The reason for the hand you’ve been dealt in life…and art
Igor Stravinsky portrait by Pablo Picasso
“Melody, Melodia in Greek, is the intonation of the melos, which signifies a fragment, a part of a phrase. It is these parts that strike the ear in such a way as to make certain accentuations…
The capacity for melody is a gift. This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study…The example of Beethoven would suffice to convince us that, of all the elements of music, melody is the most accessible to the ear and the least capable of acquisition. Here we have one of the greatest creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked. So that this admirable deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his auditive sense.
An excerpt from Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics Of Music In The Form Of Six Lessons
The entire series of Norton lectures is wonderful by the way.
