As the summer wraps up and the school year begins, we’re savoring the memories of our summer vacations or maybe even squeezing in one last trip. As the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain said, “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” This is just as true for composers as anyone else. In this article, we’re looking at ten composers whose travels inspired them and their works.
1. J.S. Bach in Lübeck
In 1705, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) famously walked nearly 400 kilometers from the central German town of Arnstadt to Lübeck in the north to hear the works of organist Dietrich Buxtehude. The 20-year-old composer obtained permission to take one month of leave from his church job for the journey. He likely followed the Old Salt Route, a trade route through northern Germany dating to medieval times. The trip proved to be a fruitful one—so much so that Bach extended his trip to four months, much to his employer’s chagrin. In Lübeck, he likely played in concerts with Buxtehude and copied some of his works for study. This encounter with the Danish master had a significant impact on Bach’s organ playing and his compositional output, particularly his keyboard works. For instance, Bach’s Passacaglia in C minor, BWV 582 — likely written shortly after his trip to Lübeck — is indebted to Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in D minor BuxWV 161. What’s more, Bach’s manuscript copies helped preserve and disseminate Buxtehude’s work, which otherwise might have been lost.
2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Italy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was already a seasoned traveler by age 13 when he and his father, Leopold, undertook their first of three trips to the Italian peninsula. He had made extensive concert tours of Northern Europe throughout his childhood. But it was his time in Italy—and introduction to Italian opera in particular—that proved to be the most influential. Leaving his mother and sister at home in Salzburg, Wolfgang and his father undertook their first tour of Italy in December 1769. Traveling long distances at this time was a complicated and at times dangerous feat. But across 15 months, they managed to visit every major Italian city.
Leopold organized the tour to promote Wolfgang’s talent, establish connections, and hopefully secure court positions for either or both father and son. While no long-term employment resulted from their Italian trips, they were still financially profitable and experientially rich. The impressionable young Wolfgang absorbed the Italian language, culture, history, art, and—as is the wont of many teenage boys—women. But it was his encounter with Italian opera that stayed with him for the rest of his life. While in Milan, he landed commissions for three operas (Mitridate, re di Ponto; Ascanio in Alba; and Lucio Silla), which occasioned their return visits in 1771 and 1772. He longed to return to Italy for the rest of his short life and continued to write arias, scenes, and operas in Italian whenever he could.
For more on Mozart’s trips to Italy with his father, read Dame Jane Glover’s fascinating new book, Mozart in Italy: Coming of Age in the Land of Opera.
3. Felix Mendelssohn in Scotland
Grand Tours of Europe were an expected educational rite of passage for upper-class young men in the early nineteenth century. France and Italy were the most common destinations, but for composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), the British Isles held the greatest allure. After a successful concert season in London, a 20-year-old Mendelssohn traveled to Scotland in the summer of 1829 with his friend Karl Klingemann. They began in Edinburgh, where they visited the ruins of Holyrood Abbey, the inspiration for Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3 (“Scottish”).
They then traveled to the Hebrides, an archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. After a rocky boat ride to see Fingal’s Cave on the uninhabited Isle of Staffa, Mendelssohn had the idea for what would become his Hebrides Overture. His travel companion described the cave poetically: “A greener rush of waves surely never rushed into a stranger cavern—its many pillars making it look like the inside of an immense organ, black and resounding, absolutely without purpose, and quite alone, the wide gray sea within and without.” By contrast, Mendelssohn's diary reads simply, “horrible seasickness...” Nevertheless, the trip had a profound impact on him. Unable to capture the experience in words, he wrote to his father, “In order to make clear to you the extraordinary effect the Hebrides have had on me, the following occurred to me there,” followed by a sketch of the first 21 bars of the Hebrides Overture.
4. Antonín Dvořák in the United States
Just as Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) helped to shape American music, so too did American music shape him. He moved to the United States in 1892 to serve as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. The Czech composer was hired to help free the Americans from the influence of European art music so they could find their own national musical identity. Although hiring a European may seem counterintuitive, he had gained a reputation as a nationalist composer, using Bohemian folk music in his compositions to assert cultural and political independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, when his student Harry Burleigh introduced him to African American spirituals, Dvořák saw their potential in forming the backbone of an American school, writing, “There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.” His three years in the United States were highly productive, the landscape, people, and music inspiring some of his most famous works, including his Symphony No. 9 (“New World”), Cello Concerto, and String Quartet No. 12 (“American”).
