Stravinsky Snark

I don't know whether I'm technically "allowed" to post this, but I am anyway, because I just find it funny.
In English a while back, we had to write an essay based upon this essay by Stravinsky. I (and my opera-singing friend who could relate much more than the rest of the class) enjoyed this far too much, especially upon discovering that Stravinsky was as sarcastic, irritated, and cynical as I could have hoped.
I won't share the essay (especially since I don't actually remember if we wrote it or just analyzed the piece), but here's the work by Stravinsky, in words rather than notes, for all of you to check out. I don't claim this to be mine - obviously, as I've mentioned several times that it was written by Stravinsky - and I owe credit to the College Board for even publishing it. I haven't been able to find it out of the AP context, at least as far as the internet is concerned.

Conducting, like politics, rarely attracts original minds, and the field is more for the making of careers and the exploitation of personalities - another resemblance to politics - than a profession for the application of exact and standardized discipline. A conductor my actually be less equipped for his work than his players, but no one except the players need know it, and his career is not dependent upon them in any case, but on the society women (including critics) to whom his musical qualities are of secondary importance. The successful conductor can be an incomplete musician, but he must be a compleat angler. His first skill has to be power politics. 

In such people the incidence of ego disease is naturally high to begin with, and I hardly need add that the disease grows like a tropical weed under the sun of a pandering public. The results are that the conductor is encouraged to impose a purely egotistical, false, and arbitrary authority, and that he is accorded a position out of all proportion to his real value in the musical, as opposed to the music-business, community. He soon becomes a "great" conductor, in fact, or as the press agent of one of them recently wrote me, a "titan of the podium," and as such is very nearly the worst obstacle to genuine music-making. "Great" conductors, like "great" actors, are unable to play anything but themselves;  being unable to adapt themselves to the work, they adapt the work to themselves, to their "style," their mannerisms. The cult of the "great"conductor also tends to substitute looking for listening, so that the conductor and audience alike (and to reviewers who habitually fall into the trap of describing a conductor's appearance rather than the way he makes music sound, and of mistaking the conductor's gestures for the music's meanings), the important part of the performance becomes the gesture.

If you are incapable of listening, the conductor will show you what to feel. Thus, the film-actor type of conductor will act out a life of Napoleon in "his" Eroica, wear an expression of noble suffering on the retreat from Moscow (TV having circumvented the comparatively merciful limitation to the dorsal view)and one of ultimate triumph in the last movement, during which he even dances the Victory Ball. If you are unable to listen to the music, you watch the corybantics, and if you are able, you had better not go to the concert.