Mozart but at the same time sounded wrong.
How did Stravinsky accomplish this? Without going off into the woods, we can say that one of the defining characteristics of Western music is the idea of tonality -- that a piece of music is centered around one note. So if a piece, whether it's a Symphony, or a three-minute pop song, is composed in C-Major, the music revolves around, and resolves to, the note of C. When Stravinsky was composing there were hundreds of years of music theory and history that defined the rules of how music was supposed to resolve. He kept the idea of tonality, but disregarded many of the rules of how to get there. ¹
So what is the point? To Stravinsky, history was important. He saw himself as part of the Western Music lineage. But he also wanted to push the envelope, to create new ideas. So he used certain aspects of Classical Western music for restraint. And then he was free to explore new ideas within that framework.
He didn't attempt to reinvent music; if he had sat down and tried to reinvent music, the possibilities would be mind-boggling. You can't totally break all the rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, phrasing, and form and expect any listener to have context. Therefore, he constrained himself within a framework, and it allowed him to create within that framework.
********************************
Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut uses the second movement of György Ligeti's piano piece Musica ricercata as a recurring theme. The piece contains only three pitches: E#, F# and G. It's slow-moving and foreboding and fits the mood of the film. But how does a piece of music stay interesting with only three pitches? In fact, most of the piece only uses two pitches. It's not until the middle that you hear G. Ligeti achieves this by using other musical elements such as rhythm, note duration, and dynamic range (loudness).
Fast forward to 1:10 in the trailer here for a taste.
Ligeti (1923-2006) composed Musica ricercata between 1951 and 1953. It consists of eleven movements. The first movement contains only two pitches, or to be more exact, pitch classes. ("Pitch class" refers to all notes separated by an octave. For example, all A notes on a keyboard are in the same pitch class. It's the same note, just separated by octaves.)
In each subsequent movement, one pitch class is added. So the second movement contains three pitches, the third movement four, etc until the final, eleventh movement, which contains all twelve pitches. It looks like this (thank you Wikipedia):
This structure is the defining global characteristic of the work. Whether or not the music succeeds as interesting or engaging is determined by the listener. Or to put another way, if the listener inherently finds the music interesting without considering the overall structure, then the music succeeds. In particular, in the early movements, finding a way to keep the music interesting using only a few pitches is an exercise in simplicity and constraint.
However, the form of the piece is only that. The average listener probably doesn't notice that in the second movement there are only three pitches. All he hears is a foreboding piece of music that evokes feelings of fear, anxiety, or perhaps something different (it's subjective). What he isn't doing is sitting there saying "Wow, only two pitches. Or three pitches. And now all twelve." He is just listening.
As in Stravinsky's neo-Classical work, the form of the music is just the framework. Ultimately, the music has to stand alone in order to stand the test of time. Not critics, only listeners over time. The framework is the beginning; it allows creativity to flow.
********************************
In Chapter 16 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig, who is professor Phaedrus in the book, has a student who is "stuck" in his writing class. The girl, who he describes as "serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull ... not a spark of creativity" is trying to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. She just can't think of anything to say, so he suggests she narrow it down to Bozeman, Montanta, the town where they live.
The paper came due, but she still didn't have anything, and was quite distressed. So he suggested she narrow it to one street in Bozeman. She came back the next class more despondent than ever crying that if she couldn't think of anything to say about the entirety of Bozeman, how could she think of something to say about one street.
Angrily he said to her, "You're not looking! The more you look the more you see". He told her to narrow it down to "the front of one building on main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."
She came in the next class with a five-thousand-word essay. She didn't understand what opened the floodgates, but as she described it "I started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop".
Pirsig (again, Professor Phaedrus in the story) concluded that she was blocked because she was trying to repeat things she had heard before. She couldn't think of anything to say about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. The narrowing to one brick destroyed the blockage because she had to do some original thinking. In other words, there were no essays out there about the upper-left hand brick of the Opera House.
Narrowing the subject creates a framework that frees the mind. By constraining the subject to something dull and simple, you open up the creativity; your mind is forced to create something to say. A five-hundred-word essay about the United States is ludicrous. A writer would have to be a master-historian using elegant or provocative prose to make the paragraph interesting. There is no new story there because it is too broad. But the upper-left-hand brick of the Opera House ... there is an unwritten story. Where did it come from? Who placed it? How has brick manufacturing changed in the recent past, and what are the economic ramifications of that? Etc, etc. You start at the brick, and project outward in any direction.
Through constraint the mind is free...
********************************
NOTES:
¹ Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music -- an Introduction (3rd edition) (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988).