How to be inspired without copying

In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The work was painstaking, derivative on its face, and (as it turned out) the foundation of everything Bach would become. Once he'd absorbed the architecture of the Italian concerto, he produced the Brandenburg Concertos, music that sounds nothing like Vivaldi and could only have come from Bach.The conventional warning is that you shouldn't copy because copying is theft. Austin Kleon's bestseller (Steal Like an Artist, 2012) tried to rescue copying from this stigma by reframing it as the basis of all creative work. He was right; but what does the heist look like, when it works?The transcription testWhen you copy a Vivaldi concerto into a manuscript by hand, you're not producing a Vivaldi concerto - nobody would…