Timeless lessons on the pleasures of listening, the dilemmas of composition, and the meaning of artistic freedom from a founder of musical modernism.

In October 1939, Igor Stravinsky took the stage at Harvard not as a conductor but as a speaker. Invited to deliver the prestigious Norton Lectures, he had departed Europe just days after the outbreak of war, leaving behind not only a growing political maelstrom but also his life in France, where his wife, eldest daughter, and mother all had died in the previous year.

Poetics of Music offers a snapshot of this pivotal moment in the composer’s biography and career. Delivered at the height of his neoclassical period, which blended the sculptural precision of classicism with distinctively twentieth-century cadences, Stravinsky’s lectures explore both the creative potential and the constraints of tradition. Though he achieved artistic immortality as a genre-defying experimentalist who scandalized audiences in Belle Époque Paris, the Stravinsky we find here is more circumspect, defending the dignity of formal conventions against the more anarchic currents of modernist experimentation. Tradition, he argues, is not a relic of a bygone past but a living force that animates the present. And true artistic freedom emerges not only in moments of revolutionary inspiration but also through strict deference to the formal requirements of the work.

Like his compositions, Stravinsky’s lectures are ambitious and at times bombastic, punctuated by wit and polemic. Ranging widely from the phenomenology of rhythm to the fate of high culture in the Soviet Union, he invites us to reflect on what it is in music that compels us, whether we are hearing one of his polytonal works or a simple birdsong.

One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.

One of the greatest of contemporary composers has here set down in delightfully personal fashion his general ideas about music and some accounts of his own experience as a composer. Every concert-goer and lover of music will take keen pleasure in his notes about the essential features of music, the process of musical composition, inspiration, musical types, and musical execution. Throughout the volume are to he found trenchant comments on such subjects as Wagnerism, the operas of Verdi, musical taste, musical snobbery, the influence of political ideas on Russian music under the Soviets, musical improvisation as opposed to musical construction, the nature of melody, and the function of the critic of music. Musical people of every sort will welcome this first presentation in English of an unusually interesting book.