Where do musical ideas come from? It’s a question, I suppose, for scientists as much as composers. I have no idea where mine come from and am blissful in my ignorance; but I usually know how they’ve come. Here’s how one turned up — twice.
The first time was so long ago I don’t recall the year. It might have been when I was still a student, though I fancy it was shortly after. Either way, I was in my early twenties, so it’s been more than forty years.
I remember being very taken by one of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella sonnets — the one beginning: “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies!” Like all the sonnets in this sequence, it’s about unrequited love. The Elizabethan soldier–poet, who seems to have experienced a fair amount of disappointment in this regard, looks up at the pale face of the moon and believes her to be lovelorn. He asks her if it’s the same up there as it is on Earth. Is “constant love” — he means faithful love — considered “want of wit”? “Are beauties there as proud as here they be?” “Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?”
You can see how the poem might have appealed to a young man of twenty-one or twenty-two. But it was the opening line — about the moon climbing the skies — that sparked music, and the result was a solo flute piece, cool and silvery, its notes ascending like the moon in the poem. At least I think they did. The piece, which I called Sad Steps, was played a few times but I have long since lost the handwritten score.
I hadn’t thought about this piece for many years until the other week when I was walking my dog through the country town where I live and, as is my wont, listening to a podcast. I can’t tell you which podcast because my memory of it was quickly wiped by the music I started hearing. Someone mentioned Sir Philip Sidney’s name; my mind went straight back to that sonnet and before I knew it I was imaging flute music again.
As we walked on, the sound in my head was extremely vivid. It began with low, isolated notes in an uneven stepwise plod (I must have begun trudging in time to it because Dora started tugging at the lead); then the music began to climb, slowly at first, then more and more quickly until it disappeared, the high, fast flute notes quietly evaporating.
Reasoning that this idea alone would hardly make a piece (the podcast was still playing in my ears but by now I was actually composing), I started again. It was the same combination of basic ideas — plodding, ascending, evaporating — but it began a little higher, and the ascent went further. The same happened again and then again, each time more elaborate, as I realised this was Sad Steps, back from the dead and getting a very thorough makeover.
By the time I got home, I had a mildly disgruntled dog — her ball had remained in my pocket throughout our walk — but the whole piece was mapped out in my head. It was quite a formal seven-part structure — five versions of the plodding/ascending idea, the last one exploding rather than evaporating, framed by an introduction and epilogue, ten or eleven minutes of rather ritualistic music. I dropped a line to the flute player Lina Andonovska, who has played a few of my pieces over the years, asking if she’d be interested in having one specially composed for her. She was. The piece is now written and Lina will premiere it in 2025.
Pieces of music come in all sorts of ways — I’m sure it’s the same with all creative artists — and anything can spark one: a poem, a painting, a film, a chance remark, another piece of music. Sometimes the idea comes from someone else; the phone rings or the email pings and there’s a commission. It might be big or small, attached to a particular occasion or none, but it’s no different regarding the spark.
Occasionally, after agreeing to write the piece, I’ve had to wait around for the spark, but usually it happens in an instant. It is the moment you know you have the piece; there might be months of work ahead working out the details, but you have the strongest sense that the music exists.
I suppose it’s what people call inspiration and the most important thing about it is that the moment can be revisited, the spark rekindled. With a big piece, this is important. Anything can happen along the way; you can get distracted, derailed, or even — if it’s months of work — bored. But if the original spark is strong enough you can summon it and it will get you back on track. Even, apparently, after more than forty years. •
