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.
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
In 1935, Romanian composer George Enescu (1881-1955) started working on what was going to be a symphonic suite entitled Voix de la nature (Voice of Nature). He only completed one movement, Nuages d’automne sur les forêts (Autumn Clouds over the
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was a keen observer of the human condition, and a number of his contemporaries become important characters in his “Divine Comedy.” One such contemporary was Francesca da Rimini, the daughter of Guido da Polenta of Ravenna. Francesca
One of the most interesting cross-generational music styles is the theme and variations, particularly when a composer delves into the past to find his inspiration. How a work gets changed and modernized, its style developed, and a new work created
Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” contains 14, 233 lines of text divided into three main sections, “Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.” As we might well imagine, there isn’t much music in Hell. It reverberates with “sighs, screams and lamentations, and different tongues
In his breakthrough instrumental piece, written in 1899 and given its premiere in 1902, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) set aside all the vocal music he’d been writing to produce a work of true beauty. Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was based on
Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1750) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) were contemporaries, but they never actually met. While Albinoni was at home on various Italian and international operatic stages, Bach never traveled far away from his native community in North-Germany. We do
