The New Year Quote by Lukas Foss

Creative confidence is usually narrated as swagger; Foss gives you the far truer backstage shot: the panic before the first note exists. The empty staff paper isn’t just “blank page” cliché. In music, it’s a grid that promises order while offering none. Five lines, infinite choices, and a deadline that turns possibility into threat.

His most revealing move is the word “recipe.” Foss isn’t pretending inspiration is mystical; he’s admitting the opposite anxiety: that composition is work, and work is supposed to be repeatable. A recipe implies control, predictable outcomes, a method you can trust under pressure. By confessing he doesn’t have one, he punctures the comforting myth that accomplished artists possess a secret system. Even professionals are improvising their own process, piece by piece, and the résumé doesn’t protect you from the void.

The context matters: Foss came of age amid mid-century modernism, when composers were expected to invent new languages, not merely refine old ones. Under that cultural demand, “How can I say…?” reads like a quiet indictment of institutional timelines. Commission culture requires certainty (a premiere date, an orchestra booked, programs printed) from an art form that begins in uncertainty. Foss’s panic is partly aesthetic, partly bureaucratic: the collision of fragile imagination with the hard calendar.

The subtext is oddly bracing. Panic isn’t a sign you’re a fraud; it’s evidence you’re still at the edge of something unwritten. Foss frames the fear as the price of making something that can’t be made by formula.