Whenever people are looking for inspiration, they often look up into the sky. Classical composers are no exception.
We’ve gathered fourteen pieces of classical music that encourage us to take a breath, go outside, and look up.
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Franz Liszt: Nuages gris (1881)
“Nuages gris” translated means “grey clouds.” It’s a late work by composer and pianist Franz Liszt, who was seventy years old when he wrote it.
The work is brief – only a few minutes long – but eerie and impactful. It is clearly anticipating works by later composers like Debussy or Schoenberg, with its austere character and unexpected harmonies.
Edward MacDowell: Silver Clouds from Six Idyls After Goethe (1887)
American composer Edward MacDowell had a much brighter conception of grey clouds than Liszt did.
“Silver Clouds” comes from MacDowell’s “Six Idyls After Goethe” for solo piano. Each of the six pieces is prefaced by a poem. This one’s begins:
Silver clouds are lightly sailing
Through the drowsy, trembling air,
And the golden summer sunshine
Casts a glory everywhere…
Richard Strauss: Ride through the air from Don Quixote (1897)
In 1897, composer Richard Strauss created an orchestral showpiece illustrating the story of Don Quixote from the novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes.
Don Quixote is a delusional older man who has read too many books about knight-errantry, fancies himself a knight, and loses touch with reality. He employs a sidekick squire named Sancho Panza, who is perpetually confused by his master’s insanity.
In a Young People’s Concert given by Leonard Bernstein in 1968, Bernstein describes the setup to Strauss’s musical interpretation of this work perfectly:
Perhaps the most famous of these Variations; which we’re now going to hear, concerns a ride through the air, with the Don and his squire mounted, blindfolded, and mounted on what they believe to be the magic horse Pegasus, who is supposed to be able to fly them through space. In their boggled imagination, this does indeed happen, very graphically, with the aid of a wind machine plus a lot of other windy noises, but the low instrument of the orchestra never gets off their one low note, which is D. They’re there throughout, thus informing us that Pegasus has remained earthbound throughout the flight.
Don Quixote’s imaginary flight through the sky is gloriously epic, even though it never actually occurs.
Claude Debussy: Nuages from Three Nocturnes (1899)
When writing his Nuages (“Clouds”), French composer Claude Debussy may have been inspired by Liszt’s starkly modern Nuages gris (“Grey clouds”) from 1881.
This work has a similarly lulling rhythm, with ambiguous harmonies and a haunting atmosphere.
A Debussy biographer named Léon Vallas reported about the origins of Nuages:
One day, in stormy weather, as Debussy was crossing the Pont de la Concorde in Paris with his friend Paul Poujaud, he told him that on a similar kind of day, the idea of the symphonic work “Clouds” had occurred to him: he had visualised those very thunderclouds swept along by a stormy wind; a boat passing, with its horn sounding. These two impressions are recalled in the languorous succession of chords and by the short chromatic theme on the English horn.
Amy Beach: Under the Stars (1907)
American composer Amy Beach was born in 1867. She was one of the most impressive child prodigies in American history and wrote her first works when she was four years old.
She got married when she was eighteen. Per her new husband’s wishes, she agreed to cut down on public performances as a pianist and spend more time composing.
Over the course of her career, she wrote many evocative songs and piano pieces like this one, portraying a sky full of stars.
Gustav Holst: The Cloud Messenger (1910-13)
English composer Gustav Holst was born in 1874. His work for chorus and orchestra, The Cloud Messenger, was composed in the early 1910s.
Holst had a passion for the Sanskrit language, and he even went back to school in 1909 to better learn it. His daughter once described his relationship with Sanskrit: “He was not a poet, and there are occasions when his verses seem naïve. But they never sound vague or slovenly, for he had set himself the task of finding words that would be ‘clear and dignified’ and that would ‘lead the listener into another world.’”
The Cloud Messenger tells an ancient story of an exiled yaksha (a nature spirit) who sends an expression of love to his wife over the Himalayas through the sky on a cloud.
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending (1914)
In 1914, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote one of his most popular works, The Lark Ascending, for violin and piano. (It would be arranged for violin and orchestra after World War I.)
