“Music the Primal Art”
Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.
In 1939-1940 Stravinsky delivered the Charles Eliot Norton series of lectures at Harvard University. They were entitled Poetics of Music.
I feel certain that whoever came up with the title was not a musician. For it is backwards.
Implied is the aspiration of Music to be Poetry. But rather Poetry and all the other arts are aspiring – or should be – to be Music.
For Music is the primal, the anlage, the Archaeus, of all the Arts. All poetry, all painting, all sculpture and dance is valid to the extent that it Aspires to be as if Music.
