Dreamtime Part I: David Maslanka, Big Dreams, and the Holy Mother
David Maslanka is a leading composer for wind bands, writing the most imaginative and singular music played today. The UW wind ensemble performs his works frequently. Each of his works has a broad and symbolic theme wending through the entire composition (or, a "big dream" as Maslanka likes to call it) and each composition is produced by merging his conscious mind with his dreamtime mind, then beginning to write. Maslanka best explained this connection in this short program note before a performance of his music in 2002:
I want to give a few thoughts about how music acts in our lives. Music making is in the balance point between the conscious and unconscious minds. By way of brief illustration, the conscious part is the part we consider to be ourselves - the ego, the thinking part, the active does, the part that wakes up in the morning, and lives by the clock, and lives in a particular place, the part that has a name, and a personality, and a job.
By contrast, the unconscious part of ourselves, the part where dreams come from, does not live in time. That is, time means nothing to it. It lives in the whole universe but in no particular place. It has no personality but is life force itself. It does not have a name or a job identity, but comes forward to us as mythic forms and dreams.
Each of us has this mythic, timeless part. In mythology we are princes, kings, queens, warriors, wise men, and wise women. In a fundamental way these mythic identifications are who we really are. This part of ourselves is what allows us to identify so strongly with mythic characters, and why mythology from all cultures stays so strongly alive.
Music making is about bringing the conscious and unconscious minds together. Music making is about dreaming.
There are different kinds of dreams. Ordinary dreaming is the way our minds have of sorting out the day and getting us ready for tomorrow. Then there are the “big” dreams which come from somewhere far deeper in us. Our religious traditions are filled with the big dreams of the prophets and the visionaries. Having a big dream is like swimming in the ocean far from shore; it is both frightening and exhilarating.
Making a piece of music is about “big dreams.” I am pushed by some unknown force to try to write a piece of music. I can feel the power of what wants to happen, but most often I don’t know right off what it means. I am the channel for something that wants to come into the world.
Maslanka's reference to mythic identities is a profoundly interesting idea, especially where it concerns the struggle of the conscious mind to find a place in the world via self-identity (e.g. thinking of oneself as a healer, a journeyman, an entertainer, a powerful lord, a devoted servant, a guardian, a wise person, and so on.) The Mamet quote in yesterday's post is pointing to this exact idea through a different set of words: we respond most strongly to dramas that hold a high amount of meaning for us, and the most profound of those meanings are found in our dream lives.
It's my hypothesis that when our conscious lives begin to correspond to our "big dreams" and timeless identities, we begin to reach the high-water marks in our lives where we feel fulfilled in a way that isn't readily explained.
It's also worth mentioning that Maslanka has trained himself to sink into his dreamtime whenever he feels the need through a series of meditation exercises. Once there, he receives his music through a medium that he can only describe as the "Holy Mother"; a symbolic female representation of his creative process whereby his works are born. Though Maslanka is not a practicing Christian, religious symbolism contains some of the biggest of dreams (crucifixion and resurrection, ultimate creation, immaculate conception, sacrifice) and this is the closest he comes to naming the conduit through which his unconcious mind flows.
In my experience, big dreams make themselves known in small fragments at unexpected times. It's difficult to release the ordinary dreams that cater your immediate needs and sink into the realm where the big dreams lie.