Musical Inspiration

For Musical Inspiration, Put Your Instrument Down

As part of a research initiative by the AHRC ResearchCentre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, a collaboration between Cambridge and Oxford universities, researcher John Rink asked musicians about when inspiration most often struck them. He discovered that fairly mundane activities that didn’t involve playing their own instruments often led to new insight, knowledge, and means of expression. Rink, a professor of musical performance studies at Cambridge, and his team also identified four keys for creative expression in performance: freedom, flexibility, a sense of being in the moment, and a commitment to “giving” the music to the audience.