Great Composers: Genius or Madness?
Why do composers write music? Because they are compelled to do so. Perhaps they are trying to recreate a feeling or mood, create an audio story, or just score out the music running through their heads. Schumann tells us, “It is the artist’s lofty mission to shed light into the very depths of the human heart.”1 Leonard Bernstein tells us, “To achieve great things two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”2 (LOL, Leo, you’ve seen our composition seminar class.) As told by Georges Bizet, “As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.” 3 It seems the world provided lots of fodder for Bizet. The same holds for nearly every composer who has told a folk tale, nursery rhyme, or front-page news story.
We are inspired by beauty, motivated by injustice, devastated by poverty and hunger and extremely frustrated by politicians who care more for themselves than the good of the people they are intended to serve. The artist translates these emotions into a two- or three-dimensional work, the poet or writer, into a collection of words, the composer into an auditory symbol. How can we decipher the creative process in the artist’s mind? Is this process truly the work of a genius? In some cases, we find the process is physiologically enabled, either by a brain tumor, depression, loss, unbridled joy, some mechanism gone awry.
1 Robert Schumann “On Music and Musicians” (Berkley and Los Angeles, University of California Press 1946), 38
2 “Inspiring Composer Quotes”, ClassicFM.com, accessed March 7, 2014 http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/inspiring-composer-quotes/leonard-bernstein/
3 “Inspiring Composer Quotes”, ClassicFM.com, accessed March 7, 2014 http://www.classicfm.com/discover/music/inspiring-composer-quotes/george-bizet/
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