In his autobiography the fifty-three-year-old Stravinsky claimed: ‘Composers may well envy the lot of painters, sculptors, and writers, who communicate directly with their public without having recourse to intermediaries.’1 This longing to present a musical work as a self-contained entity, as an objet d’art, became central to his promotion of neoclassical music, and he was most outspoken about this in the article introducing his Octet in 1923, where he stated: ‘My Octuor is a musical object.’2