Drop the Needle

How a College Turntable and a French Composer’s Memoirs Changed Everything

23 March 2026 ~ 3 min read

My music history teacher in college was also my trumpet teacher. He’d wheel a cart into the classroom—an old turntable, two speakers, and a stack of records—and play us the canon. Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque. For tests, he’d play drop the needle: he’d set the needle down at a random spot on a record and we had to identify the composer, the period, and ideally the piece. It was brutal and wonderful, and it taught me to listen the way a detective reads a crime scene—every detail matters, every texture is a clue.

The first semester covered everything up to the Baroque. As a trumpet player, it only got interesting when we reached Bach. But the second semester—that’s when the cart rolled in with Hector Berlioz, and something caught fire in me that hasn’t gone out.

What hit me was the program. Berlioz didn’t just write music—he wrote a story and then composed the soundtrack. The Symphonie Fantastique has a written narrative: a young artist, consumed by hopeless love, poisons himself with opium and hallucinates five scenes—dreams, a ball, a pastoral landscape, his own execution, a witches’ sabbath. And you can hear it. You can literally hear the story in the music. The idée fixe—the melody representing his beloved—appears in every movement, tender at first, then fragmented, then grotesquely twisted into a mocking dance. No composer had done anything like that before. He invented a form and poured his actual life into it.

Years later, at USC, I discovered his Memoirs. That’s when the composer became a character. Berlioz wrote about his life the way he wrote music—at full volume, with no restraint, every emotion amplified to orchestral scale. His account of seeing Harriet Smithson play Juliet for the first time reads like a man being struck by lightning and then trying to conduct the thunder. His descriptions of the Paris Conservatoire, the political battles, the obsessive letter-writing campaigns, the Prix de Rome competition—all of it pulsed with a personality so vivid that he practically wrote himself into fiction before I ever got the chance.

What makes Berlioz a great character isn’t just the genius. It’s the excess. He was too much of everything—too passionate, too loud, too convinced of his own destiny, too willing to humiliate himself in public for love. He proposed to a woman who didn’t know he existed. He wrote a symphony about his obsession with her and performed it in front of all of Paris. He was a rock star, a stalker, a revolutionary, and a hopeless romantic, sometimes in the same afternoon. You don’t have to invent drama for a character like that. You just have to keep up with him.

Berlioz appears in The Year of Shadows as a young man on the edge of everything—genius, madness, heartbreak, revolution. He appears in the Cosmic Janitor Trilogy by reference and reputation, because a character that large casts a shadow even when he’s offstage. Both times, I’m writing the same person I first heard on that turntable in my music history classroom: a composer who believed music could tell stories, and then proved it.

I’m still listening to the record he put on.

~ Liam