Igor Stravinsky

Source Reading in Music History Oliver Strunk (ed. copy right 1978):
Morgan Robert (Revised edition) (1998) Volume 7 The twentieth Century
Leo Treitler (General ed.) W. W. Norton & Company: New York.

Igor Stravinsky: Poetics of Music (1946)

Poetics of music, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947)

p. 25

Everyone knows that time passes at a rate which varies according to the inner dispositions of the subject and to the evens that come to affect his consciousness. Expectation, boredom, anguish, pleasure and pain, contemplation--all of these thus come to appear as different categories in the midst of which our life unfolds, and each of these determines a special psychological process, a particular tempo. These variations in psychological time are perceptible only as they are related to the primary sensation--whether conscious or unconscious--of real time, ontological time.

What gives that concept of musical time its special stamp is that this concept is born and develops as well outside of the categories of psychological time as it does simultaneously with them. All music, whether it submits to the normal flow of time, or whether it disassociates itself therefrom, establishes a particular relationship, a sort of counterpoint between the passing of time, the music's own duration, and the material and technical means through which the music is made manifest.

.....presents us with two kinds of music: one which evolves parallel to the process of ontological time, embracing and penetrating it, inducing in the mind of the listener a feeling of euphoria and, so to speak, of "dynamic calm." The other kind runs ahead of, or counter to, this process. It is not self-contained in each momentary tonal unit. It dislocates the centers of attraction and gravity and sets itself up in the unstable; and this fact makes it particularly adaptable to the translation of the composer's emotive impulses. All music in which the will to expression is dominant belongs to the second type.

p.26
.....and for over a century music has provided repeated examples of a style in which dissonance has emancipated itself. It is no longer tied down to its former function. Having become an entity in itself, it frequently happens that dissonance neither prepares nor anticipates anything. Dissonance is thus no more an agent of disorder than consonance is a guarantee of security. The music of yesterday and of today unhesitatingly unites parallel dissonant chords that thereby lose their functional value, and our ear quite naturally accepts their juxtaposition.

p. 27
.....All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose.

p. 30
.....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.

Stravinsky has always been a fascinating composer to me. Some of the concepts that he mentions in the writing shares the same beliefs in what Mr. Su taught back at high school period. "The materials might change but the concepts of structuring and organising the elements did not change much through time."--was one of the core concepts.

However, I been wondering how much it influences me as it seems very much a concept that was inherited from the western music training since youth and how vigorous it penetrates my aesthetic value. Based on this, how it can be break down if one wants to break away from this methods of creating music?
Schoenberg's main concern is pitch orientated functional harmony system. His answer hence to be an anti-tonal movement that broke down the tonal hierarchy. It might not be the most artistic reaction but no doubt the most logical step. Later composers started with the one from or influenced by the second Vienna school, then have explored areas outside pitch dominant sphere, however, the concept of formalism applies.
There my ultimate and foremost question in the last few years arose.