John Dalmas:

>It is not enough to sit down and decide you are going to write great music,
>and then write it.

True enough.

>First you have to be inspired, and then you have to hear it in your mind,
>over and over again, bar by bar.

Vaughan Williams never waited for inspiration.  He wrote just about every
day of his life, as did Richard Strauss.  Inspiration came from hard work,
false starts, and in part from lucky accidents that arose in the course of
hard work.  From the notebooks, Beethoven seems to have been the same sort
of composer, as was Brahms.  Vaughan Williams used to say that if he waited
for inspiration, it wouldn't come.  Mozart, of course, did it differently.
I remember one letter to his father in which he writes something like, "Of
course, I compose as a cow pisses."

I don't really believe it possible to generalize or to posit a universal
"ideal" way of working.  Composers compose as they have to.  It seems to
me that writing music for most - though by no means all - composers is a
rather hard job.  It really does seem to be a leap of faith that you're not
going to waste your time and that if you keep at it, an inspired thought
will occur.

Steve Schwartz