Music

   1) The Compulsion to Renewed Creativity in the Serious Musical Composer

   The serious composer who thinks about his art will sooner or later have occasion to ask himself: why is it so important to my own psyche that I compose music? What makes it seem so absolutely necessary, so that every other daily activity, by comparison, is of lesser significance? And why is the creative impulse never satisfied; why must one always begin anew? To the first question-the need to create-the answer is always the same-self-expression; the basic need to make evident one's deepest feelings about life. But why is the job never done? Why must one always begin again? The reason for the compulsion to renewed creativity, it seems to me, is that each added work brings with it an element of selfdiscovery. I must create in order to know myself, and since selfknowledge is a never-ending search, each new work is only a part-answer to the question "Who am I?" and brings with it the need to go on to other and different part-answers. (Copland, 1952, pp. 40-41)

   2) The Relation of Music to Conscious and Unconscious Thought

   When collaboration occurs, when, for a while, the lines of conscious and unconscious thought run along the same track, we achieve the feeling of wholeness and satisfaction which is characteristic of our response to great art and other transcendent states of mind. The patterns of music, translated, analyzed, shorn of detail, are able to stimulate the patterns of emotions on many levels simultaneously, thus bringing various hierarchical states of consciousness and unconsciousness into harmony with one another during the existence of the music for us, whether this is in a performance or purely in the memory. As this happens we experience the sense of unity which arises from the cessation of conflict between conscious and unconscious. (McLaughlin, 1970, pp. 104-105)