By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
From October 22, 2011
This post contains my take on the importance of getting beyond the everyday musical habits of popular culture for writing. It’s also an introduction for many to Q2 Music, the online-streaming contemporary classical service of NPR affiliate WQXR in New York. You can read the entire post at JaneFriedman.com
Pop music is the worst thing that could happen to your writing. It’s for dates and bad wedding receptions. Turn it off at once.
Pop is designed to structure your ideas. Stereo hearts in the dark with pumped up kicks. And it works far too well for a writer’s good. As Noel Coward told us, it’s extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
Contemporary classical music, the genius of today’s living composers, will set you free.
Shake out some of the sand that’s in your hair when you come in off the dunes of life. Mess with your best nitties. Line up your finest gritties. You know what we’re doing, don’t you? Well, of course you do. Get them in the right order and others can read what you were thinking. Even feel what you were feeling. These are words. And this is writing. It’s what we do.
But why not engage an even higher alchemy?
Living composers, gorgeous and serious creatures with racing-quick wits—not old dead white guys in breeches—arrive dusted in the same nuggets of concept and emotion we writers wear. Same world as ours, after all. But they super-heat what sticks to them into a new substance.
High-silica content: composers’ material moves through time. And this is your hours’ glass.
Contemporary classical music wraps your efforts to fuse thought and emotion in a see-through composite. Clear aesthetic possibility.
As your words rush through that glassy focused space–space they create with their music–you may or may not share a single concept with your composer. Doesn’t matter. The transparency of her or his medium opens windows in your work, shifting your sands with new breezes of sonic intelligence.
Read the full post here at JaneFriedman.com
About Porter Anderson
Porter Anderson, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fellow with the National Critics Institute and has done special readings in the psychology of the arts at the University of Bath, UK. As a journalist, he has worked with three networks of CNN (CNN USA, CNN International, CNN.com) and was on the lead development team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, D Magazine, Sarasota Herald-Tribune and other outlets. He writes the weekly (Thursdays) WRITING ON THE ETHER column at JaneFriedman.com. Anderson also is a regular contributor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Digital Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Publishing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Programme, and served as Executive Producer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copenhagen. He is based in Tampa and his primary medium is Twitter. Follow him @Porter_Anderson
