# Are there any known instances of composers who have dreamt their themes



## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

...or snippets of musical ideas, orchestrations, etc., and commented on the experience? Seems like this would be much more conducive to a literary approach, but as a kind of "simple assist" in the creative process of a composer, I'm sure it must have happened many times. Does anyone know of any examples?


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## Guest (May 22, 2014)

Schumann claims that his theme for the Geistervariationen was dictated to him by angels or something along those lines. Now, considering this was Schumann, who knows.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

There's the well known legend about Tartini dreaming that the devil played the violin at his bedside. He took what the devil had played and wrote it into his g minor violin sonata, nicknamed the "Devil's Trill"

"One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and - I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me."

The work in question:


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

*Ligeti*´s childhood dream/nightmare of a large insect´s web, where a few beings were able to free themselves for a very short time, has been used for analysis for the compositional pattern in some of his works

cf. p.32 http://books.google.dk/books?id=T89...g#v=onepage&q=ligeti nightmare spider&f=false

and - for instance - http://qutmusic.pbworks.com/w/page/4663881/micropolyphony


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

Stravinsky said the Rite of Spring came to him in a dream.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

They are all dreaming. I don't think day-dreaming is any less valid than night-dreaming.


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Cosmos said:


> There's the well known legend about Tartini dreaming that the devil played the violin at his bedside. He took what the devil had played and wrote it into his g minor violin sonata, nicknamed the "Devil's Trill"
> 
> "One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and - I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me."
> 
> The work in question:


Yes! THIS is the one I was trying to recall having heard about before, which I started to mention as being on the tip of my tongue. I knew the idea of the devil was in there somewhere, but I kept on getting an image of Paganini...


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

The opening of Bruckner's 7th Symphony came to him in a dream, supposedly.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

Pysmythe said:


> Yes! THIS is the one I was trying to recall having heard about before, which I started to mention as being on the tip of my tongue. I knew the idea of the devil was in there somewhere, but I kept on getting an image of Paganini...


That's probably because of the legend that Paganini sold his soul to the devil to be a great violinist :devil:


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## Celloissimo (Mar 29, 2013)

Bruckner says he heard the opening theme to his 7th symphony in a dream, played on a viola. In the actual work it is played on the cello. 

Gorgeous stuff.


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## Jobis (Jun 13, 2013)

Not a classical composer but didn't Paul McCartney hear the melody to 'yesterday' in a dream?


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> They are all dreaming. I don't think day-dreaming is any less valid than night-dreaming.


I don't, either, but daydreaming isn't usually comprised of logic and sense as skewed as they are in dreams. That a musical idea might come to someone out of the "brain-cleansing" world of a dream more or less "ready to go" just seems a little counter-intuitive to a process that normally requires such a great deal of considered, prefrontal cortex sort of thinking. Sure, you could say it's just another form of being inspired, for example, but that it might arise out of the muck of a dream, I just think that's fascinating. It reminds me in some ways of what Bertrand Russell once said about how he went about solving some of his mathematics problems, by consciously committing the components of a problem to his subconscious, and then forgetting all about it, and then lo, and behold, some time later, he might find himself suddenly presented with a solution. Consciousness is still largely a mystery, so how much more must the subconscious be.


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Cosmos said:


> That's probably because of the legend that Paganini sold his soul to the devil to be a great violinist :devil:


Oh, I know that's what it stemmed from, lol.


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Jobis said:


> Not a classical composer but didn't Paul McCartney hear the melody to 'yesterday' in a dream?


I believe I heard he did, too... Looks like another one I forgot about.


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## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

I dreamt about a ham sandwich last night...


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

DavidA said:


> Stravinsky said the Rite of Spring came to him in a dream.


More like a nightmare.


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Lope de Aguirre said:


> I dreamt about a ham sandwich last night...


I've got you beat, I think. I dreamt about, of all things, a HUGE syringe of heroin (I'm talking about enough to lay out an elephant...), which I just carried around in my dream-pocket because I was too afraid to stick it in my arm... Now, I've NEVER done heroin in my life, so I have no idea why I would dream of such a thing. I told my wife about it this morning, and she said, "Honey, I think it just means you're stressed out."

