The paradox of freedom in music

Just read Douglas Lowry's inaugural address at his investiture as the new Dean of ESM. As he looks into the future for the institution, it is interesting that he should quote Stravinsky:

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself … my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action …” (fr Poetics of Music)

Lowry then condenses this to "An artist is most free when the limits are most severe."

In the past, I would immediately think of what I normally tell students when persuading them of the value of mastering species counterpoint; this time, I suddenly wonder if we cannot also profitably think of the 'field' of analysis as similarly 'acting' within constraints. When we choose a particular analytical tool (e.g. Roman numeral analysis, voice-leading reduction, phrase analysis, etc), we 'limit' ourselves to a particular frame of musical thinking, shared by a particular musical community, to exercise our 'freedom' of interpretive imaginations. I wonder if my students sometimes resist analysis not because of the mental hard work involved, but because they see analysis as limiting their musical imagination....But then, without a proper frame of reference, our analytical/interpretational ruminations may risk diffusing into incoherence; and without a shared frame of reference, we can't effectively communicate our musical epiphanies.

Of course, this is not to deny the value of thinking out of the box--of stepping out of a particular frame of analytical perspective in order to find/develop a different (or even better) one.