Jegede: where do the ideas come from?

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Inspiration can come from anywhere. Keep your mind open …

IF YOU'RE TRYING to dream up a new idea, or the solution to a problem, the best action is often to do something else, something completely different, then inspiration comes to you when you least expect it.

Music is lots of things to different people, but perhaps for everyone it’s about expression, and about expressing something human and real. Happiness, sadness, love, hate, birth, death, joy, grief, peace, war, sex, democracy, slavery, liberation – these are all things people have expressed in music.

Where the ideas for the music come from, and the musical ways in which these expressions are manifested – these are often the hardest things for composers to describe.

When the magic moment happens, when the piece is unlocked fully, that's the moment when one has connected, tapped into that source point

Tunde Jegede

For Tunde, getting musical ideas is more a process of receiving. In some sense, the music already exists and it’s simply a matter of tapping into it, finding it or discovering it. So it’s a spiritual event in the mind, perhaps even an awakening. Sometimes this event takes place out of the blue, and sometimes it can happen when he’s trying to make it happen, or just playing the piano, as he discusses in this clip.

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Composing in two traditions

Receiving the idea

Jegede: where do the ideas come from?

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