Inspiration is the impulse which sets creation in movement

26 May 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roger_Sessions.jpg

Today's book appreciation post comes from Roger Sessions. He was an American composer and music teacher born in the 1890s. His work was considered neoclassical. He won a Pulitzer Price in 1974.

His few pages in this book that I'm slowly reading are about inspiration and how that translates to finished work of musical art.

Inspiration is the impulse which sets creation in movement

"'Inspiration' can come as a flash or slowly worked on until made great," he says and then asks essentially where is the inspiration in slowly creating something? "Yet if the word has any meaning at all, it is certainly appropriate to this movement [creation], with its irresistible and titanic energy of expression."

Speaking of the composer, he said, "He is not so much conscious of his ideas as possessed by them." We could say that about every creative field: we are possessed by our ideas. I love that.

Later Sessions talks about Aristotle's definition of art which is: "the reproduction of inner nature." But Sessions says that "art is a function, an activity of inner nature," not inner nature itself. The artist endow's the undisciplined materials that his inner nature provides him with a meaning that they do not possess—"to transcend them by giving them artistic form."

His words are almost poetry themselves. I love learning from the greats. What have you learned from Roger Sessions?