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