Music Thoughts: What inspires me

As many of you know I'm an aspiring song writer who's planning on majoring in Piano Performance. So music has been a part of me since I was a little girl (four to be exact). So in that time span there have been many times when I thought about quitting and I would always ask God why he wanted me to play piano.

Inspiration though is a tangible thing, something that is indescribable but I'm going to try to explain what inspires me. For starters in piano when I try to understand & interpret a section I always play it slower and slower until I can ascertain the tone/mood of the passage. And then I slowly speed it back up and it is during those moments that I feel most at peace. In my personal opinion you can't figure out why it inspires you until you slow it down. When it's fast it doesn't have time to sink in and thus you aren't truly inspired by it.

Also inspiration and the beads that link a song together is stripped down. So when I play piano I don't pedal when I am studying the music. It may not sound as polished but it allows me to listen to how the song was when the composer wrote it. Because as I'm sure many of you know the first draft of a song is always simple. It's just lines written in a fit of inspiration, it has no bass beats or complicated riffs. It's just the bare essence and later through time and modern technology the song becomes what you hear on the radio. Which is why live performances for most artists sound more "acoustic" and "stripped down." because that's the organic way it was written.