When limits free creativity rather than inhibit it.

[KidCharlemagne]

I remember Shakespeare or someone saying that the limiting forms of sonnets, haiku, etc. actually enhanced their creativity because it reduced the overwhelm of how to structure a poem. Basically I'm looking for any examples about how limiting something actually frees rather than constrains. Quotes, examples, etc.. would be great. Anyone?

[KidCharlemagne]

I should add that examples of limiting as paradoxically freeing need not be restricted to creativity. I fact, intuition would even be better. I'll take anything.

[tanstaafl]

Here's a very recent article on this very thing (http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/03/editorial_dungeons_dragons_net.html).

[Terrorcotta]

I tend to get pretty creative when I am thinking around the limits and roadblacks. It helps me focus on the problem instead of all the myriad of options.
Plus, being the perverse being I am, I put a lot of energy into bending the rules.

[Autumn Almanac]

A few examples from the rock and roll world:

The Beatles' Get Back project was an attempt to get away from the heavily-produced, studio-bound experimentalism of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's. The idea was to write and record quickly, with minimal overdubs. Of course, the album that finally resulted from those sessions (Let It Be) semi-abandoned the original concept, but the sessions still produced, IMHO, a lot of the Beatles' best work.

Similarly, starting with (IIRC) The Cult of Ray and continuing through his albums with the Catholics, Frank Black recorded under strict self-imposed rules. Each song had to be a complete performance, recorded directly to two-track with no overdubs or post-production at all. Again, IMHO, this technique resulted in much better music than his fussy, overly-elaborate first two solo albums.

Then there's Robert Pollard, the "man of ten thousand songs." On top of being a ridiculously prolific songwriter to begin with, his typical recording methods involve almost none of the usual filters between the songwriter's brain and the listener's ears. He records and releases practically every scrap of music he writes. If inspiration hits when he's alone at home with only an acoustic guitar and a cassette tape recorder, then that's how the track gets recorded and that's what ends up on his next album. If he writes a good verse but can't think up a chorus on the fly, then the song just won't have a chorus and that's that. Being a fan and trying to sift through the mountain of music he releases any given year is practically a full-time job. :) The man's a genius though.

[Misnomer]

I'm with Shakespeare. I've been writing poems and song lyrics since I was a kid (I'm now 35), and my stuff almost always deliberately rhymes: I can't tell you the number of times I have discovered a better way of expressing something while in the process of looking for/working through a rhyme. I feel that the twin constraints of rhythm and rhyme are often actually freeing, and make me a better writer. They make me a less lazy writer, for damn sure!

[jsgoddess]

Yes, rhyme is a good example since it means you can't just grab the first word that means the right thing, or close to it.

I often take my own free verse poems and turn them into rhymed and metered pieces. That can show me new avenues with the original, or the new poem might be an improvement.

Anything that serves as a challenge forces us to think differently, to stretch. It might not help that particular art work, but it might help every piece after it.

[Alessan]

Because instead of wasting your time on trying to be original, you can focus on being good.

Originality is overrated.

[Trunk]

I think that most art can fit into that category, even if not as neatly as it does with a sonnet or a haiku.

Painting on a canvas itself imposes a lot of structure on the process, not to mention doing a portrait, a nude, a still life, which might be the equivalent of a sonnet, a limerick, whatever.

My wife is a jeweler, and you notice this phenomenon in the world of arts & crafts. Ceramic artists or jewelers don't just make "anything". They express creativity through their take on a tea-pot, an urn, a necklace -- classic structures with modern ideas and materials applied to their creation.

There has to be some parameters within which to evaluate them. Sometimes people can transcend that entirely -- Christo might be an example -- but that's much more the exception than the rule.

[Unauthorized Cinnamon]

I haven't seen it yet (it's in my Netflix queue), but I'd say from the description, The Five Obstructions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Obstructions) is the perfect anwer to your query.

[Millit the Frail]

I think this was the driving appeal behind the "magnetic poetry" craze a few years ago. We had that stuff in our lockers, dorm rooms, fridges, et cetera. Maybe they're still around, but I never see them anymore.

