Necessity of restraint in order to have freedom

It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal twelve sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust...

I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite - matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possiblities.

In art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible.

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 obsticles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chians that shackle the spirit.

It is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organisation of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rehtorics keep orginality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true.

-Baudelaire (Stravinsky's Poetics of Music)