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.
Roaring onto the Broadway stage and changing the musical forever was Disney’s The Lion King, with music by Elton John. No musical had taken a children’s animation as its source and turning the fantasies of a cartoon into a performance
People across the globe celebrate the arrival of the New Year with a variety of delectable customs. In Spain, tradition dictates the eating of 12 grapes—washed down with a glass of Cava—with each stroke of the clock at midnight. In
The New Year’s concert by the Vienna Philharmonic is commonly regarded as the most important classical concert worldwide. Seen by an estimated audience of 1 billion viewers around the world, the concert always features works by the Viennese Strauss family,
It’s truly a shame that I’ve never heard the live lecture by Daniel Barenboim on how whiskey and classical music resemble one another. In this 2006 talk entitled “Whisky is liquid music,” the pianist and conductor argues that “both experiences
In 1879, the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier requested leave from his job at the French Ministry of the Interior so that he could travel to Munich, which was the only place in the world to hear Wagner’s opera Tristan und
The composer and educator Dmitry Kabalevsky wrote, “We should never for an instant forget our main purpose, which is to interest our audience in music, to emotionally fascinate them, to infect them with our love of music.” The composer’s interest
The 1970s brought us musicals based on contemporary society (Company), memories of the past (Follies, Gigi, Evita, Sweeney Todd, Cats), stories based on the Bible (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and stories from French novels of a century earlier
Over a period of 20 years, Johannes Brahms cautiously approached composition via different genres, carefully isolating the required musical elements. He experimented with orchestral colors in his Serenades, blended symphonic sketches with a sonata for two pianos to produce his
