Composition and Mind-Altering Substances?

Hey everyone,

Although very atypical of me to be posting a topic about this, my curiosity has got the better of my tactfullness and I'm very interested in knowing a well known but I think unprecedented question in this forum to date....

Have you ever used, or contemplated using, a mind-altering and/or psychadelic drug or substance in order to stimulate your compositional abilities?

If this topic post breaches the terms and conditions of this forum website please delete this post! If free speech is however allowed :P I'd be very curious to know. I'll give my answer to the question posed shortly after a moderator has given it the go ahead! All the best, enjoying every facet of this website,

Pravin.

Nope. Never considered it. I used to smoke occassionally, and I even tried pot once--though it didn't do anything for me. I still like to have a drink or two on occassion, though I do NOT like to drink to get drunk. But I've never composed anything while under the influence of any substance.

However, I HAVE found that I do nearly all my best composing in my sleep, or in that weird state between consciousness and subconsciousness, so in a sense, that IS composing in an altered state of mind.

Decided to edit my original answer drastically because, although hallucinogenics do have profound awareness-expanding properties (and a dozen other useful things) I don't want to encourage younger members to experiment without caution.

If you must, then you should research the thing thoroughly first. Find a few people who have used such drugs for serious artistic or religious purposes; read Leary's Politics of Ecstasy. Avoid stuff written by the medical orthodoxy and sensationist press. And don't buy the stuff off the street...you just don't know what else goes into it. (There was a spate of pills going round in england "enhanced" with strychnine - its chemical effect on neuornes...but we all know that strychnine is a lethal poison, so be VERY aware).

And DO take the warning seriously - if you're going to use the wilder of the hallucingenics - like LSD, you MUST have someone with you at all times who you can trust absolutely...and that's dead serious - absolutely, so no matter what you say or do, they won't desert you and you won't feel threatened that they might. This other person, in complete empathy with you, is your ticket to what you know outside the trip as "reality" whatever that may mean for you.

If you're under the age of about 17, you'll get high and plenty of weird experiences but you're unlikely to take full advantage of the experience as your mind will not have patterned too much.

My own findings (at age 24, first trip) were that it didn't help write music too much - but the after-effect was quite sweeping.* I virtually stopped writing serial and classical music in favour of more imprssionistic stuff. However, I can never know what might have happened if I didn't go through the experience. One can't do both.

*It was in every respect. It is/was a deep mystical experience. Things were the same around me once I straightened out....but my relationship to them all was different. You come out with a different view of life. Clocks still amuse me.

My imagination is my LSD...

yeah, drugs tend to make you think you wrote a masterpiece while you're stoned...

except when you come down from it, you realize you just wrote pure crap because you weren't in any sort of control over what you were doing.

If you can't let your mind loose to explore your inspiration when you're "straight", then you need to work on that rather than try to find artificial means to remove your inhibitions.

The greatest thing about composing is that it's a controlled balancing act between wild inspiration and intellectual construction. Too much of either leads to either disjointed meanderings, or to mechanical robot music.

I refrain from commenting on that...nahhh, not the 5th amendment but simply because I don't think "mind-altering" substances (even perfumes, nicotine or alcohol) are a good idea, let alone the ones against which you have little fight.

I've had people come up to me in pubs (with a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette going in the other)...and lecture me on drugs!!!

:)

However, I HAVE found that I do nearly all my best composing in my sleep, or in that weird state between consciousness and subconsciousness, so in a sense, that IS composing in an altered state of mind.

That is very true. I often have found myself, when in that state of rest where you are not quite sleeping, yet too tired to get up, intercepting some glorious musical idea. This depresses me, because I know that I cannot possibly get it all down.

Well, that needs practice and a bit of organisation. Work out a system that allows you to notate all you need but with your eyes shut so that at the moment of waking you can briefly recap what's going on - reach as far back into the dream as need be, then note down what you need to - unlikely to be musical notation. Keep a note-book by your bed and try to capture what you can of any dream you wake from (or go lucid in). Difficult but it's best to lie in the position you start to wake up. You get used to writing like that. You learn to "index" down the page with one hand also using it as a margin stop for your writing hand.

Then when you get up, allow a few minutes in solitude to go over it again. You'll find the writing-down tends to 'cement' the image better in your memory.

It's another composing technique but it does take practice.

:rolleyes:

yeah, drugs tend to make you think you wrote a masterpiece while you're stoned...

except when you come down from it, you realize you just wrote pure crap because you weren't in any sort of control over what you were doing.

If you can't let your mind loose to explore your inspiration when you're "straight", then you need to work on that rather than try to find artificial means to remove your inhibitions.

The greatest thing about composing is that it's a controlled balancing act between wild inspiration and intellectual construction. Too much of either leads to either disjointed meanderings, or to mechanical robot music.

Very well said and I completely agree.

I did drugs for 7 years(11 years quit now). Weed, cocaine, lsd, speed, some heroine in the last days. The only thing they did was seriously screw up my life, sap my motivation for anything (including music) and leave me hating myself for what I had become.

The best music I feel I have written has been totally sober. I need a clear mind AND spirit to write music that *I* like to hear.

I've never considered the use of drugs. But I don't think I'd go to the extreme of using them to increase my compositional abilities.

