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.
How do you take the morning, musically? Bright and brassy alarm bells, a gentle reminder from the buzzer, the shock of morning radio? We decided to survey music for the earliest time of day: Dawn. We’ll start with Mussorgsky’s music
The Amazon rainforest covers the majority of the Amazon basin in South America. Its region stretches over nine nations and thousands of indigenous territories, and it is said to represent over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests. Well over 30
You can hear it one too many times. It’s the season for every ballet company to line up all their children dancers, get their prima ballerinas primed and put on their annual edition of The Nutcracker. It serves as the
Our incredible planet is in real trouble. Scientists have identified a triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss and overpopulation as humanity is racing “towards mass extinctions, health crises and constant climate-induced disruptions to society.” Earth has lost an estimated 50%
American composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) only wrote one work for piano and orchestra, his 1926 Piano Concerto. To put this work in context, we need to listen to it not only as a work by the young American composer newly
In 2020, the year the “Beethoven Year” met the COVID-19 virus, we heard hours and hours and miles of miles of Beethoven. We recently found, however, a different version of Beethoven that we found very intriguing. American composer Michael Gordon
The tale of the Greek god Pan and the nymph Syrinx is a tale of unrequited love and the invention of a musical instrument. After doing readings in Ovid’s Metamorphses, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) took up the take
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) took up the story of the beautiful miller’s daughter in 1823 using selections from a longer poem published in 1820 by his friend Wilhelm Müller. Müller’s original poem is made up of some 25 separate poems, only
