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.
The swan is a bird of many metaphors: sailing perfectly calmly on the surface and flapping wildly with their webbed feet below is one of the more memorable. In music, however, the swan is the bird that is silent in
In 1892 Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) set to work on an orchestral suite with arrangements of piano music by Frédéric Chopin. Entitled Chopiniana it was introduced to the public in December 1893 by Rimsky-Korsakov, and published by Belyayev one year later.
Birds in music are everywhere – even non-singing birds, such as Sibelius’ The Swan of Tuonela. There’s also Vaughan Williams’ Lark (ascending), and Delius’ First Cuckoo in Spring, and even Mussorgsky’s Ballet of Unhatched Chicks. Let’s explore some other birds.
The Great War, as World War I was known at the time, inspired many works of music, often set to poetry. Maurice Ravel took inspiration from his many dead friends to create a piano work, Le tombeau de Couperin (1914-1917),
So you don’t have a dog or a cat, but a fish tank is the place where your animal companion resides. What kind of music do we have about fish? We’ll start with the tank itself, and Giancarlo Vulcano’s Music
We know…there’s only 12 notes in a scale and how many different ways can there be of combining them? Sometimes, you get a song in your ear and start to hear it in many different places. Sometimes it was deliberate
Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Martyrdom of Insects Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) is considered ‘the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music.’ Immensely prolific, at his death he left some 2,000 works, many of which had gained international
Fritz Steinbach (1855-1916), none withstanding Hans von Bülow, was regarded as the foremost conductor of Brahms’ music. We know that they first met when Steinbach attempted to persuade Brahms to take him on as a student in 1875. Brahms declined,
