Musical effects

Gods, but I love classical music.  I’m listening to Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 on my iPod while at work, and just the first forty seconds are enough to send chills down my back.  So clear, distant, beautiful, like a winter’s landscape with the sun just about to rise.  Then, at around two minutes, the chills return as the sun bursts into the sky with the brass chorus…

Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 is a rich blue sky filled with towering cumulonimbus clouds – actually, it manages to remind me simultaneously of the Texas Hill Country and a Scandinavian grassland landscape, no mean feat.  But whether Texas or Finland, there is a crisp, fresh breeze embodied in those notes that makes me breathe deeply just to think of it.  That might have something to do with making it my favorite piece of music, given that “blue skies, white clouds, mountains in the distance and breeze rustling the leaves in the trees” pretty much sums up my notion of heaven. 

When I want a sensation pleasantly similar to dropping a bath bomb into my brain, I pop on Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, which fizzes nicely through the crevices. 

For music that never fails to make me tap or fidget some part of my body in time with the music, Tchaikovsky’s “Capricchio Italien” fits the bill.

And on and on goes the list…  Thank you to both my parents for being so kind as to raise my brother and me on classical music!