[Trunk]

I think this was the driving appeal behind the "magnetic poetry" craze a few years ago. We had that stuff in our lockers, dorm rooms, fridges, et cetera. Maybe they're still around, but I never see them anymore.
That strikes me as almost the complete opposite.

[Autumn Almanac]

That strikes me as almost the complete opposite.
I can see how it fits into the thread. The challenge is to create a poem from a small, pre-selected set of possible words, instead of the entire language.

[lissener]

When writing "freeform" (jus to stick with writing as an example for now), you're not only trying to come up with original thoughts and expressions, you're also trying to come up with an original structure to put them in. Two different parts of my brain at work. When working within a pre-designed format, you can let the structure part of your brain rest and concentrate all your energy on the "art." When I'm experiencing writer's block, I try to write whay I'm saying in iambic pentamater. Whoosh! it's like ExLax for the brain! There's a nearly physical sense of the blockage being just blown away, and the flow reasserts itself. Then I can go back and un-iamb, if necessary, and move on from there.

[Millit the Frail]

That strikes me as almost the complete opposite.

I think it fits. You've got a small set of words and you have to manipulate them around to make poetry. How many people just go off and write a poem without being prompted?

It's hard for most people to just sit down, think of something to say, and then write a poem from scratch. Yet everyone I knew was tempted to create funny or pretty or thoughtful little phrases when they saw a bunch of little words they could arrange however they pleased. Trust me--put some out somewhere, and it's hard for people to walk by and not put something together, even if it's nonsensical or inane.

[DoctorJ]

One of the trends I noticed among bands at SXSW was the prevalence of vintage keyboards--not just the old 60s and 70s organs, but plenty of the cheap Yamahas and Casiotones a lot of us had in the 80s.

Even cheap keyboards these days sound pretty damn good, and have reasonably good pressure sensors and polyphony; they'll go just about as far as you could ever want them to go. Back then a non-virtuoso could push a keyboard like that to its limits, where you could come up with new ways to make it sound cool.

[KidCharlemagne]

I know I've seen a quote about this somewhere, can anyone recall it? A pithy quote would help to make the point and add some authority to it.

[delphica]

Architecture comes to mind, especially in urban environments. Sometimes you have a very small piece of land, or an oddly shaped one, on which to build.

[Trunk]

I can see how it fits into the thread. The challenge is to create a poem from a small, pre-selected set of possible words, instead of the entire language.
In the case of the OP, you are given a structure, and it is the artist's job to create that structure using a set of building blocks that is virtually limitless.

In the case of the magnet poetry, you are given a set of building blocks, and can create arbitrary structures.

In the sense that you've limited the universe, they're similar. But, to me (and what I thought the OP was getting at) the use of language is the expression of the poet -- not the construction of new forms.

(Or maybe I just find the idea of selecting 500 words from a dictionary, and stringing them together arbitrarily until you get something that sounds interesting lame.)

It's like "jewelers" who purchase pre-fabricated beads and baubles or drill holes in dice or sticks and string them together to make a bangle. It forgoes what makes the process of creation interesting in the first place.

I don't know. It's distinct in my mind.

[CJJ*]

I know I've seen a quote about this somewhere, can anyone recall it? A pithy quote would help to make the point and add some authority to it.

Try Wordsworth's Nuns fret not sonnet; I think it's rather commonly read in HS English classes:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

[Rodgers01]

I've always thought silent movies and the radio were good examples of this. Silent movies had to tell everything with visuals and consequently developed some of the most purely "cinematic" films in movie history. Radio show writers and producers had to create entire worlds from sound. I've often wondered if the golden age of movies in the 1930s was a result of sets of people from these two creative backgrounds coming together.

[rowrrbazzle]

Kant uses this image in "Critique of Pure Reason" - "The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space."

[Skara_Brae]

I am not sure if this applies, but Steven Spielburg's JAWs in generally held up to be a masterwork in the art of suspense and anticipation. I have read numerous articles stating that the decision not to show the shark until the 2nd half of the film was pure genius becuase it forces the audience to build up the animal in their own minds, and what we imagine is always scarier than what we see.

