Daily Inspiration Quote by Lukas Foss

Originality, Foss implies, is less a plan than a side effect. The line takes a quiet swing at the romantic fantasy of the artist as a lone genius white-knuckling novelty into existence. In Foss's world - the disciplined, inheritance-heavy world of composition - "trying to be original" is almost a category error, like trying to breathe creatively. You can force quirks; you cannot force a voice.

The intent is corrective and mildly provocative: stop fetishizing the new and start doing the work that makes the new possible. Foss frames originality as "the last thing that develops" because an artist's early years are inevitably apprenticeship: imitation, technique, ear training, absorption of forms, constraints, and predecessors. In music, especially, originality that arrives too early can read as gimmick or ignorance, a refusal to learn the grammar before inventing slang.

The subtext is also generational. Foss came of age in the mid-20th century, when composers were pressed to declare allegiance - serialism, neoclassicism, experimentalism - and careers could hinge on perceived innovation. Against that backdrop, Foss's skepticism reads as a rebuke to institutional incentives: the conservatory, the critic, the grant committee, all rewarding "newness" as a credential. He's insisting that a mature sensibility emerges only after the artist has internalized tradition deeply enough to bend it without breaking.

It's a pragmatic kind of hope, too: if originality is late-stage growth, then feeling derivative early on isn't failure; it's training. The quote dignifies the slow formation of taste, craft, and judgment - the invisible ingredients that eventually make something unmistakably yours.