Need Help Concentrating? OR Nature Sounds

Whenever I hear an Elvis Costello song, I think of my college roommate, who studied and wrote to My Aim Is True, among other Costello albums. A brilliant student, she'd blast music while she did her homework, turning it down with an embarrassed smile whenever someone entered the room. (She was considerate as well as brilliant.)

Although I also love music, I rarely listened to it when studying: I can't really play "background" music while writing or studying, since it usually claims my attention over whatever I'm working on. But sometimes, particularly as a student, I'd wish for a little white noise to tune out distractions: the students chatting next to me at the library, the sound of a neighbor's television through the walls.

Too bad I didn't know about the library's Sounds CDs back then. Today they're my secret weapon: I listen to them whenever I need to tune out the noise around me and concentrate. For example, as I write this, I'm listening to Thunderstorm, an atmospheric, 60-minute CD of, yes, a thunderstorm: rain pouring down punctuated by distant thunder. Do you prefer your rain without thunder? Check out Summer Rain, part of the Atmosphere Collection, which also includes Island Jungle, Waterfall and A Month in the Brazilian Rainforest, among others. But my favorite of all our sounds CDs is The Sea: waves crashing on a shore, distant seagulls, and the occasional, subdued foghorn.

The Sounds CDs are located between our Rock  and Television Music CDs. Just stop by the Readers' Services desk and we'll help you locate them.

What's your preference when writing or doing homework? Music, white noise, nature sounds, the sounds of silence or something else?

What's Elvis Costello Doing in the Ballet Section?

There's an Elvis Costello CD in the Ballet section (Il Sogno)
There's a Sting CD in the Lute section
(Songs from the Labyrinth)
There's a Yo-Yo Ma CD in the Jazz section (Hush)

What's the world coming to?!
Have the shelvers gone mad?!
Have the catalogers gone mad?!

Absolutely not! But more and more musicians, composers and songwriters are thinking--and writing and performing--outside of the box they're associated with. So you might not find every CD featuring your favorite artist in the same section.

For example, though you'll find most of Elvis Costello's CDs in the rock section, they aren't all there. To find one of them you'll have to stroll over to the Ballet section. That's right, the Ballet section! Although truth be told, longtime Costello fans shouldn't be surprised. The man has long been a chameleon. He has written songs with "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" songwriter Burt Bacharach for the CD Painted from Memory (it's in the Popular section); he has collaborated with the Brodsky Quartet, and a couple of those songs can be heard on Best of Brodsky Quartet: Featuring Björk & Elvis Costello; and in 2000, when an Italian dance troupe contacted him about composing music for an adaption of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he took them up on the offer. The result is Il Sogno, and in the liner notes he talks about writing different types of music to accompany different kinds of characters. (Of supernatural beings, he wrote: "I thought it only appropriate that they should be swinging fairies.") While some classical compositions by rockers have been savaged by critics, The New York Times called it "a rhapsodic piece full of shifting moods, with moments of eerie delicacy and of comic pomp."

Others who have experimented with non-rock musical forms are Paul McCartney, who co-wrote Liverpool Oratorio with Carl Davis; and Billy Joel, who wrote Fantasies & Delusions: Music for Solo Piano.

If you're ever unsure of where to find a CD, please don't hesitate to ask at the Readers' Services desk on the 3rd floor. We're more than happy to help.

Have you ever checked out any of these CDs, or any other genre-busting CDs? (I've been warned against Liverpool Oratorio.) Do you enjoy Elton John's forays into musicals and movie soundtracks?