Musical inspiration outside your typical listening/playing orbit stretches your ears — hopefully your compositional neurons too.
Listening/playing "the same old, same old:" likely produces the same old, same old.
A New Yorker recommend review caught my eye the other day, a review of Ensemble Libro Promo's "Fantasia Incantata."
Improvisation has played a minor role in European classical music, but it's the basis for...
These works are meant to sound as impulsive as improvisations, while also allowing their performers free reigh in expression, ornamentation, and counterpoint...
Clicked on PLAY and... wowl
A little Googling, and:
[The stylus fantasticus (or stylus phantasticus)] is the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues.
Many facets of musical modernism were invented in the stylus fantasticus at Kroměříž, such as bitonality... minimalism... stochasticism... More.
And:
Improvisation and free form were paramount to the Stylus Fantasticus and virtuosity reigned in this early baroque style. More.
And:
[ "Stylus Phantasticus"] is a style of both composing and performing instrumental music which derives from phantasiren or "the art of improvising".
"Stylus Phantasticus" represents a form of liberty in the composition of instrumental music. The style does not confine the composer's imagination or force it to abide by strict rules. More.
Whoa.
A little YouTubing, and found some marvelous online pieces. Check 'em out:
Kathryn Salfelder - Stylus Phantasticus
Vincent Lubeck - Stylus Phantasticus
Dietrich Buxtehude — BuxWV 38 Stylus Phantasticus
Annegret Siedel & Bell'Arte Salzburg — Stylus Phantasticus (Amazon samples)
And a challenging-to-the-ears 2017 Stylus Phantasticus take:
Stylus Phantasticus, musique à voir et à entendre (extraits 7 min, 2017)
As Kathryn Salfeder is alive and well and teaching at MIT, discovered yet another strand on the ever-expanding web of inspiration.
Listening to more Vincent Lubeck (Praeludium in d-moll) as I write. And now enthralled by whoever's singing on Dietrich Buxtehude — BuxWV 38 Stylus Phantasticus. (Suzie Le Blanc.)
Yeah to the joys of inspiration, inspiration that crashes into you or falls on your head, and inspiration you chase like a ghost crab zig-zagging in the surf zone.
Warmest aloha.
Cat
