Stravinsky and the Muses

Extract

The interrelation of the arts is a fruitful subject for discussion, but leads only to pedantry if the intention is only to make distinctions. It is more interesting to trace the similarities, perhaps even to find an all-embracing identity, but that task demands an unusual range of sensibility. The senses are dependent on separate organs of sensation, so that a sensitive eye is not necessarily housed in the same body as a sensitive ear. The musician may be colour-blind, the painter tone-deaf, and there may even exist some law of compensation in the nervous system, so that the hypertrophy of one sense involves the atrophy of another. Men of universal sensibility are rare, but they do exist and Stravinsky is one of them.