I sat down to work in the library and found myself craving darkly romantic piano music. I know I’m in a library and they probably have mountains of CDs but I decided I should focus.

(Tangent: Whenever my mother used to force me to go to the library to study, I would evade/procrastinate by browsing CDs and ripping whatever looked cool to my laptop. Part of the reason my music library is now so large and varied.)

So I put on the next best thing I could find that was already on my computer, Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique. 

Then, as I’m reading the chapter in my Music Lit book about sonority and orchestration, along comes “Hector Berlioz is credited with increasing the size of the orchestra even more, as well as being one of the first composer to provide performers with much more detailed performance instructions. Berlioz also wrote what is considered to be the first text on orchestration to appear.”

In the same afternoon as I decided to sit down and listen to Symphonie Fantastique the whole way through for the first time in two years, Hector popped up in my homework. Cool.