When Stravinsky shaped his purpose to the shifting scenes of many cultures, many salons, many dialectics, many personalities, he tried to refashion himself into a stylist of many styles, determined by many disparate cultures. Prokofieff was guided in a consistent direction by the life of his own people -- by the compass of their national ideas. But Stravinsky was swayed by the attitudes of whatever culture he was reflecting. In all his miscalculations, Stravinsky made the fatal historical blunder of presuming that he could transform other composers' inspirations -- representing many peoples, time periods and styles -- into his own music by warping the harmony, melody, or form, to verify his own experiments. Because of the authentic homogeneity of his early Nationalistic materials, and his flair for orchestrations -- his brilliant Petruchka, his savage Sacre du Printemps, his incisive Les Noces -- the world kept hoping that he could recapture the historical direction for which his native talents were predisposed.

But time is running out, and many of Stravinsky's admirers begin to fear that he will never find terra firma. His various aesthetic postulates remain as landmarks of a house divided against itself: Supra Expressionism, Neo Paganism, Neo Classicism, Neo Romanticism, Neo Jazz, Neo Ecclesiasticism, Neo Popularism, and most recently, Post Serialism -- all competing with each other within one composer! What a patchwork of proclamations and renunciations! Meager and shabby by-products linger to haunt our memories of a once mighty protagonist; a maladroit reharmonization of our National Anthem (The Star-Spangled Banner); a poor attempt to write an idiomatic jazz concerto; a circus polka for elephants; his hopes that the tunes from his old music might be used for popular American commercial songs! Stravinsky, nearing the age of eighty, is like a lost and frantic bird, flitting from one abandoned nest to another, searching for a home.