How classical music fuels my creative process

For me, it begins and ends with music. In third grade Mrs. Harrison played a bombastic symphonic piece, trilling with violins, rich bass harmonies, and—can you believe it?—cannons. The 1812 Overture, in third grade, secured my obsession with classical music.

In elementary school I listened to my sister squeak and squawk on her saxophone; its bell-shaped curve created a type of craving in my mind. I wanted to rip and roar, let loose and squeal, my fingers flashing across the saxophone's pearl keys. So, in fifth grade, I started to blow, started listening to Count Basie and Gorgon Goodwin, and I fell in love with Cannonball Adderley.

Then came the piano. In eighth grade I felt I couldn't do what I wanted blowing air through a tube. I needed more. I needed harmonies rather than one melodic line of music. I wanted to sink my ten little fingers into the ivories; I wanted to play Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert. After mastering the dreaded Hanon exercises came Bach—that German Lutheran who wrote cantatas week after week, while directing choirs, writing works for the harpsichord, and producing 20 children.

So I plunked away, rushing along the 88 keys and felt I finally landed when I could play this:

It's not so much that the piece is difficult, though it is, but it represents something larger to me in Bach: it represents what the human mind is capable of producing. Did you hear it? There were multiple melodies in multiple voices. The bass line doesn't just play chords like in Mozart: it's constantly moving, pushing, and pulsing. I remember sweating the first time I listened to this piece because my heart was slamming in my chest. I was excited.

And that, I guess, is what I search for in my own writing, that pounding effect. I want someone to race along sentences with me—stopping, figuring out how it works—and then continuing; it's like figuring out fingering for a difficult piano piece. For me, it's inhabiting the other arts that really makes me want to be a writer.

Often, in graduate school, one of the negative influences for me is that I'm around so many other neurotic people who identify as writers. I find more often than not I'm unwilling to listen to other people's processes when it comes to writing than I am to other artists. I latch on to painters who work in layers of acrylic, trying to reveal the subtlety of light; I sit in rapt attention as sculptors speak about using their hands to shape and break marble, the blow of the hammer unveiling a hand or cascading hair; but I listen mostly to musicians, women and men who spend hours practicing by themselves each day, getting the phrasing just right, pausing for a breath, experimenting with sound and space. For me, it's like listening to a cousin at a dinner party, someone who shares something in common with you, but is just different enough from your sister that you might be able to tolerate him a little bit longer.

So whether the music be pounding...

https://youtu.be/BXss9lg1PDM?t=8m7s

...or bookending my day, feeling as if I have accomplished something...

https://youtu.be/D6L16ggIABg?t=18m15s

...it seems that I feel most inspired and content while living inside the harmonies of music, which work as a soothing balm in difficult times and as a refreshing tonic in times of happiness and joy.

So maybe it's this: Music, for me, is the bedrock of my inspiration because it takes me into the ethereal world of sound and roots me to the pulsing of my heart. Oftentimes when I am walking, the speed at which I walk is dictated by the music playing inside my head. So, in some ways, the sonorous sound of music pushes me into my own world of wordsmithing and sentence structure, looking for the harmonies and intricacies that shape my life.

Taylor Brorby is a writer, environmentalist, and GLBT rights activist. He received his M.A. in Liberal Studies from Hamline University in 2013, and is currently a graduate student at Iowa State University in Creative Writing and Environment.

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