Unlike Bartók, who had almost nothing to say about his own work, Stravinsky was a man of many words, both philosophical and eminently practical. Had Bartók been minded to expand on the subject of his own music vis-à-vis performance, he too might well have observed that ‘The sin against the spirit of the work always begins with a sin against its letter’, as well as endorsing Stravinsky's remark that ‘An executant's talent lies precisely in his faculty for seeing what is actually in the score …’. But it is at this point that Stravinsky the composer evidently parts company with himself as performer, since he too-often fails, by default, to provide the very information he trusts the talented executant to note. Not so Bartók, for whom intervallic shape and motivic phrasing is a sine qua non for the cut and thrust of his Beethovenian developments. It is not so much that, like Debussy, he expanded the range of classical accentuation according to the needs of his own music, but that he succeeded in devising an articulation precisely appropriate to the needs of each particular piece (see for instance Nine Little Piano Pieces, Nos. 1–4); in other words, the relative weight of phrase and of points within that phrase may be signalled by metre, dynamics, accents and, everywhere, by articulation slurs which define shape and intervallic content. Any properly articulate performance should of course take account of all these punctuating elements.