5. Francis Poulenc in Rocamadour
French composer Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) was deeply affected by a religious pilgrimage. In August 1936, Poulenc’s friend and fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud died in a grisly car accident in Debrecen, Hungary. To process his grief, Poulenc traveled to the ancient shrine of the Black Virgin at Notre-Dame de Rocamadour in south-central France. The religious experience he had there was transformative, leading him back to the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood. Throughout the rest of his career, Poulenc produced a steady stream of religious choral works, beginning with Litanies à la vierge noire that year. Other religious works include the Gloria and his 1957 operatic masterpiece Dialogues des Carmélites, which tells the real-life story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, a group of Carmelite nuns who were guillotined for refusing to renounce their vocation during the French Revolution.
6. Maurice Ravel in the United States
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was already a fan of American jazz before his four-month concert tour of North America in 1928. Jazz had made its way to the clubs of Paris and inspired Ravel and his fellow French composers like Satie and Debussy. But while in New York City, Ravel’s fascination with jazz and other forms of American popular music deepened, particularly after his encounters with George Gershwin. The two met at Ravel’s birthday party, where Gershwin gave an impromptu rendition of Rhapsody in Blue and a selection of songs. Afterward, they spent several nights club hopping in Harlem, listening to jazz bands at the Savory Ballroom, Connie’s Inn, and the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington’s orchestra played. Some of Ravel’s later works show the enduring influence of jazz in their use of blue notes and syncopation. Most notable among these is the Concerto for Piano in G Major (1931), often considered an homage to Gershwin.
7. Philip Glass in India
Like many American composers before him, Philip Glass (b. 1937) went to Paris to study with famed teacher Nadia Boulanger. But it was his encounter with sitar master Ravi Shanker in the French capital that blew his musical world wide open. Glass began working as Shankar’s assistant in the mid-1960s, transcribing his music for Western players. Glass was entranced by the repetitive structures of Indian classical music and decided to throw out his earlier serialist and traditional Western compositions. His first trip to India in 1966 inspired Satyagraha (1979), an opera about Mahatma Gandhi’s early years in South Africa and philosophy of nonviolent protest. Glass credits Shankar with opening his mind to music from all over the world. “India was the first place,” Glass told NPR in 2015, “but in the course of time I’ve worked with musicians from Africa, from all parts of South America, from Australia, from China, from Tibet. Those encounters were the most stimulating parts of my music education . . . And of course it had an impact on the way I compose music. It became the engine of change for me.”
8. Gabriela Lena Frank in Peru
Composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) was born in Berkley, California to a Peruvian-Chinese mother and a Lithuanian Jewish father. This multicultural heritage has been central to her compositional identity. However, she had not visited her mother’s birthplace in Peru until 2000. This trip inspired her orchestral work Elegía Andina (Andean Elegy), one of her first formal compositions to explicitly explore and address her heritage. During her visit, she said she experienced conflicting emotions, feeling simultaneously at home and alien. This clash is evident in the piece in the juxtaposition of elements of traditional Peruvian music, such as in the flutes and percussion, within the framework of Western classical music.
9. Steve Reich in Ghana
American minimalist composer Steve Reich (b. 1936) was inspired to write one of his most significant pieces after a trip to Ghana in 1970. Having studied percussion and treatises on African drumming, he obtained a travel grant from the Special Projects Division of the Institute of International Education to train with Ghanaian master drummers. Although he had to cut short his stay after contracting malaria, Reich’s five weeks in Accra helped him bring his idea of rhythmic phasing to its culmination in his 1971 work, Drumming. “I am often asked what influence my visit to Africa in the summer of 1970 had on Drumming,” he said. “The answer is encouragement, confirmation, and learning from another musical culture.” Although the work does not employ the strict polyrhythms found in central and west African drumming, his use of the 12/8 rhythmic cell and calling for the musicians to alternate between singing and playing drums and mallet instruments demonstrate an appreciation of African traditions.
10. Joan Tower in Bolivia
Joan Tower (b. 1938) spent much of her childhood in Bolivia after her family relocated there from her birthplace, New Rochelle, New York, when she was nine. Her nanny would often take her to patron saint festivals and drop her off by the bandstand. Local Incan musicians would then hand her maracas or castanets to play, which contributed to her lifelong fascination with percussion. Childhood memories of riding her horse around in the deep valley of La Paz inspired Tower’s piano trio Big Sky (2000). The composer writes in her program note, “The valley was surrounded by the huge and high mountains of the Andes range; and as I rode I looked into a vast and enormous sky. It was very peaceful and extraordinarily beautiful. We never went over one of these mountains, but if we had, it might have felt like what I wrote in this piece.”
The journeys of these ten composers illustrate the profound influence travel can have both personally and creatively. Whether seeking inspiration, respite, or additional training, they came home armed with new musical ideas and personal experiences that they carried with them the rest of their lives.
