About this Book

Inspiration is the factor common to all composers throughout musical history - yet this is the first book to examine its source. Jonathan Harvey, one of Britain's foremost composers, here brings a specialist's insight to the relationship between the source of inspiration and the act of composition.

His choice of material is wide-ranging, aiming to chart the common ground between many different composers and how the concept of inspiration persists within differing musical cultures. He demonstrates how composers have drawn inspiration from a wide variety of sources - from their own unconscious, from the experiences of their life, from their audiences, and from the perception of the ideal or the infinite, which they derive either from religious faith orphilosophical conviction.