<\/p>
Where have composers throughout history found their inspiration? With big figures like JS Bach, Beethoven or Messiaen, you can often locate it in the loftiest realms of personal belief and experience: the revelations offered by religion, say, and the magnitude of the natural environment, or freedom\u2019s cause in a fettered world. But inspiration can take many other and humbler forms.<\/p>
Since composers may want to earn a living, one inspiration could simply be economics and the rules of their employment. The commercial commission that must be fulfilled, the restrictive duties of the court composer \u2013 both require notes to be pumped out regardless of whether the muse strikes or not. A complete genius like Bach<\/a><\/strong> may even tick both boxes and still write great music.<\/p> Most composers, though, take their inspiration from the vast territory sitting between these two extremes. Consider the music sparked into life from literature, paintings, legends, myths or phenomena historical, geographical, political and meteorological. The titles alone often lay the source bare: Biber\u2019s descriptive onslaught Battalia, <\/em>Falla\u2019s Nights in the gardens of Spain<\/em>, Arnold Bax<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Tintagel<\/em>, Liszt<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Mazeppa<\/em>, Debussy<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s La mer<\/a><\/strong><\/em>.<\/p> But there are also numerous instances where inspiration has been drawn from what you might call the ordinary things of life, and being a mundane kind of chap, that\u2019s what I\u2019d like to explore here: music inspired by drinking coffee, chattering on the London Underground, a ticking clock, a barking dog, the business of cooking, most of the things that great art ignores. Such activities might not top a list of life\u2019s great experiences, but you should never discount an artist\u2019s alchemical powers.<\/p> There are of course composers whose well of \u2018ordinary\u2019 inspiration is so deep and wide that the sounds they gather shape their entire world and philosophical view. Take away the bugle calls, folk dances, funeral marches and evocations of nature from the music of Mahler<\/a><\/strong>, and what do you have left? Not Mahler.<\/p> The position is the same if you strip Messiaen<\/a><\/strong> of his birdsong<\/a><\/strong> or remove Ives<\/a>\u2019<\/strong>s hymn singing and marching bands. The surgery would prove equally harmful for Richard Strauss<\/a><\/strong>, who depicted the stresses and glories of his own personal and professional life in Ein Heldenleben<\/em>, Symphonia Domestica, <\/em>and the opera Intermezzo.<\/em><\/p> Then there\u2019s the odd case of Erik Satie<\/a><\/strong> who, inspired by a comment from the painter Henri Matisse, coined the term musique d\u2019ameublement<\/em> (furniture music). He proceeded to slap this label on several of his creations of the early 1920s with titles like Wall-Lining in an Administrator\u2019s Office <\/em>\u2013 music bare and repetitious, deliberately intended, like the administrator\u2019s wallpaper, to sink into the background. Was Satie the father of muzak<\/a><\/strong>? See what you think, below.<\/p> A ticking clock, a barking dog: these are the things that great art ignores<\/h3>
Music inspired by the everyday: ten curious examples<\/h2>
1. Erik Satie: furniture music<\/h3>