Sometimes one feels like giving up .....

[Serial_Apologist]

I have in the past very occasionally had musical dreams. I've not had anything as stimulating as a lesson with Bartok though - wow! Oddly I've not heard so much music recently - under more normal circumstances I have days when music is going round in my head for a substantial time most days. Sometimes it can even be an irritation.

I once had the oddest of dreams, consisting of me conducting an interview with Francis Poulenc. In it I am speaking perfect French, which certainly wasn't the case in living reality, asking him why he would draw such diverse and contradictory influences into his own music. Poulenc was seriously answering "I can't really say - I just love Chopin, Chabrier, Saint-Saens, Ravel, Stravinsky, and mixing them up". Poulenc could in fact speak in pretty good English, so there was no need for me to show off; but these would probably have been the answers he would have given, and I woke up wanting to go back into the dream to discover what he would have said next! It is often said that dreams function as subconscious sorting houses for the previous day's ups and downs, but I hadn't at the time particularly been thinking about Poulenc.