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.
Approaching his 80th birthday, Camille Saint-Saëns was appointed by the French government as “First Delegate to the Franco-American Commission for the Development of Political, Economic, Literary, and Artistic Relations” for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Organized to commemorate
English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) first went to Scandinavia as a young man working for his father. He went first to Sweden and then, in his off hours, went to Norway and began a lifelong fascination with the country, its
In 1827, Hector Berlioz went to a play and came away transformed. At the Odéon Theatre in Paris, a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet took his heart. Everything about the play and the performance affected him – the raging
Camille Saint-Saëns was not a deeply religious man, and he certainly had “a repugnance for religious ceremonies.” On one occasion he even made arrangements for someone else to represent him at a baptism service where he was to become a
Classical music has transformative power, as perhaps you’ve noted in the previous article, which features large symphonic works. A piece of music can transport you to a different time and place and the collective response for and from the audience,
We often forget the connections between composers. When you start to look at who knew who, particularly in the 20th century, connections are not only local but also international. The Australian composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961) knew the piano works of
After his self-imposed exile from Spain with the defeat of the Republican government, cellist Pablo Casals started his concerts with a traditional Catalan Christmas song, El Cant dels Ocells (The Song of the Birds). The lyrics describe the joy of