It later came out that the plans were to use the prop shark much more, but they could not get it to work properly and had to work around it. The faulty mechanical shark actually made for a better film.

Nowadays, we all the CGI, filmmakers really don't have to get creative anymore, which could explain the more humdrum thillers we are seeing.

(By the way, I'm new round these parts - hi!)

[WhyNot]

A lot of director's choices in film and stage are better when more limited. An unlimited budget gets you a Phantom or a Les Mis - which are entertaining shows, of course, but when you can afford to buy or build exactly what you want, tends to get very representational and not very creative. When you have $2000 and a cast of 10, you get really creative because there will be no show if you don't. Mary Zimmerman (to use an example I saw recently) can create all of the Grecian Islands and a boat to sail around them on with a few 4X4's and ropes. A few strings of Christmas lights become the constellations. Some burlap and a homecoming dress from the eighties make your wardrobe. And it's a far more creative - in the sense of creating original stuff, and in the sense of stretching your brain - endeavor than when you can simply go out and buy what you need.

Furthermore, the limits of your stuff increase the creativity of your AUDIENCE, not just the artist. When the audience has to fill in the blanks, they become part of the creative process. They become involved, rather than observers. We all have our scariest/sexiest/grossest/funniest things ever, and if the director can get us to project that into the performance, we're all working at a level of superlatives, instead of shrugging and accepting the director's vision of "ugliest" as reality.

The classic example, of course, being Psycho. Everyone thinks they remember the knife stabbing the woman. Didn't happen. We filled that in on our own, because Hitchcock wasn't allowed to show it. And because we filled it in on our own, it was our own version of scariest.

[Figaro]

Acting in opera benefits from this same "limit boost," in my experience.

Any kind of acting other than improv already has a limit on the performers creativity: the script. But they are still free to make decisions about tone, timing, and overall expressive intent. Two different actors inhabiting the same role can make wildly different choices.

Once you add music to the mix, however, those choices have already largely been made by the composer, and so your creative energy is channeled into making those choices work as dramatic moments, rather than making the choices themselves.

Having to bring someone else's dramatic framework to life so that it seems organic and spontaneous to an audience forces you to commit to that framework and to its underlying choices in ways that you sometimes don't when you're free to make them yourself.

On rereading, I don't think I've said this very clearly, but oh well! :p

[jsgoddess]

I am not sure if this applies, but Steven Spielburg's JAWs in generally held up to be a masterwork in the art of suspense and anticipation.

<snip>


(By the way, I'm new round these parts - hi!)

I think it applies perfectly. And welcome!

[MovieMogul]

Interview with Robert Rodriguez (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue277/interview.html):Do you get particular satisfaction out of solving such problems cheaply?

Rodriguez: You have to, because you don't have the money. And it's more fun that way, because then you have to think, "OK, I don't have the money. How can I be creative? How do I still make the big movie without doing that?" It's more satisfying. It's more fun for the crew. And you save so much money that you get in return ... a lot of creative freedom, I mean total creative freedom. I even made the posters. The studio doesn't call you then; you are able to just do [it]. I want to do a Ray Harryhausen scene, no one is going to say no. You want to be the painter who can just sit there and paint. You don't want to have to be there going, "Did they take the paint brush away?" "Don't use yellow; use red." "Why?" "I don't know, just use red." "Ah, OK." After a while, you don't know what you are even doing. So this way you are really free to just be able to do whatever you really want.On Edgar G. Ulmer (http://www.alldayentertainment.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.100.exe/online-store/scstore/allday/ulmer/aboutulmer.html?E+scstore)“Poverty Row--From this cinematic no-man’s land, one expects no lavish, herculean masterworks. The most one can hope for are films that make the most of the modest resources and transcend their limitations of capital; films whose obvious budgetary shortcomings reveal the difficult conditions under which the filmmaker struggled to realize his/her vision, the financial obstacles that were cleared by ingenuity and clever craftsmanship. One hopes for films that do not rest upon established techniques and premises, but rather explore (even if clumsily and sometimes with unsatisfactory results) the possibilities and promise of an art form whose limits are not often enough tested. There, Edgar G. Ulmer fulfilled these hopes, found absolution and made the films for which he is best remembered. Yet, in those moments when the filmmaker fought ramshackleness with pure creativity, the unpolished gems that resulted remind us of the inventive spirit that first made photographs dance, make us aware of the mechanics of film construction, and ultimately reveal the cinema in its purest essence.”

