Poem Without Words

After I deleted the first paragraph of this post for the second time, I scrolled down through my following feed. Oh, Things Are Not All Black And White - I spotted one part of the title of whywhy's post.

En serio?

You want to tell me that my whole world, my keys - my things - are not all black and white!?

Maybe you are right, but I think someone has to invent some colourful piano keys then; each note would receive a different coloured key or at least a shade of a colour. Probably I would need some hours or hopefully just minutes to get used to that keyboard as it is not anymore my eyes that guide me there. Sometimes most of the time I don't need to watch with full attention what my fingers do and where they have to go on the keyboard as the pieces I play in my Sunday morning gigs are already settled down in my muscle memory.

That is a perfect situation, right? I could just stay with those songs I know well and avoid any additional effort of learning new compositions. It would be perfect. But I do like to learn new stuff and the guests of the hotel are so helpful with the ideas. I mean it, seriously.

Last week a couple came close and a little conversation was born between us. The lady let me know her intentions to learn to play the piano and mentioned one piece - Poem Without Words by Anne Clark. Thanks to that little chitchat I searched for the scores for that piece and learned it.

Playing and having conversations on my gigs is great, and you all know that I also have a little friend there who talks to me through books placed on the shelves. {If you don't know who I am talking about and you are interested in finding it out, I can reveal his identity in the comment section}

So, today I was reading a page of a book, The Lost Notebook of a Traveller (don't try to read from the photos, somehow it wouldn't match what I'm writing here...).

The thing is that the main character from that book had to travel for his mission long distances. As they didn't have another means of transportation, those journeys required a lot of time spent in carriages. That way he got plenty of possibilities to experience the life of the places he got in touch with: smelling the aroma of cinnamon or chestnuts, the petrichor after the rain, flowers in bloom, feeling the breeze in summer evenings and cold during the winter nights. But that's not all that he was doing. Long story short, in one of his travels he was reading a book about the wilderness. Zebras... - he was reading - Zebras got black and white stripes on their bodies to confuse the predators.

I imagined those stripes and my fingers reacted instinctively - I was there to play the piano and not to read or invent stories. I was also there to receive some new suggestions from other people and maybe to perform this quite minimalistic piece, Poem Without Words (by Anne Clark). Freshly learned last week!