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’s cause in a fettered world. But inspiration can take many other and humbler forms.
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 – both require notes to be pumped out regardless of whether the muse strikes or not. A complete genius like Bach may even tick both boxes and still write great music.
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’s descriptive onslaught Battalia, Falla’s Nights in the gardens of Spain, Arnold Bax’s Tintagel, Liszt’s Mazeppa, Debussy’s La mer.
A ticking clock, a barking dog: these are the things that great art ignores
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’s what I’d 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’s great experiences, but you should never discount an artist’s alchemical powers.
There are of course composers whose well of ‘ordinary’ 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, and what do you have left? Not Mahler.
The position is the same if you strip Messiaen of his birdsong or remove Ives’s hymn singing and marching bands. The surgery would prove equally harmful for Richard Strauss, who depicted the stresses and glories of his own personal and professional life in Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and the opera Intermezzo.
Music inspired by the everyday: ten curious examples
1. Erik Satie: furniture music
Then there’s the odd case of Erik Satie who, inspired by a comment from the painter Henri Matisse, coined the term musique d’ameublement (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’s Office – music bare and repetitious, deliberately intended, like the administrator’s wallpaper, to sink into the background. Was Satie the father of muzak? See what you think, below.
And from Satie’s outlook on life and music surely it’s a hop, skip and a jump to the sonic landscapes of John Cage and his followers, for whom every chance sound, from chair squeak to radio set static, is so much better than a perfectly tuned C major chord.
2. Bach's coffee cantata
However, let’s move on from the majestic canvasses of the grand masters and examine the musically mundane by exploring spot effects in individual works. Take Bach’s cantata Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211 – a mini comic opera, really – written for a student performance in Gottfried Zimmermann’s famous coffee house in Leipzig.
The subject is coffee. How can you turn coffee into music? Bach seems to alight not on the taste, but the aroma. That’s one explanation anyway for the strikingly florid flute decorations circling up towards the nose during the aria Ei! Wie schmeckt der Kaffee süße, sung by the heroine, a real caffeine addict. I wouldn’t myself pick the flute, light both in weight and tone colour, as the beverage’s musical stand-in. On the other hand, I’ve never drunk Zimmermann’s coffee.
3. Bliss's Conversations
A larger 20th-century example of the same tactic – choosing a musical equivalent rather than direct imitation – arrives two centuries later with Arthur Bliss’s Conversations. Within its five movements, five musicians aim to conjure up five conversations held in five different environments, beginning with a committee meeting and ending inside a London Underground train at the busy Oxford Circus station.
The chairman is obviously a wimp, personified by a wispy violin monotonously repeating the same phrase while other instruments argue loudly. But it’s the train conversation, marked Allegro energico, that tickles the ears the most, with flute and oboe burbling politely like ladies on a genteel shopping trip to the West End. Life on the London Underground in 1920 was clearly more civilised than it is today.
4. Elgar's swimming dog
Society also appears on its best behaviour in Elgar's masterful Enigma Variations. But some of Elgar’s effects in these musical portraits of ‘friends pictured within’ are exceedingly dexterous. Within five bars of the eleventh variation devoted to George Robertson Sinclair (G.R.S.), the organist of Hereford Cathedral, we’ve heard G.R.S.'s bulldog Dan tumble into the River Wye (plunging strings), paddle upstream (bassoons and double basses), and celebrate reaching dry land with a bark (horns, oboes, clarinets).
In the words of Elgar himself: 'The first few bars were suggested by his great bulldog, Dan (a well-known character) falling down the steep bank into the River Wye; his paddling upstream to find a landing place; and his rejoicing bark on landing. G.R.S. said, "Set that to music". I did; here it is.'
5. Morton Feldman's cuckoo clocks
Equally disarming in a different way is the cuckoo clock effect in Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety (1970), a tiny tribute to the American avant-gardist’s childhood piano teacher, containing 90 iterations of a cuckoo clock’s falling major third while spare background harmonies come and go. It’s a cunning and touching way of charting time passing during Madame’s long life.
6. Martinů's flirty kitchen utensils
Compared to Elgar and Feldman’s finesse, other composers’ musical portraits can seem very broad-brush. For anyone fond of kitchen utensils, Bohuslav Martinů’s ballet score La revue de cuisine (1927) might appear a masterpiece in waiting. But the ballet’s four characters – pot, lid, whisk, dishcloth – flirt and quarrel without being directly aligned with any instrument. What a disappointment!
7. Beethoven's financial fury
It’s almost as upsetting as Beethoven’s Rage over a Lost Penny, a title in another’s hand on the composer’s manuscript of a fairly temperate piano rondo. Though the notion of Beethoven in a torrential rage after losing a low-denomination coin (probably lurking behind his sofa) always seemed a bit of stretch.
8. Nyman's dreadful football chants
I take serious issue, too, with Michael Nyman’s Trombone Concerto (1995), which aims to spice up its finale with the rhythms of a football chant favoured at the time by supporters of Queens Park Rangers, a London football club that used to have a mysterious following among experimental-minded British musicians. To simulate the chant, Nyman asks the orchestra’s percussionists to thwack three metal filing cabinets – not objects I’d want as my instrumental doppelgänger. The effect on both listener and music is dreadful, like being continually kicked.
9. A tax form filled out in music
This article could easily be wrapped up with colourful and noisy examples of musical trains (Honegger’s Pacific 231), car manufacture (Frederick Converse’s Flivver Ten Million)and Soviet industrial might (Mossolov’s Iron Foundry). But those subjects are easy targets. I prefer to salute two artistic triumphs in making valid music from the seemingly intractable.
One is a madrigal, Lament for 15 April, a delightfully serious setting of the instructions for filling in the 1955 American tax form, written by the businessman-composer Avery Claflin. It includes a very effective, indeed moving rendering of the words ‘see page 14’. See below.
10. Marin Marais: quite the operation
The other whisks us back to 1725, publication date for a viol collection by Marin Marais, containing Le Tableau de l’opération de la taille – a startling musical account of an operation the composer himself had undergone for the removal of a bladder stone. The operation, mostly in E minor, takes about four minutes, including time for the patient trembling with fear, the binding of arms and legs to the surgical slab, making the incision, inserting the forceps, the spurts of blood, and E major recuperation in bed.
Admittedly Marais’s character piece is not Fidelio or St Matthew Passion. But it’s always comforting to know that with imagination the plain, humdrum and unalluring can still be made marvellous.
