Music to My Ears

Are you a music fan?

Do you listen when you drive?

How about if you are working out?

What gets you moving?

I do some of my writing to music, but I turn the volume down low, low, low. What’s my music of choice? For writing, it is classical. And there is definitely a story behind this.

Percussion!

I am hardly an orchestral connoisseur. In fact, I couldn’t tell you much of anything about it, but I turn on this type of music during writing time as a background sound to push out other thoughts. Here’s the thing. As a child, I often went to sleep hearing classical music coming from downstairs as my parents listened to the WQXR offerings on the radio coming out of New York City. In addition, during the day, my mother often played classical works on a baby grand, so I was listening to Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin and many more from well before I was born and throughout childhood.

Playing simultaneously with the nightly WQXR selections was another percussion “instrument” -  a typewriter... or two.... Tap. Tap. Tap. Ringggg (as the carriage was manually moved from one side to another). Tap... tap... tap... Both of my parents wrote ...  on typewriters. It was marvelous.

I consider myself lucky to have had this surround me as a child, and I find it fascinating that even today the soft background music is an effective way to put my mind in “writing mode” as I take to my laptop and begin to tap tap tap my more modern percussion instrument.

Do you use music to help you through certain parts of your day? I’d love to hear about it. Please share a comment!