[Khadaji]

I guess this is only a little bit what you are asking about. I find that when writing technical papers it goes so much more smoothly when I work from a pre-defined template. As you said, I don't have to put any thought into structure.

[Fatwater Fewl]

I know I've seen a quote about this somewhere, can anyone recall it? A pithy quote would help to make the point and add some authority to it.

Well, Robert Frost said

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Pithy enough for ya?

[dotchan]

Y'know, I think this thread is giving the most compelling defense of fanfiction I've seen in a long while. :D

(Although, to be honest, eventually it does stop being fun playing around in other people's worlds and the idea of building your own gets a lot more attractive.)

[Bosstone]

A little limitation absolutely helps spur creativity. I've never been able to make something up out of whole cloth, but I consider myself very good at taking the germ of an idea created by someone else and expanding on it and fleshing it out.

A little limitation/structure:
1) Provides direction. With total creativity, either it can take too long finding a path that works for you, or you find so many paths that work that indecision inhibits growth.
2) Gives you a sense of what works and what doesn't. If you're working freeform, it's harder to tell when something works or fits into the overall picture than when you have a rule or two defining the boundary.

Fanfiction is definitely a good example. Granted, there's thousands of terrible writers who couldn't have an original thought if their lives depended on it, but it's also a good way for emerging writers to practice the actual act of writing plot without worrying about characters or setting. The trick, though, is acknowledging and accepting the constraints that writing for a premade world imposes; bad fanfiction arises when the writer does not accept those constraints (personal characters being the most powerful characters in the story, unlikely romances, and other such horrors).

[Wendell Wagner]

Shakespeare certainly didn't say anything like the idea in the OP. It's just not the sort of thing he would say. I presume that the quote given above from Robert Frost is what is being asked about.

[jsgoddess]

Shakespeare certainly didn't say anything like the idea in the OP. It's just not the sort of thing he would say. I presume that the quote given above from Robert Frost is what is being asked about.

I hate that Frost quote.

If I'm playing without a net, that means my opponent is, too. And that would simply make the game harder.

[Dr. Rieux]

And exactly how is writng poetry like playing tennis, anyhow?

[Sailboat]

A common example we've all encountered is in party games that engage our creativity, like charades. There need to be some rules and there needs to be a chosen thing to pantomime before the whole thing really takes off. Everyone can play charades within those limitiations -- but if you just out of the blue turned to the person next to you at the party and said "act something out," he'd be dumbfounded and have a hard time getting started.

Sailboat

[stolichnaya]

As an actor and an improv comedian, my personal experience is that limitations, even self-imposed, encourage exploration. If you are a creative personality, once you know a thing, you are basically uninterested in it. You need to explore beyond it.

A "limitation" is a fact about the world you're creating that you already know, it is inalterable. One of the most satisfying questions to answer in improv or in any other creative pursuit is:

"Given that this is true, what is also likely to be true?"

It's almost like exploratory science. Here are the rules in this universe, they are arbitrarily defined, you cannot change them, what does this lead to? I get tingles thinking about it, honestly.

In less esoteric terms, I think of movies like Primer and Cube- both defined and in a sense inspired by their limitations in resources. Cube was written specifically as a thought experiment- how can one make a sci-fi/horror movie with a small, unknown cast and a single set?

[Mangetout]

A rather mundane example would be Scrapheap Challenge (Junkyard Wars in the USA) - creativity in design being provoked by the limits of materials and time available.

Or The Great Egg Race (who remembers that?) - where contestants had to build devices (initially egg-transportation devices) out of very scant materials such as drinking straws, newspaper and spoons.

[Fatwater Fewl]

And exactly how is writng poetry like playing tennis, anyhow?

