The Abyss of Freedom
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... Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom? ... 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 ... strong and weak accents are within my reach, and ... 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 ... 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.
, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl) (1942) · Excerpt
Stravinsky begins not with confidence but with terror. There is something striking about one of the twentieth century’s most inventive composers admitting that unlimited possibility does not feel like freedom. It feels like an abyss.
Most discussions about creative tools focus on what they make possible. Stravinsky, in this excerpt from his Harvard lectures, focuses on something less comfortable: what happens when too much becomes possible at once. The “infinitude of possibilities” doesn’t inspire him. It paralyzes. And his solution is counterintuitive. He narrows. He reminds himself of the seven notes, the strong and weak accents, the specific and finite elements of his medium. Only then can he begin.
There is a version of this terror that many of us recognize now. When the capacity to generate expands dramatically, when a kind of creative plenty arrives all at once, the first sensation isn’t always exhilaration. Sometimes it is closer to vertigo. Stravinsky’s phrase “everything is permissible to me” could describe a thoroughly contemporary feeling: the old constraints of skill, time, and medium dissolving, and the unsettling discovery that this dissolution doesn’t always feel like liberation.
“Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.” The strength he means isn’t muscular effort. It is the focused pressure that builds when a mind works against something solid, something that pushes back. Constraints give us walls to press against, and that pressing is how we discover what we actually want to say. When every direction is equally available, we may lose the very friction that reveals our own direction. So the question that lingers is a practical one: as old limitations fall away, which new ones will we choose for ourselves, and how will we know they are the right ones?