Daily Inspiration Quote by Lukas Foss

Originality is a convenient myth, and Foss is puncturing it with a composer’s pragmatism. The line sounds almost elementary - “obvious,” he insists - because he’s arguing against a stubborn romantic hangover: the idea that art arrives as pure lightning, untainted by other people’s work. By yoking the arts to scientific discovery, Foss sneaks in a bracing demotion. Art isn’t a sacred exception; it’s a field of method, inheritance, and iteration. Genius, in this framing, is less a solitary prophet than a sharp listener who knows what to steal, transform, and re-aim.

The subtext is also a defense of modern composition. Foss wrote in a 20th-century landscape where “new music” was routinely accused of being derivative, overly intellectual, or aggressively experimental. His point flips the complaint: derivation isn’t a failure, it’s the operating system. Even scientific breakthroughs are legible as recombinations - new questions asked with old tools, old problems solved with new ones. So why demand that art be born immaculate?

There’s a quiet ethical note in “based on”: it implies lineage, not plagiarism. Foss isn’t celebrating copy-and-paste; he’s arguing for continuity as the condition of innovation. In a culture obsessed with branding the self as unprecedented, he offers a more honest picture: the past isn’t a weight chained to the ankle, it’s the floor you can actually push off from.