A colleague inquires:
Do you listen to music when you write? Or do you
write in silence?
I used to write with music on–I wrote a good-sized chunk of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy while listening to Aaron Copland’s Letter from Home repeatedly–but in recent years I’ve found that I prefer to write my first drafts in silence. Once I have a draft on paper, though, I’m often put on background music while I edit. Not surprisingly, I tend to listen to Louis Armstrong when working on Hotter Than That, and for the last couple of weeks I’ve also been listening to Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat quite a bit.
Oddly enough–or not–I discovered a long time ago that I couldn’t listen to Arturo Toscanini while I was writing. His recordings never fail to force themselves to the front of my consciousness. No other music has that effect, though.