On Study Music

I lived in an apartment for 7 years. During that time, I listened to music on headphones, from my computer or from a small boombox. Over time, I slowly stopped listening to music unless I was driving and could sing along with it. Likewise, as the time spent listening to music declined, my time spent listening to NPR increased. Although I still like listening to NPR (after all, Chapter a Day and the random experts on trees, bugs and cats are very interesting), I now live in a house and most of the time, I'm the only one at home. Last week, my husband announced that he finally bought a record player. I came home and found a new record player, tuner and two HUGE speakers set up in the dining room. It took a week to get all of the right equipment in the proper place, but now I am able to listen to music while working on Geraldine. It makes the repetitive tasks of copy and paste/ open and save/ download new program/ rename file as X much more exciting.

But records? Who listens to records? I do. Digital music can't compare to the sound of vinyl. There is nothing like blasting Beethoven's 5th Symphony with big speakers and a record player. Nothing. And if musicians don't want to have copies of their music on vinyl, I probably don't want to listen to their music anyways.

I listened to 7 of Beethoven's 9 symphonies today while working on Geraldine. It motivated me to strive towards greatness. Yes, maybe only 5 people other than those who are on my dissertation committee will ever read Geraldine and two of those people will probably be my relatives, but Geraldine will be a masterpiece. Others may not realize it in my lifetime, but generations of linguists to come after me will cite me and wonder just how exactly one does properly pronounce my last name. Some will say of me, "Oh, that Kelsie. She was interesting, alright... This one time I heard her lecturing at University of the Something in Somewhere and she started acting out morphology with random props that came out of nowhere. Everyone in the lecture hall was drooling with anticipatation for what she would say and do next. Man, students beat each other up to be in her class, and if they couldn't wiggle their eyebrows, she kicked them out!"

Unlike the famous composers of prior centuries, I do not have addictions. I'm not an alcoholic, I'm not despressed, and (although some people might disgree with this last one) I'm not a maniac. I hope I won't die alone like them and have to be buried in a pauper's grave, but I know that I will continue to have my fair share of suffering. My work will be ridiculed and rejected. I will receive nasty hate mail. I will likely have periods of unemployment because people will not appreciate my intellectual genious, and there will always be someone who is smarter, more cutting edge, better looking and better educated than me... but no one will be able to produce the work that I will with Geraldine.

Thus I am convinced that if I continue to listen to Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Mahler and the likes, I too will achieve something great. And when some ivory tower jerk rejects my work for the eleventybillionth time, I will still have the classical composers on my side, cheering me on from beyond the grave, saying "Just one more measure!" "One more treble clef!" "One more symphony!" And I will sit in the dark, with a glass of wine, conducting away with inspired thoughts brewing in my worn out, weary but still knowledge thirsty mind, toasting to the greats and those brilliant people that invented records and record players with each sip.