On Creating and Being Created by Music

Abstract

This chapter discusses improvisation to involve dreaming in music, where unconscious processes have an important role to play. In exploring this, I refer to an improvisation through which I experienced the healing of childhood trauma. The chapter integrates musical analysis of a composition that consolidated the improvisation with psychoanalytic and other thinking used to understand my experience of being created by music through surrendering conscious control. The process allowed me to discover a much-needed sense of inner emotional truth, where I also experienced how the death-rebirth rhythm of creativity can generate considerable anxiety. The associated challenges of the creative process are discussed with reference to Ehrenzweig’s thinking about conscious and unconscious levels of musical perception, structure, and containment. Consideration is given to the nature of existential trauma that lies beyond the full reach of music even where there has been an overwhelming and destructive encounter with the infinite dimensions of the unconscious mind. The chapter explores how dreaming in music can make it possible to safely navigate contact with such depth to promote healing where the experience of musical space and time is central, at once finite and infinite.