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Family legend has it that when I was an infant and my father put Beethoven on the stereo for the first time, I crawled across the floor, curled up against the speaker, and fell asleep. I’ve always liked this story for a number of reasons, chief of which is that I appeared to love Beethoven before I knew he was a great composer. In fact, I loved his music before I knew much of anything at all.
I didn’t listen to Beethoven again until I was a senior in high school. I was a rock and roll guy as a teen. Then one day I found a collection of his 7th, 8th, and 9th symphonies stored in my mom’s record collection. I got curious and tried the 9th and found it very exciting, particularly the second movement. It had all the energy of rock and roll but with the depth and breadth of a good novel. I also liked the first movement of the 7th, though for some reason never listened to the rest of that symphony.
But one afternoon I was feeling a little blue and decided Beethoven was just the thing to put me right. The Seventh’s first movement is bright and celebratory and optimistic, so I put it on and let it do its work, which it did. The record player’s needle hit the groove between tracks and I sat on our couch in that contented stillness in which music and stories can leave you. The second movement began. It starts off very quietly, just the violas and cellos beating out a melody. It was a nice enough opening, but I was done with classical for the day, and I had a friend to meet, so I got up from the couch and went to the turntable.
That’s when the violins kicked in with a second melody. My hand was poised over the turntable’s arm, where it would remain for the next few minutes. I won’t bother trying to describe how beautiful that melody is. You might not like it at all. I can only say it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I loved music, but nothing had ever stopped me like that from its first note. It felt as good to be stopped by something as it did just to hear music that beautiful. I could have turned the record off, I had that power, but to do so would have been like making that baby sleep in his crib because that’s where babies belong.
I thought of Beethoven often during my freshman year in college. I got headaches frequently then, and I found nothing soothed those away like the Ode to Joy and a darkened dorm room. I also learned I wasn’t too keen on academia. So much debate, so much thinking, so much analysis. Stories and poems were pulled apart so their pieces could be examined and explained: This is what Shakespeare meant at the end of Hamlet; this is what Elliot is referring to in The Hollow Men; the snake in the garden is phallic.
The problem, I thought, was words. I loved them, they were my tool of choice, but they were also an invitation to the intellect and its ceaseless hunger for an explanation. It wasn’t enough to love a poem, you also had to know what it meant. Good luck telling me what Beethoven’s Seventh meant. Just shut up and listen. My dream was that somehow all of life could be like listening to Beethoven, just shutting up and listening, no argument, no debate, no understanding, no thinking, just listening to something beautiful enough to stop you.
I didn’t really understand writing until I started composing some music of my own. To compose you listen, first to what’s in your mind, and then what you’re playing on the keyboard. Something loosened up in me then, and I started listening more when I wrote my stories. I stopped thinking so much, stopped plotting, stopped trying to write well. Instead, I sat at the desk, waiting and listening, waiting and listening until I hear an idea with its own lovely sound–and like that something in me stops and stands up and pays attention then away I go.
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William Kenower is the author of Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt, Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence, Write Within Yourself: An Author’s Companion, and the Editor-in-Chief of Author magazine. In addition to his books, he’s been published in The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, Edible Seattle, Parent Map, and has been a featured blogger for the Huffington Post.
