I, too, often imagine myself as a character in a movie of the life around me, and I’m sure many millions of other people do as well.

What’s really intriguing about doing that is trying to find the right soundtrack for what it is your movie self is experiencing. I often find that random music playing somewhere I’m shopping, or music overheard from a nearby house while I’m doing yard work, makes all kinds of other mental connections come alive that I would never have come up with using the selections in my own mental library.

To this day I still associate pulling out dead palm leaves with the sound of someone practicing the clarinet, slowly and laboriously, because that’s what I heard one day while on vegetation duty. I suppose if I had to write the score to accompany such a scene in an actual movie, and resorted to a solo clarinet, the director might raise an eyebrow or two. But it works for me.

Good to hear from you.

Interesting you should mention Handel concerti grossi; the Op. 3 set has been one of my favorite work selections for years, and just today I found a recording of early Handel sacred cantatas to be quite conducive to getting on with things (though I can’t help but think, too, of Handel’s plagiaristic approach to his work, and hope it doesn’t rub off).

I’ve also found the Vaughan Williams string quintet and first of the two quartets to be useful for mental focus, and the same goes for the Op. 1 piano trios of Beethoven. I like your idea of it being a mental tonic rather than wallpaper; I don’t think I’m slighting the music by using it in this way; I’m conscious of its every move though I’m focusing on something else.