Monday, April 03, 2006

inspiration and worldview

Mozart is said to once have explained his methods of composing as follows:

When I am . . . say travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the nights when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them . . . When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out the bag of my memory, if I may use that phrase, what has previously been collected . . . the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

From a Christian worldview, I can understand why an idea for a concerto, for example, might appear, fully formed, in a composer's mind. There is something (someone) Other who puts these ideas into circulation.

But I can't understand, from an evolutionary worldview, how this would happen. Where would an idea like that come from?

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