Taken from the old site. Original post date: September 22, 2006
I’m not a travel-holic. I do like to settle in one location and get to know the community. But this summer afforded me an opportunity to tour many countries, and it was WILD!!!!
There’s something downright thrilling about taking a high-speed train ride through rolling hills of lush green grass with the reds and yellows of wild flowers here and there. Or to wake up in a new place and see the first tint of a sun’s rays casting over distant, majestic mountains on a cool morning.
Ideas about interpretation generally don’t come to me while I’m practicing my instrument. They come during the last 30 seconds you have to board a train that’s about to depart, or when a cute stranger sends you a smile from another part of the room.
Travelling is a little bit like a session of sight reading – that is, reading music you’ve never seen before. You take one piece of music you’d enjoy playing, and then another. But then you find you’re in the mood to try something of a different nature. You end up going through a large pile of music until you find something that utterly captures your attention. As you focus on it, you find yourself going on an adventure, one that fulfills all the needs you have at that moment. Pretty soon you get a strong desire to play it through over and over. That’s just like discovering a new city and wanting to go back because you love it so much.
That’s what happened to me when I first saw Rome with its labyrinth of intimate, cozy street corners, sidewalk vendors who spray paint truly amazing scenes on canvas, and incredible artifacts over 2000 years old. Now I’m living there…