What a woman!


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

I would think this would happen all the time. A recent dream study found that of subjects instructed to play Tetris for several hours before bed, 60% were dreaming about playing the game when awakened during a REM cycle within the first few hours of sleep. What do you think composers would be dreaming about?


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## Botec (Jan 14, 2011)

I once dreamed of attending a performance of some Machaut-like motet, which was not simply a recalling of any authentic work. At the time, it seemed very real and very impressive, and I got some sense of the multiple texts and the interplay of voices. Now, the subconscious mind might be capable of remarkable things, but my musical talents - not to mention my medieval French - are certainly not up to it, so I suspect there was some sort of mental placeholder, a shortcut that said 'imagine you're listening to this' when I really wasn't, in the same way that you could certainly dream of inspecting detailed blueprints for a fusion reactor, but if you attempted to reproduce them once awake, you'd find they were nonsensical.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Not necessarily a dream but more of a daydream, I just found out Humphrey Searle was sitting by a lake, and he zoned out, like in a trance, then said to his wife, "I've got my 5th symphony."


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## Pysmythe (May 11, 2014)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> More like a nightmare.


We've all got to make sacrifices.


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## Alfacharger (Dec 6, 2013)

To quote John Adams on his work Harmonielehre, "The first part is a seventeen-minute inverted arch form: high energy at the beginning and end, with a long, roaming "Sehnsucht" section in between. The pounding e minor chords at the beginning and end of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image I'd shortly before starting the piece. In the dream I'd watched a gigantic supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket."


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

I dreamt that I achieved 4000 posts. Stupid dream. Been there. Done that.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Stravinsky woke up from a dream, recalling "very pleasant music" for the specific instrumentation which is his _Octet_. There was nothing literary about it, i.e. he "just heard the music." Other composers who have dreamed music have had similar experiences, which is nothing so unusual considering their minds are so steadily active in the realm of purely musical ideas, and many of those ideas are dreamed without pictorial or literal story content being at all part of the dream.


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## musicrom (Dec 29, 2013)

Not in a dream, but I read once that Schubert was walking in the park with some friends when all of a sudden, the theme for his Ständchen from Schwanengesang came into his head. It sounded so good to him that he immediately left his friends to write down the piece.

(I read that once, but when I tried looking it up later, I couldn't find it anywhere... so hopefully it's true, but it may not be)


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> More like a nightmare.


Now, now, just because it is difficult to count and play


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## SilenceIsGolden (May 5, 2013)

According to Wagner, as he laid down for a nap one afternoon and drifted off a sensation of flowing water grew in intensity to the accompaniment of an E-flat major triad, swirling and fragmenting, and voila the beginning of _The Ring_ was born.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

PetrB said:


> Stravinsky woke up from a dream, recalling "very pleasant music" for the specific instrumentation which is his _Octet_. There was nothing literary about it, i.e. he "just heard the music." Other composers who have dreamed music have had similar experiences, which is nothing so unusual considering their minds are so steadily active in the realm of purely musical ideas, and many of those ideas are dreamed without pictorial or literal story content being at all part of the dream.


Stravinsky also once was having trouble with this one chord that he knew he had to use, but he wasn't comfortable with. He had a dream where the tones of the chord were objects in his hands, and moving them around, he discovered how best to implement the chord.


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## Guest (May 23, 2014)

I know I've had foreign melodies play in my dreams before, but I'm never clear enough in the morning to remember any detail.


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## Guest (May 23, 2014)

Lope de Aguirre said:


> I dreamt about ham sandwich last night...


You wrote this music? In a dream? Wow!


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

PetrB said:


> Now, now, just because it is difficult to count and play


I actually had the Firebird in a dream once, the Infernal Dance. I'd say that was a lot scarier than the Rite of Spring is to me. I feel like the Rite is more of a parody of emotions rather than really trying to scare anyone. It's almost a satire on ritual.


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