I dunno ... maybe you play little mind games with reality, then set yourself to try and match your perceptions with words as best you can?

[CJJ*]

And exactly how is writng poetry like playing tennis, anyhow?
A simile, like a witty joke, loses all it's magic when it has to be so bluntly explained, so I hope this question is rhetorical. Nevertheless, Frost is intimating that tennis wouldn't be much of a game without the limitation of a net in the middle, just like poetry isn't very interesting without the limitations of verse form.

[kunilou]

I once asked a moderately successful artist (she earns enough to eat and pay the mortgage) about this. Her answer, "You have to know all the rules before you're good enough to break them."

[astorian]

This may not be the kind of limit the OP had in mind, but the old Hays Code put a lot of restrictions on what filmmakers could show on screen. So, they couldn't shoot scenes showing graphic sex or violence.

A limit? Sure- but sometimes, this limit forced directors to get creative and find ways to suggest or imply what happened, and this was sometimes more effective than explicit scenes.

A commonly cited example would be John Ford's "The Searchers." We never see the naked, mutilated body of John Wayne's niece (who had been kidnapped by Commanches), but the expression on Wayne's face and the way he screamed, "What do you want me to do, draw you a picture???" conveyed the truth just the same.

[Manatee]

Medieval art worked the same way as well. Our model of the creative process is the blank canvas; you can create anything you want. The medieval model was a box of bits of glass and stone and you have to make a mosaic out of it. Given the former, anyone can look creative, because you can do anything. In the latter model, you're limited by the shapes and colors of the pieces at hand. To shiine in that context is to really display creativity.

You can see this especially in their literature, where the ideal isn't originality, it's reliance on authority. What's cherished isn't what you create out of whole cloth, it's what you can do with the pre-existing characters and plot.

[Full Metal Lotus]

want "genius" from me , and I CAN be extremely creative... then give me a dead line.

I need a way to express the joy of finding the perfect (insert product here) by 4pm friday...

i will not even think about it until 2 pm friday... by 3:30 P M i am finishing up the powerpoint slides....
and it WILL be very very good...
worst thing you can ask me is "come up wityh "X", and then tell me to get back to you when I do....

fml

[Liberal]

It isn't just art, either. Austrian School economists say that entrepreneurship flourishes at its finest amidst market restraints. Restraints against pollution, for example. If government allows certain minimal levels of pollution, then there is no incentive to produce anything better. But if there had to be a way to produce things without so much as a wiff of smoke, entrepreneurs would find it (by commissioning inventors and engineers) what with necessity being the mother of invention, and all that. Creativity would be an advantage.

There is a caveat, however. Frivolous restraints against entrepreneurship itself (like onerous taxes, or legislation favoring one company over another) stifle the innovations that would otherwise occur.

[TJdude825]

I randomly started clicking around Wikipedia a few months ago, looking for things on this same topic. I remember finding out about a book written with no verbs at all, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing

[jjimm]

On the charming limitations of iambic pentameter (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=3582308#post3582308).

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

In the old Soviet Union, painters were under restrictions as to subject matter & technique.

What they did to express themselves was remarkable.

I saw one such painting on display in our State Museum--a portrait of an old man with dispairing eyes. The artist had used lighting to make it appear absolutely 3 dimensional, & they had to put up railings & a guard to keep people from trying to touch it. I almost did myself.

The effect was amazing.

[b3tour]

Serial music -- especially integral serialism, which stretched the precompositional process to overarching, forbidding dimensions.

Anything associated with the enormously influential group OuLiPo (of which Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Raymond Queneau were members, as was "honorary" retroactive member Ray Roussel). Favorite examples include Roubaud's ε (the title is actually supposed to be the other style of lower-case epsilon, which I can't find in the character map I have -- the one used to indicate set membership in set theory, not the Hilbert-style one used above for something I can't remember) and Perec's La vie : mode d'emploi.

Works by those inspired by the playful formal constraints classified and exploited by members of the above group, like Christian Bök (in, e.g., Eunoia).

