The age-old question of “inspiration”—where that music comes from—has always fascinated me. Paintings of angels hovering beside composers and dictating new music are common. Music’s origination is often attributed only to centuries-dead geniuses and divine inspiration, certainly nothing that happens now. Of course, as a child, I believed that. Fast-forward to my recent history.
Since I finally acquired the skills to write music (Thank you, Dr. Margarita Merriman and college music theory), my oeuvre has grown substantially. But the core element, the initial ideas and themes mostly remained a mystery to me, until…
Part of my graduate school requirements was to write a thesis. As my degree was in composition, writing a major work would fulfill most of that requirement. The trick, of course, was to find a theme what was highbrow enough to impress the academics around me while not assaulting my recovering-from-dodecaphonic-dissonance ears. Enter the stars.
I had noticed that all music has shapes, and some of the most beautiful shapes are found in the natural world. It appeared to me that Camille Saint-Saëns had inadvertently (?) traced the actual shape of a swan as the opening theme of “The Swan.” Listen to “The Swan” while tracing the shape of a swan, like this. The waves and the rapidly paddling feet are also represented in Saint-Saëns’ music.
What if I applied that to stars, constellations? And so, I chose some recognizable constellations and superimposed those shapes on musical staves. Developing those themes required more than just those motifs, so the next part was musically describing the myths behind the constellation names. This was fun for me as I had always made up stories to match any music that didn’t have lyrics. And my own music often developed into tone poems—a way to tell stories. Composing this symphony went smoothly. And then…
While writing the assigned scholarly analysis to accompany my already-written symphony, I decided to check out some recordings of space music. NASA had posted multiple YouTube videos of sound waves and radiation from various celestial formations: planets, stars, nebulae, pulsars. I can’t tell you how amazed I was when my harmonies resembled some of this space music. The character was there in my music. How? Even more amazing was the rhythm of a pulsar emanating from a nebula—which somehow sounded a lot like the rhythm of my “Orion’s” star theme in, you guessed it, the part about Orion’s nebula. I only listened to these NASA recordings after I wrote the music. I can’t explain how it happened. My only conjecture: there is music around us, music that most people don’t listen to, but that composers do hear. And every bit of music keeps radiating outward for the benefit of those who listen.
Listen to the music, my friends. It’s there.