Volume 21, Number 13 · August 8, 1974
Stravinsky in America
By Robert Craft
The events of almost every day of Stravinsky's thirty-two years in America can be reconstructed from diaries, letters, and other documents. Yet the sum of the parts is less than the whole, a casual remark by the man himself often casting more light than pages of biographers' details. Thus the composer's observation that 'it is impossible for the brain to follow the ear and the eye at the same time' reveals the totality with which music absorbed his brain, while the exactness of the analogy, 'Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano-playing in my living-room has on the book I am reading,' suggests an extraordinary power to visualize.[1] Obviously dicta such as these[2] are worth more than any amount of commentary on the composer's 'listening habits' and 'visual imagination.'
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