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.
Stravinsky’s ballet Le baiser de la fée gives us the life of a child fated to a bad end by a desirous fairy. Composed in 1928 for Diaghilev and created for the prima ballerina Ida Rubinstein, the ballet tells of
A work from 1916 entitled In memoriam would normally be assumed to be work commemorating the losses of World War I. This work by English composer Arnold Bax, however, is for a different struggle – the armed uprising in Ireland
For composer Alexander Tchaikovsky (b. 1946), it wasn’t the thought of doing his 9th symphony that was the difficult mountain to meet, it was the sixth and seventh. Having completed his sixth symphony (and remembering that the sixth symphony was
Widely considered the most influential cartoonists of all time, Charles Schulz (1922-2000) created the “Peanuts” in 1950. This most famous of all comic strips ran for 50 years, with 17,897 original strips published in all. It appeared in over 2,600
Orgue de Marcel Dupre à Meudon In 1925, Marcel Dupré (1886-1971) bought a large house in the Parisian suburb of Meudon. He quickly installed a house organ that had once belonged to the revered organist Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911). Aristide Cavaillé-Coll
When many composers do songs about death, it’s death as an abstract concept. In Mussorgsky’s Song and Dances of Death, however, Death (capital D) is an active character. He rocks babies, he sings to children, he gets drunk men to
Anton Webern (1883-1945) is best known to us as part of the Second Viennese School with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and fellow-student Alban Berg. Before he was a radical atonal composer, however, he was a nice Romantic composer whose idol
The nationalism that hit the 19th century and carried through to the 20th century had a profound effect on music. Music that had been ignored for its folk-like character, or its non-urban nature, became the basis for new works that