Others have. Pollock for example, but he was a nutcase.

But no, I've never considered using them. Why ruin what you have?

I think there's ever-such-a big difference between "doing drugs" and using mind altering substances to stimulate crative/artistic activity. Indeed, music itself can be mind altering, so can incense, perfume (and other pheromones), a sudden complete change of surroundings. Lots of things.

All that crap about taking drugs to enhance creativity is a load of BS. You take some drugs to get f***** up. Don't take them so seriously. I find that blabber about drugs being mind opening so childish, and I've done my fair share of em. I'll stick with beer and tobacco nowadays (and maybe a little Bolivian snowflake every now and then but that's a secret)

has anyone read Huxley's "Doors of Perception" and "Heaven and Hell"???

Very much recommended

Hi all,

Good to see the post going. Personally I have taken several drugs, not for the *purpose* of composition as such but definitely for the experience of it. Some of these experiences have been wonderful and very thought provoking. However I never became addicted to any of the drugs. This is not simply chance but a concerted effort on my part to understand what I was taking by speaking to others and researching on the web thoroughly before taking the substances. The following website was very handy in this respect:

Erowid

I recommended going to the 'Plants and Drugs' section and reading extensively about all the effects of the substances whether good or bad.

Regards

Pravin

I've heard all this drug advocating crap before. It is all 1 big cliche and real stupid. Hearing someone go through the whole number one more time is really yawn-inducing. There is no such thing as taking drugs responsibly. I'm also pretty sure you haven't had any religious experiences. Maybe you got a very dreamlike state, but that is no religious experience. You sound like a cookie cutter teenager who just found out about the whole drug advocating thing on the internet. Act your age. BTW I think this thread should be moved, this section is to talk about composition, not to express your half-witted views on an irrelevant and infiinitely trivial matter.

I've heard all this drug advocating crap before. It is all 1 big cliche and real stupid. Hearing someone go through the whole number one more time is really yawn-inducing. There is no such thing as taking drugs responsibly. I'm also pretty sure you haven't had any religious experiences. Maybe you got a very dreamlike state, but that is no religious experience. You sound like a cookie cutter teenager who just found out about the whole drug advocating thing on the internet. Act your age. BTW I think this thread should be moved, this section is to talk about composition, not to express your half-witted views on an irrelevant and infiinitely trivial matter.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about and it's obvious that you haven't used certain things with a serious intent or - simply - you wouldn't make such statements.

Besides, this thread is/was about composition.... you seem to be hijacking it with a media-comatised anti-drug diatribe. The original poster, in case you hadn't noticed, asked a question. You aren't answering it. If you haven't indulged or considered indulging in the manner addressed by the question, simply say "no".

To what extent are you a composer, by the way?

I have tried all the hallucinogenic BS. I have done very nice amounts of it in fact. I don't even feel like listing all the names because it reminds me of a dumb teenager. You get the idea, psychedelics bla bla. And it is all a bunch of trivial crap. Associating it with notions of enhanced creativity is half-witted and childish. If anything it inspires bizarre thinking. That is not necessarily creative.

This forum section is for discussing practical matters of composition, not this idiot scraggy.

As far as composition I am a student of it.

Hi PraeludiumumundFugue,

I have to agree with montpellier that your vitriolic spiel is pretty unwarranted. And I have to disagree with you about this thread needing to be moved. It is not a thread to discuss or confess to what substances you have taken gratiutously, but rather to discuss them with the purpose of determing to what extent others see a relationship between the experience, or remembered experience, or even imagined experience of drug use and composition. That is a very broad question and it has been answered broadly and plenty of other people have attested to its relevance by responding to this post. So if you would like to discuss your dislike for drugs themselves, then you should probably start another thread in the free-for-All section.

As to my opinion - I've always been fascinated by it. Plenty of famous composers have definitely taken drugs. In fact, artists of all genres have experimented with drug use and used it for creative purposes. Everything from absinthe to ayahuasca. In terms of music, I definitely see a direct relationship between the two. Jazz, Reggae music, Techno music, and to a larger extent, RnB music all have a and are borne out of a drug culture, whether it be a direct reference to drug use, or being concerned with its theme. I'm sure there are plenty of ritualistic cultures still in existence where ceremony, and music, and drug use are still commmonly practiced in conjunction with one another. So in terms of drug use not providing any kind of 'religious experience', I think there is a difference of terminology of what exactly defines religion according to you.

As to classical music, I am unsure of the association. I think however, that a lot of earlier classical music, Bach especially, would be very antithetical to drug use. In regards to that kind of music, which is deeply logical, and mathematical, invention and ingenuity are almost pre-thought out puzzles to solve rather than disassociative and/or free associative thought. That may not always be the case. I remember once when stoned I listened to almost 40of Correli's Sonatas in one sitting and had a profoundly different experience of how the melodies intertwined and the harmonies operated - I felt as though I was seeing beyond the music and straight to the composer. Of course, it didn't mean the next day I was writing even remotely the same quality of music; but it inspired my enjoyment of it in a way that is deeply personal and will continue to evolve as I make music and educate myself.

That's all from me! Speak to you all soon. All the best

Pravin