What influences me as a creative person?

As a music composition major, the romantic music era is by far the one I look to the most when I'm writing music (years 1825-1900). I like the romantic era because of the emotion and virtuosity of the music, the hardest music ever written was from this time period.

The first example I would like to use is my favorite composer ever, Frederic Chopin. This is one of his well known preludes from his book of 24 preludes, This is Prelude #4 in E minor.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef-4Bv5Ng0w
In this song Chopin uses lots of tension and release. In every chord he pulls you to the next by a musical term called suspension, which just means that a note from a chord is play before the actual chord is played making a listener anticipate the next chord. Then the release is the actual next chord.

The second example of romantic composers is Schumann's Symphony #4 in D Minor.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6QUvSovobI
At this time in history symphonies were at there largest.. Composers calling for more, and more instrumentalist. The reason why I like this song so much is this is the epitome of romantic music, loud, the style changes dramatically, and its purely dramatic.

The third example I would like to give is the romantic "god", Brahms. This is his Violin Concerto, just the first movement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlIEbBcXT_U
The reason why I want to point out that this is just the first movement of the piece is because how long the movement is. Brahms movements where longer than most composers whole Symphony's. If you don't know symphonies/concertos have around five movements. This movement is almost 25 minutes long.

Other things that composer of this era liked to use was Text/Subtext, obviously there are no words but composers would write music that had to do with things of there time, like politics or news. Composers would make fun of certain people with there music. For example I know a composer that wrote a song that was called "Fuck Bush", Which the song was to sound silly and to make fun of him.