The work was inspired by a poem by the same name by British poet George Meredith, who described the beauty of a lark singing while flying up into the sky:
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,..
Albert Roussel: Les nuages s’accumulent dans le ciel from Bacchus and Ariadne (1930)
French composer Albert Roussel was born in 1869. He worked in the French Navy as a young man. After he resigned from military service, he devoted his life to composing.
In 1930, he wrote a ballet inspired by the ancient Greek myth of the abduction of Ariadne by Dionysus (also known as Bacchus).
In his ballet, Ariadne helps Theseus to make a prison break. Their punishment is to be sent together to the island of Naxos. Unfortunately for Ariadne, Theseus makes another escape, this time without her. In this telling, she attempts to die by suicide, throwing herself off the top of the island, but Dionysus / Bacchus saves her and they marry.
“Les nuages s’accumulent dans le ciel” (or “The clouds gather”) plays after Bacchus envelops Ariadne in his black cloak.
Florence Price: Clouds (1940)
American composer Florence Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887. In 1933, when the Chicago Symphony played her first symphony, she became the first Black woman to have a work played by a major American orchestra.
Clouds are potent symbols in many cultures, including African ones. They symbolise freedom of form and movement. You can hear this freedom in this dreamy work for solo piano.
Uuno Klami: Revontulet (1943-46)
Uuno Klami was a Finnish composer who was born in 1900. Revontulet (“Northern Lights”) was his crowning achievement and the work he personally believed was his best.
Revontulet is a beautifully written orchestral fantasy, especially notable for its writing for winds and brass. It paints a stunning portrait of skies coloured by otherworldly northern lights.
Charles Koechlin: Le ciel etoilé from Le Docteur Fabricius (1946)
French composer Charles Koechlin was born in 1867. He had a wide variety of extra-musical interests, including The Jungle Book, movie stars, and socialism.
Read more about Koechlin’s obsession with Hollywood stars – and how it impacted his music.
In 1946, he wrote a fifty-minute tone poem based on a short story by his uncle. In it, the narrator visits an eccentric, disillusioned nihilist named Doctor Fabricius, who lives in a house apart from other people. While visiting the nihilist, the narrator looks to the sky and sees a beautiful expanse of stars.
John Luther Adams: Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1995)
Composer John Luther Adams wrote in a program note about this piece:
Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing is a work of musical contemplation, an attempt to consecrate a small time and space for extraordinary listening. The work is titled after The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth-century mystical Christian text which has much in common with the teachings of contemplative traditions throughout the world. The essence of the contemplative experience is voluntary surrender, purposeful immersion in the fullness of a presence far larger than ourselves. To find communion, we must lose perspective. What, after all, is perspective but a way of removing ourselves from experience?
Ludovico Einaudi: Nuvole Bianche (2003)
Nuvole Bianche (“White Clouds”) is a simple, repetitive piano piece written by popular contemporary composer Ludovico Einaudi.
It came from his album Una Mattina. He described the album like this:
It speaks about me now, my life, the things around me. My piano, which I have nicknamed Tagore, my children Jessica and Leo, the orange kilim carpet that brightens up the living room, the clouds sailing slowly across the sky, the sunlight coming through the window, the music I listen to, the books I read and those I don’t read, my memories, my friends and the people I love.
Anna Clyne: Prince of Clouds (2012)
English composer Anna Clyne wrote this concerto for two solo violins and string orchestra in 2012. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Clyne wrote about the piece:
When writing Prince of Clouds, I was contemplating the presence of musical lineage—a family tree of sorts that passes from generation to generation. This transfer of knowledge and inspiration between generations is a beautiful gift. Composed specifically for Jennifer Koh and her mentor at the Curtis Institute of Music, Jaime Laredo, this thread was in the foreground of my imagination as a dialogue between the soloists and ensemble…
Conclusion
No matter what the weather, the sky is an ever-changing art piece available to nearly every human being at any time of day or night. It’s no surprise that classical music composers have been so inspired by it and its changing moods.
If Anna Clyne’s conception of the sky as a place where generations connect is any indication – or Florence Price drawing connections between the sky and freedom – or Liszt using clouds as the inspiration for his extraordinary late-in-life musical experiments…it seems clear that composers will keep looking skyward to find inspiration.
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