Writing and music

By the way, this book could perhaps be described as the result of my own personal quest. For many years now, I have built my research and writing on a very simple statement of purpose—which I repeat, almost as a mantra, on every possible occasion, in print or public lectures: Music is a source of enchantment and a catalyst in human life , and my... See more

the silence of my bedroom where the only way to escape the invisible yellow caution-tape around my small-town life was on spiral leaf graph-paper.

“A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

People naturally remember musical language, and I would encourage writers to inject their prose with a bit of music. When you’re writing, think about repetition and variety. Crescendos and rests. Pace and punctuation. Read your work out loud, and feel the rhythm of the words in your voice.

The goal of this series is not to present music as disposable background noise to be mostly ignored or tuned out , but the complete opposite — the goal is to present music that can engulf the listener, carefully selected works that can be fully appreciated (perhaps even enhanced) despite sometimes only having peripheral attention paid to them.