Daily Inspiration Quote by Lukas Foss

Obvious influence is the boring part; the scandal is transformation. Lukas Foss is pushing back against the lazy museum-guide version of musical lineage, where a modern composer “borrows” from Bach the way a student copies a worksheet. Foss hears something more muscular in Stravinsky: a composer who treats the canon as raw material, not scripture, and who proves his originality by what he can metabolize.

The phrasing “turned Bach into Stravinsky” is a sly reversal. It’s not Bach elevating Stravinsky by proximity to greatness; it’s Stravinsky re-encoding Bach through his own rhythmic bite, harmonic chill, and architectural clarity. That verb “turned” suggests alchemy with fingerprints left on the gold: neoclassicism not as nostalgia, but as a controlled experiment. Bach becomes a set of procedures - counterpoint, balance, motor energy - that can be re-lit under Stravinsky’s harsher, modern lamp.

Context matters: Foss, himself a 20th-century composer navigating tradition after modernism’s first shocks, is defending a way forward that doesn’t pretend the past can be escaped. He’s also quietly telling you how to listen. Don’t hunt for quotations or “influences” like Easter eggs; listen for the angle of attack. Stravinsky’s genius, Foss implies, is that he can enter the classical house, rearrange the furniture with icy confidence, and make it feel inevitable - as if Bach had been waiting, centuries earlier, to be renovated.