THE MYTH OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS (fantasy, idealism, inspiration, madness)

Explain german idealism – reaction against reason – Kant and Hegel in the 19th century

freud and nietsche : reason oppresses human beings.

Reason doesn’t grant us with liberty.

Idea: madness is a superior state of reason.

There is this idea that reason is not enough when it comes to creativity. This idea that you
need madness to achieve things that you wouldn’t be able to achieve with reason.

Berlioz induces himself to a state of hallucinations through the consumption of opium.

In 1829, at the age of twenty-five, Hector Berlioz was affected by a strange nervous condition.
For a year he wrestled with attacks of excitement and insomnia, with intervals of exhaustion
and depression.

Musical ideas tormented him, whirling him into ecstatic frenzies and then dropping him like a
limp rag doll.

“So many musical ideas are seething within me”

“oh, must my destiny be engulfed by this overwhelming passion?”.

“This imaginary world”, he wrote to his father, “has become a real malady”.

But the work which was gestating inside him remained chaotic, out of focus, impossible to fix
or transcribe. Then abruptly, in March of 1830, the fever broke. Over the next six weeks he
wrote the entire Symphonie Fantastique, some movements apparently scribbled almost
automatically in a single night. On the 16th April he wrote to his friend and collaborator, the
librettist Humbert Ferrand, including his first draft of the Symphonie’s programme.

“I see myself in a mirror. Often I experience the most extraordinary impressions, of which
nothing can give any idea…the effect is like that of opium”. Later in life, as these strange states
recurred, he would be more specific: when his nerves were worn to shreds, the only solution
was “ten drops of laudanum, and forget things till tomorrow”.

TALK ABOUT SCHUMANN: ghost variations: the theme was dictated to him by the ghost of
Schubert.

Lyapunov, studied with Taneyev and Tchaikovsky wrote: Hashish, and oriental symphonic
poem.

John Cage: “In his book of conversations For the Birds, John Cage says, “I have come to the
conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom."

Beethoven’s compositional method.