Sharing an excerpt from Igor Stravinsky's "Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons."
As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. If everything is permissible to me, the best and the worst. If nothing offers me any resistance, then any effort is inconceivable and I cannot use anything as a basis. And consequently, every undertaking becomes futile. Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom to what shall I cling in order to escape the dizziness that seizes me before the virtuality of this infinitude? However, I shall not succumb. I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal, that strong and weak accents are within my reach, and that in all of these, I possess solid and concrete elements, which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that has just frightened me. It is into this field that I shall sink my roots, fully convinced that combinations which have at their disposal, 12 sounds in each octave and all possible rhythmic varieties, promise me riches that all the activity of human genius will never exhaust.
