Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lukas Foss

There is a quiet flex buried in Foss's modesty: a lifetime of work, and still no master key. The line balances two truths that artists rarely admit in the same breath. First, craft is real. "Since age seven" is not a romantic flourish; it's a credential, a way of saying the hours are indisputable, the discipline sustained. Then comes the reversal: despite all that practice, the "creative process" remains "elusive". Foss refuses the comforting myth that experience turns inspiration into a machine you can operate on command.

The intent feels partly protective, partly liberating. Protective because it punctures the expectation that a celebrated composer should be able to explain genius like a technician describing wiring. Liberating because it gives permission to remain a beginner inside one's own expertise. Foss isn't confessing incompetence; he's describing a perpetual frontier. The subtext is that creativity is not a solved problem but a recurring encounter - with taste, doubt, accident, and whatever flickers just beyond deliberate control.

Context matters: Foss moved easily between traditions, teaching at elite institutions while experimenting with chance procedures, improvisation, and contemporary idioms. That 20th-century musical environment prized novelty but also demanded explanations: manifestos, systems, theories. Foss's statement quietly resists that pressure. It argues that composing can be rigorous without being fully legible, that the most honest report from the studio isn't certainty but continued astonishment.