Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ones said:
“Inspiration is a Fine Lady who doesn’t visit the lazy people”
(Please excuse my rough translation). This sounds a bit harsh, pretty much a Russian style of expressing yourself. I should know! Surely, musicians are not lazy. We didn’t become musicians by being lazy! We have dozens of pupils to make a living, running our family life like a clockwork, dealing with bills and some of us are carers on top of it all.
What I found out from my experience is that it is not about doing more, it is just doing something different and trying to find new ways of doing things.
Let me give you one example. In my case the things that shake my normal routine can be:
- discovering a new group on Facebook & going through their posts
- going to a concert which I wouldn’t normally go to
- playing something new, reading something on music history which I missed in my misspent youth
- or just staying up into the small hours being alone with the sounds.
Praises go to the patience of my long suffering hubby:)
I find teaching and composing groups on Facebook a great inspiration. I also regularly go searching for something new on YouTube and pass it on to my pupils. You've got an idea.
We all go through periods of quiet when nothing seems to happen but when I search for new things “the Fine Lady” smiles on me. One of my friends described it really well: ”it is as though your head becomes a radar catching the ideas from the thin air!” Most wonderful feeling!
After all, our old friend Pyotr Ilyich was not far wrong - we have to do something after all!
