Realm Of Necessity

: So here we are, whether we like it or not, in the realm of necessity. And yet which of us has ever heard talk of art as other than a realm of freedom? This sort of heresy is uniformly widespread because it is imagined that art is outside the bounds of ordinary activity. Well, 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 thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
: I shall go even further: 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 obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength....the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
: "It is evident," writes Baudelaire, "that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrranies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from fully manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."

Igor Stravinsky - Poetics of Music