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.
As the 19th century idea of death as a close and regular companion faded away, the elegy in the 20th century began to change character. If we look at a work by the Hungarian composer Eugene Zádor (1894–1977), we can
Russian composers have created some of the most memorable music for children, starting with Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) created the ballet The Nutcracker for the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. It was given its premiere on 18
In 1915, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) attended a concert featuring the Polish pianist-composer Ignacy Paderewski. Young Copland, as well as countless young hopefuls around the world, was spellbound. He immediately decided to become a composer and enrolled in a number of
Demoralized by the carnage of World War I and fighting his own battle against cancer, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) writes, “Try as I may, I can’t regard the sadness of my existence with caustic detachment. Sometimes my days are dark, dull,
In music, nobody felt the anxiety of the past—specifically the looming shadow of Ludwig van Beethoven—more acutely than Johannes Brahms. Brahms told his friends that it was “horribly difficult to compose anything with Beethoven standing on his shoulders.” Over a
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote his orchestral showpiece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in 1946 as a commission for an educational film on the instruments of the orchestra. Britten used a theme from the Baroque British composer Henry Purcell
Laments continued to be very special works – rarely written and always filled with a very high emotional intensity. Elegies, on the other hand, were more of a late-19th-century phenomenon. Rather than heart-felt cries of despair, they were more like
It’s not really known who wrote the Toy Symphony, and it’s credited to both Joseph Haydn and Leopold Mozart. One problem is that the work didn’t appear in print until 1820, long after the death of either composer. The original