[Misnomer]

want "genius" from me , and I CAN be extremely creative... then give me a dead line.Oooh, good one: I second everything you said. I am always working right up until deadlines, but I have never missed one and my work is always top-quality. For example, I'm carrying a 3.8 GPA in grad school right now (that one damned "B"!) even though it's not unusual at all for me to finish writing a paper the afternoon that it's due. Deadlines are good for me. :)

[WhyNot]

I noticed an interesting example of this today on the kids' menu at our local pancake house. Usually there's an outlined picture to color, or a blank space in which I could draw a picture for the baby of one of the two things I think I can draw - a flower and a silly smiley face. On this menu, however, there were three squiggly lines, spaced about three inches apart and at different angles. "Connect the lines to make a picture!" read the instructions.

Hmm. If I'm not "allowed" to draw my signature flower and silly smiley face, and there's nothing here to color, what do I do? I have no choice but to be more creative than I usually would.

So the top squiggle became the top of some fluffy clouds, and the bottom squiggle was transformed into some hills, and the middle slantwise squiggle became the neck of a curious stegosaurus eating one of "my" flowers.

My daughter loved it, and I was shocked to find that I can draw other stuff. Wouldn't have figured it out without those squiggly lines limiting my drawing space.

[Askance]

I know I've seen a quote about this somewhere, can anyone recall it? A pithy quote would help to make the point and add some authority to it.There's a quote from Shelley (or one of that crowd, as Tom Lehrer would say) that goes something likeMany a happy thought in search of rhyme but I'm unable to find anything like it online.

[Sleel]

I can't remember for sure where I saw it, but Joe Haldeman and Jane Yolen, two SF authors who are more known for their prose than their poetry, exchanged some writing challenges online. They set varying constraints on each other and the challenger also had to write a poem conforming to the rules of the challenge. One would say something like, "The poem must have a meter; no blank verse. You have to use the words oleaginous, putrid, and stamen." They came up with some very cool stuff that way. I think that making new challenges for the other, the competition, and the restrictions placed on the form of the poem or the vocabulary boosted their creativity. People like playing games. Restrictions, whether artificial or intrinsic, make solving a problem a little bit like a game.

Come to think of it, you see this kind of fascination at work with all kinds of human behavior. It's not just a literary convention that romantic love benefits from obstacles to feed it. People do in fact have emotional responses to overcoming an obstacle between them and the object of their affection. I've felt it, and I'm sure most of you have too. Sometimes long-distance relationships fall apart when you can actually see the person whenever you want to. And there's nothing more sure to push a teenager toward a relationship than forbidding him or her to see that person. Everyone who has read Romeo and Juliet knows that this observation of behavior was held to be true in Shakespeare's time (and way before his time, when the story of Pyramus and Thisbe was first told) and it's just as true now.

Just about any writer can tell you that a deadline, arbitrary or not, is necessary or nothing would ever be "finished". Books can be endlessly tweaked and revised. Tolkein spent decades on Lord of the Rings, and never finished the Silmarillion. Writing without editing or other restrictions is obviously not very good either. Take two popular, halfway decent writers: Stephen King's re-written books are inevitably worse than his original, more edited, versions. J.K. Rowlings' early Harry Potter books are tighter and move much, much faster than her later books, which suffer from a severe lack of editing due to her powerhouse bestseller status in my opinion.

[KidCharlemagne]

I've found a bunch of applicable quotes though none are the original one I was thinking of. You'll have to forgive the formatting; I'm short on time and just copy/pasting.

"Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it", Doris Lessing, "the golden notebook" (Preface), , Flamingo, 1972, p.10

I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination", George Szirtes, Poetry, Feb 2006

"form isn't a container (of content) but rather a rule for generating a possible 'next move'", Foreman, "How to write a play", p.229

"on the simplest level, form functions for any poet as a kind of scaffold from which the poem can be constructed. Stravinsky maintained that only in art could one be freed by the imposition of more rules, perhaps because these rules limit the field of possibilities and escort us rapidly beyond the selection of tools and media to laying the first stone of the work itself." ?

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution" -

Igor Stravinksy