rds,
melodies, rhythms, just as they sang in his skull, though all the world
rise up to damn him. But the penning of music as jagged, cubical,
barbarous as the prelude to the third act of Strawinsky's little opera,
"The Nightingale," or as naked, uncouth, rectangular, rocklike,
polyharmonic, headlong, as some of that of "Le Sacre du printemps"
required no less perfect a conviction, no less great a self-reliance.
The music of Strawinsky is the expression of an innocence comparable
indeed to that of his great predecessor. "Le Sacre du printemps" is what
its composer termed it. It is "an act of faith."

And so, free of preconceptions, Strawinsky was able to let nature move
him to imitation. Just as Picasso brings twentieth-century nature into
his still lives, so the young composer brings it into his music. It is
the rhythm of machinery that has set Strawinsky the artist free. All his
life he has been conscious of these steel men. Mechanical things have
influenced his art from the beginning. It is as though machinery had
revealed him to himself, as though sight of the functioning of these
metal organisms, themselves but the extension of human bones and muscles
and organs, had awakened into play the engine that is his proper body.
For, as James Oppenheim has put it in the introduction to "The Book of
Self," "Man's body is just as large as his tools, for a tool is merely
an extension of muscle and bone; a wheel is a swifter foot, a derrick a
greater hand. Consequently, in the early part of the century, the race
found itself with a new gigantic body." It is as though the infection of
the dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking beams, drills, has
awakened out of Strawinsky a response and given him his power to beat
out rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him. One of his first
original compositions, written while he was yet a pupil of
Rimsky-Korsakoff's, imitates fireworks, distinguishes what is human in
their activity, in the popping, hissing, exploding, in the hysterical
weeping of the fiery fountains, the proud exhibitions and sudden
collapses of the pin-wheels. It is the machine, enemy of man, that is
pictured by "The Nightingale," that curious work of which one act dates
from 1909, and two from 1914. Strawinsky had the libretto formed on the
tale of Hans Christian Andersen which recounts the adventures of the
little brown bird that sings so beautifully that the Emperor of China
bids it to his court. Strawinsky'