Philippa Greenwood quoted Beethoven:

>"You will ask where my ideas come from.  I cannot say for certain.
>They come uncalled, sometimes independently, sometimes in association
>with other things.  It seems to me that I could wrest them from Nature
>herself with my own hands, as I go walking in the woods.  They come
>to me in the silence of the night or in the early morning, stirred
>into being by moods which the poet would put into words, but which
>I put into sounds; and these go through my head ringing and singing
>and storming until at last I have them before me as notes."

This is exactly what I like about the "old masters".  They got their
inspirations from Nature, moods, etc.  Contemporary composers seem
to get their inspirations from mathematics and the desire to be
original/different.

Michael Lee
http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/gustavmahlerclub