Friday Forays in Fiction: Music to Write By

Yep, I'm still going on about the music with Brainwave Entrainment tones from Mind Power MP3.com I discovered last weekend.  Only now I have more than the three free samples and the YouTube channel for Ed has gotten me this digital 20 album library plus bonuses for Christmas.  Some of the bonuses are more BWE music, some are ebooks and one is a digital course with some of each.  Altogether 30 to 40 items averaging over 10 minutes per audio file download.

I've no desire to spend hours at the tedious task of downloading them one by one (the only option given) before I stop to listen.  So I've started out by targeting several that I'm anxious to have available ASAP.  Yesterday I shared why Moonlight Sonata was so important to me.  Today the spotlighted album is Energy Activation: Holst - The Planets.

I discovered Holst's symphony, The Planets, at the same time as Beethoven's 9th via the same classical music radio station while living in Longview in the early 90s.  I had been listening to the station in the first place because my creative writing professor at Southern Oregon State College (now SOU), Lawson Inada (since designated as Poet Laureate for Oregon State), had turned me on to the usefulness of music to help set the mood or feeling tone of a poem, story or individual scenes.

Thus in the late 80s I had started keeping a file noting the emotion a musical piece called up in me and as I began using them to tune my mood for a writing session I kept records of which musical piece was playing while I was writing the scene or poem and would play it again when returning to work on it. It wasn't long before I realized that not only did the music tied to the written piece recreate the mood it triggered the memories of my unrecorded thoughts and intentions regarding the piece during previous sessions.

Energizing Classical Music - Holst, The Planets
(I think the track is Neptune)

The really cool thing about Holst's The Planets is that it is a mini mood library all by itself with each of the 7 movements titled with the name of a planet having a completely different emotional content.  Nearly all of the major moods were represented so it became a standby goto album if I didn't already have another piece of music in mind.  A good number of my poems were composed with one or another track from this album playing on a loop.

I've since lost the records I'd kept on which music conjured which mood and which had taken ownership of which story and haven't got around to recreating it.  The memories of this valuable tool were triggered by listening to some of the classical pieces on the Super Mind Music YouTube channel.

I had gravitated to classical, jazz and piano to accompany my writing as I'd learned that, at least for me, it was important that the music I listened to was instrumental or foreign language (as in Operas or the Chorale in the 4rth movement of Beethoven's 9th) as any use of words that I recognized yanked me out of the dream state and out of the story and even out of my own thoughts as tho my own thoughts were being overwritten by someone else's.  Apparently tho when it is a language I can't understand the voices are just another musical instrument.

 Several more of my one time Write By library of music are represented in this collection. Among them are:  Vivaldi's Four Seasons, several more Beethoven pieces (but sadly not my most favorite music ever, his 9th symphony), several Mozart, and some Bach, Chopin, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky.

But that's not even half of what's in this library. There are many other music genres represented from acoustic, trance, ambient, electronic, contemporary, and jazz.  Several pieces were composed for this project.

All of the positive or neutral moods are represented: contentment, peace, acceptance, trust, ecstasy, bliss, joy, euphoria, calm, energized, alert, open, love, compassion...  If I need to conjure any of the negative moods for a poem or scene, I'll have to look elsewhere.  But then again, I probably don't need the help with fear, anxiety, anger, bitterness, resentment, irritation, doubt, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief etc. as I'm well practiced in all of them.