Musical creativity in the line of fire.

Music and war is a vast topic. This essay limits itself mainly to compositions of Western classical music written in response to World War II. I examine A Ceremony of Carols (1942), by UK pacifist, Benjamin Britten, composed on a ship menaced by U-boats as he returned from voluntary exile to face the war; and the Quartet for the End of Time (1941), by the Frenchman, Olivier Messiaen, interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where 400 prisoners and German officers attended its premiere in freezing conditions. I refer also to Bion's wartime experiences. War is studied as a magnification of hatred and rivalry within families, focusing on the biblical lament of David for the killing of his son Absalom, set to music down the centuries. Finally, Britten's War Requiem is explored, as a modern testament to the horrors of war, avoiding pomp and emphasising ambivalence and ambiguity. I consider these pieces from the perspective of Bion's theories of L, H, K, and O, and suggest they bear out Winnicott's theory of transitional space and Segal's theory of artistic creativity with its depiction of a ruined world, which music may attempt to repair, particularly through the operation of musically aesthetic containment.