When I moved some years ago to the countryside – an area with beautiful nature and lots of silence – a lot of the people visiting me said: “This must be very inspiring for you!”. They didn’t know what they were talking about, because that is not the way inspiration works. Inspiration is inside yourself; in an enigmatic way it is hidden inside you. If you as an artist, a composer, get inspired by views, nature, music, books, pictures, people etc, it is because of their conjunction with similar sources inside you, and they become explanations of your own sources. It melts together, and one could say that an artist only gets inspired by “things” that seems to be inspired by the art of the artist. I always look for inspiration – or – actually – look for things that can let the inspiration out of me.
When I look at my scores and when I listen to my music, I see and hear a daily life diary but I always get images of the inspiration I “used”. When I think of the beginning of the Trumpet Concerto I wrote for Tine, I see… I imagine a dark wood – night darkness, and then I hear and see a trumpet coming out of that darkness. Tiny hunting fanfares meet the night and the shadows of the trees.
When I’m offered a commission, I start to think about how I could do it. There has to be something special about the new piece, and the older you get, it becomes more and more important only to write the pieces you really want to write.
In the case of the trumpet concerto a good friend of mine – a musician – said to me: “If you ever consider composing a Trumpet Concerto, think of Tine – she has the ability to make the trumpet sound so soft, that she could perform your music very well”. I listened, and I loved what I heard, and when she later asked me, I gave her a “yes”.
Collaboration has always been very important to me. When I compose a piece for a specific artist, I have a picture of them performing. In a way they become a part of all my inspiration sources. I love to work with the same musicians again and again, since they seem to know my music almost better than myself, but it is just as important to open up and work with artists you have not worked with before and meet new languages. Let new artists be challenged by your music and let them challenge your ears.
Courage is always needed An artist is suddenly speaking your language, and you are learning the artist’s language. That represents both a wonderful challenge and, even more, a gift.
I think the afterlife of a work is mostly up to others. I have written pieces that luckily enough have a long afterlife, but also pieces that died right after the birth. With the trumpet concerto I have been so lucky to hear Tine play it again and again, and it seems to me, that the piece in a way gets more and more mature that way, and I get a closer and closer relationship to the music. I am happy that the collaboration with Tine created a friendship between the two of us, and I will hopefully one day write her another piece.