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.
July is coming and for Americans and the French, it’s a time for fireworks. Le feu d’artifice! Times of joy for young and old. Colourful explosions in the air, designs and flourishes in ephemeral light, and the boom of excitement.
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was one of the last great pianist-composers in a long tradition stretching back to Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Brahms. He always maintained that “a composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his
They appear in the sky at the poles, flickering patterns of light that can cover the whole sky or sweep across like a curtain. The Auroras, named for the goddess of dawn, are one of the wonderful natural light displays
Collaborative Variations on Sumer is icumen in Written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English, the 13th century song Sumer is icumen in welcomes the warmest season with open arms. The cuckoo is called on to sing, the seeds are
These days, when we hear of the doomed lovers Pelléas and Mélisande, we most often think of Claude Debussy’s opera, but there were other composers who took up the story by Maurice Maeterlinck. In Maeterlinck’s 1893 play, Golaud finds Mélisande
Picking unpublished poems from the manuscripts of his neighbor romantic poet and writer Théophile Gautier, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) created his song group (not a cycle) Les nuits d’été (The Nights of Summer). Completed in 1841, the songs, written for mezzo
In 1954, British author T.H. White, known for his children’s Arthurian novels such as The Sword in the Stone, translated a medieval bestiary. His interest in the medieval started in the late 1920s, when he discovered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century chronicle
The repetitive click of the cricket is a sound for a summer night. They are all over the world with the greatest variety of them being in the tropics. They appear in literature and movies, such as The Cricket in
