Unconscious bursts of creativity that engender significant artistic endeavors are not necessarily inspired by passionate romantic love alone. Greek mythology believed that this kind of stimulus came from nine muses, the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. Muses were long considered the source of knowledge embodied in poetry, lyric songs and ancient myths. Throughout the history of Western art, artists, writers and musicians have prayed to the muses, or alternately, drawn inspiration from personified muses that conceptually reside beyond the borders of earthly love. True to life, however, composer inspiration has emerged from the entire spectrums of existence and being. Nature has always played a decidedly important role in the inspiration of various classical composers, as did exotic cities, landscapes or rituals. Composer inspiration is also found in poetry, the visual arts, and mythological stories and tales. Artistic, historical or cultural expressions of the past are just as inspirational as is the everyday: the third Punic War or the contrapuntal mastery of Bach is inspirationally just as relevant as are the virulent bat and camel. Composer inspiration is delightfully drawn from heroes and villains, scientific advances, a pet, or something as mundane as a hangover. Discover what fires the imagination of people who never stop asking questions.
Louis Henry (1784-1836) was an exceptional French dancer, choreographer and ballet master. Born in Versailles, he started his career at the Paris Opera in 1803 but quickly got into heated competition with Louis Duport and Auguste Vestris. Vicious infighting forced
J.R.R. Tolkien created an entire world of high fantasy in his work The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Creating the world of Middle Earth beginning with The Hobbit in 1937, he fleshed it out in the three volumes
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the genre-changing 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll, takes us to a world populated by talking animals who pose questions of logic and behave in ways that make 7-year-old Alice question the sanity of it all. Characters
In my humble opinion, the richness and subtlety of Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) melodic and harmonic language is unequaled in the world of classical music. For one reason or another, we are led to believe that Schubert’s music was not popular
The emergence of the new media of television, cinema and radio in the 20th century brought Scheherazade into the mainstream of popular culture. Hollywood went into overdrive, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed of 1926, is the oldest surviving feature-length
Composers are inspired by the world, by their experiences, and by others’ imaginations. Novels and stories have been set by composers as everything from little piano pieces (here, Debussy was inspired by the Golliwog character in children’s book by Florence
In much of the English-speaking world, a traditional folk song set to the words of a Scots poem is used to bid farewell to the old year at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. “Auld Lang Syne,” probably
Maurice Ravel wrote two works with Shéhérazade, the heroine and narrator of The Arabian Nights as the title. One of his earliest surviving orchestral pieces, the “Ouverture de Shéhérazade” makes use of a Persian melody, but it was not well
