Before deciding on his programme, Berlioz was thinking of basing a symphony on Goethe’s Faust. The ‘Sabbath Night’ is inspired by the Walpurgisnacht vision of the beloved transformed into a witch. The movement continues Berlioz’s exploration of new orchestral sonorities to represent his nightmare scenario. Another instrument new to the symphony orchestra is a pair of deep bells; for which, as they would not often be available, he wrote the part to be played on pianos. His handling of the usual instruments, woodwind, brass, percussion, and strings, is no less original. The bells chime, the Dies irae plainchant is played and caricatured. The idée fixe is transformed into a vulgar jig suitable for a witches’ Sabbath, and the ‘Ronde’ begins as an academically correct fugue, its subject combined at the climax with the plainchant.

Drugs and addiction are relevant to the present study: (1) by analogy with drug-taking, the term ‘addiction’ can be applied to serial killing even where drugs are not involved and (2) drugs play an important role in the lives of some serial lust killers. The discussion first turns to two killers where the term ‘addiction’ has been applied but where it appears that drugs were not used. It then looks at two examples of drug-associated killing. Serial lust killer Michael Ross described feeling assailed by intrusive thoughts urging the rape and murder of women. He published an account of his experience in an academic journal concerned with addiction. Joel Rifkin was adopted and seriously bullied by his peers. He described his sexual behaviour as addictive and gave evidence of ambivalence in his killings. Anthony Sowell appears to have been influenced in his sexual addiction by extensive use of crack cocaine.

Thomas Adès’s piano concerto In Seven Days (2008) outlines the biblical creation story in seven connected movements, merging the figurative and the abstract to parallel modern allegorical readings of Genesis 1:2. This capacious model of musical growth and transformation will include the development of a vast tonal edifice from two primary harmonies, reference the birth of the modern orchestra and repurpose traditional compositional techniques from the Renaissance to the present. But In Seven Days embraces a meta-musical role as well, through allusions to select works that have broached the subject of creation. As the composer avers, it tells ‘the story of the material and also of “material”, all of it, in the world’ writ large, as a musical paradigm of world-building that draws on medieval, Baroque and contemporary compositional techniques to recover the inexhaustible promise of the musical past.

In this chapter, I examine a singular instance of affective form in postcolonial fiction, which puts the body back in the body while also sustaining affect as a virtual substance, a potentiality that exceeds material and formal embodiments. Drawing on Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010) and Happiness (2018), I examine key psychoanalytic and psychiatric categories such as PTSD, trauma, fugue, and narrative memory as they are transported globally. Focusing on fraught contexts such as the Sierra Leonian Civil War evoked by Forna, the essay examines the entrenched assumptions and soulmaking politics of Western epistemologies of consciousness, offering the affect of Forna’s novels as an alternative depiction of the concrete and abstract materialities of traumatic states.