I still require music, not just sounds; open-ended art does nothing for me, or minimal art, or that glare of publicity and high commerce which calls itself the Underground.

He is equally impatient with computer deism, vomiting forth the new program music in demotic algebra, as with the auto-intoxicating retrograde "modernism" of emotional self-indulgence. He especially abhors the composer-as-publicist, who spins a new notation and broadside for each new work, who strews the years with the wreckage of unperformable, unfashionable breakthroughs. The polemic and evanescence of such music intensely irritates him.

Even while I am talking, the "next" will have become the "former." In short the "no-past" will be a part of the "non-past," except that the past is difficult to deny, the tabula, however looked at, being a long way from rasa.

The non-existence of the past is a necessary hypothesis for those beginning from scratch, but it easily seduces men into the sterile repetition of sensationalist mannerism. To assume the non-existence of the past is to urge the non-existence of the future. It is at this point that Stravinsky's profound sense of vivifying tradition, in which art is created only insofar as it is recreated, emerges passionately. He opposes to the cults, propagandas, and desiccated systematizations of most contemporary music the central classical value of universality, the common dignity of intelligibility.

What, may I ask, has become of the idea of a universality-of a character of expression not necessarily popular, but compelling to the highest imaginations of a decade or so beyond its own time?

Music is being strangled by mechanisms or swirled to pieces by epiphanic happenings. His conclusion is that those who toil most glamorously at self-conscious modernity are those who have the least chance for valuable contribution. Integrity and "modernity," separate from formal exploration, are antagonistic. The past lives in the art which lives. The mainstream flows to Schocnberg and Stravinsky, who are essentially similar in their conception of music, rather than antithetical, as is often assumed. The problem with such composers as Cage and enakis is whether they are belligerent in a healthy manner, whether in their individual attempts at radical changes, they do not really negate innovation, and impose a set of polemical restrictions more arbitrary and impotent than the ones they sought to replace. In his Poctics Stravinsky said, "The danger does not lie in the borrowing of cliches, but in fabricating them, and in bestowing on them the force of law, a tyranny that is merely a manifestation of romanticism grown decrepit." Are we witnessing apocalyptic musical developments, or the destructive machinations of third-rate composers? The artist who delivers us from mannerism and polemic will be an artist who has no need for them. And all the schools, foundations, cults, and mysticisms in the world cannot create, liberate, support, or influence him. For Stravinsky the most perfect art is the most perfectly made. He emphasizes the fact that true Liberality of thought is not liberal, but visionary, in regard to both past and future. For the classical composer, the visionary is the formalist.

Stravinsky's music is characterized by clarity, precision, ruthless concision, wild energy, and gaiety-Eliot's magical condition of complete simplicity. His musical sentences are always composed of complete units, which is why he manipulates prosody by syllable rather than word. He abhors sostenuto music, prefers staccato, the breaks of breath, which render every particle of every line crystalline. He does not admit superfluous notes, dynamic nourishes, believing that "gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches." He is most traditional, and most original, in his use of severely-delineated polyphony, rhythm, text, and articulation. Stravinsky has always demanded austere linear counterpoint, a practice which recalls Mahler's dictum that "All music is counterpoint."

He is often accused of emotional aridity, a charge which is beneath contempt. One has only to listen to Persephone, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto, Apollo, Orphcus, or the lullaby of The Rake's Progress. But every bar of his music is lyrical in the highest sense, that of selfless restraint. Chekhov, a similar artist in this and other respects, once wrote to a friend, "The more sensitive the matter in hand, the more calmly one should describe it-and the more touching it will be at last." Stravinsky has composed in the belief that feeling is deepest when least pitiable. "Pleasure in composing, like love, is the waste product of creation."

His music is among the least eviscerate ever written. It is not a subject for words. "Composers combine notes. That is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say." Never has an artist worked so steadily in the austere yet cheerful light of self-scrutiny, with homage to the past, and concern for the future, without servility, repetition, or arrogance. Each composition is a new problem to be solved as well as possible, a new palimpsest of feeling to be disciplined into resonant order. Eliot's lines are absolutely applicable:

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling . . .

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions