For me, inspiration comes from a bunch of places: desperation, deadlines… A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together. They come, essentially, from daydreaming. . . . And I suspect that’s something every human being does. Writers tend to train themselves to notice when they’ve had an idea — it’s not that they have any more ideas or get inspired more than anything else; we just notice when it happens a little bit more.
Neil Gaiman, writer, in an interview with Clem Bastow. Cited in: Maria Popova, “How Creativity Works: Neil Gaiman on Where Ideas Come From”, Brain Pickings, https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/02/18/neil-gaiman-creativity/, accessed 13 December 2020.
The source of inspiration
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Positive change through creativity
You need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively. — Trevor Crafts Steve Rose, “The Secret […]
Blessed Are They Who Hope in the Lord (Setting II) – Psalm 1Title: Blessed are they who hope in the Lord (setting ii) Text: Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:
The effects of Brahms’ musicJames Huneker, a critic with the New York Courier, wrote about the impact of Brahms’ music on him: Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings – wings of great terrifying monsters; hippogrifs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces […]
Transforming Bach’s Cantatas into an operaTheatre director Herbert Wernicke has taken six of Bach’s Cantatas dealing with the frailty of the human condition and presented them in a staging of mundane human activities. Albrecht Puhlmann, the general director of Stuttgart Opera, states that “From the woman with the baby to the coffin being carried out, life and death is being […]
Abstraction IITitle: Abstraction II Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score SAMPLE:
Glinka’s compositional priorities“My earnest desire is to compose music which would make all my beloved fellow countrymen feel quite at home, and lead no-one to allege that I strutted around in borrowed plumes.” – Mikhail Glinka Cited in Jerremy Nicholas, “Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka”, Classic FM, April 2012, p.35.
WeedsBut weeds have this virtue: they are not easily discouraged; they never lose heart entirely; they die game. If they cannot have the best, they will take up with the poorest; if fortune is unkind to them today, they hope for better luck tomorrow; if they cannot lord it over a corn-hill, they will sit […]
Rising after we fall“Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Oliver Goldsmith (1762) The citizen of the world: or, letters from a Chinese philosopher, residing in London, to his friends in the east, Dublin: printed for George and Alex. Ewing, 1762, letter 7, p. 30. Digitally archived at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004776950.0001.001/1:9?rgn=div1;view=fulltext, […]
Richter on Scriabin“Scriabin isn’t the sort of composer whom you’d regard as your daily bread, but is a heady liqueur on which you can get drunk periodically, a poetical drug, a crystal that’s easily broken.” -Sviatoslav Richter, pianist Monsaingeon, Bruno (2001). Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations. Princeton University Press, p.267 Cited at: Wikipedia
Rachmaninoff scares meCyril Smith recounts Rachmaninoff’s stage presence: Those who were fortunate enough to hear him play will almost certainly remember this very tall, melancholy figure, with his graying hair in a crew cut and his deeply-lined face set in a somber expression, walking unwillingly to the piano as though he hated the very sight of it. […]