Ambition

This is what I'm currently learning to play. Look at all those notes! It's the main piece of music in The Piano, the Jane Campion film (The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Michael Nyman). I absolutely love it. So far I can play the first bar, very slowly. But it's an amazing feeling even to play a piece of music extremely slowly - to recognise the tune and the beauty of the notes together.

In the last few years I've become more sensitised to visual beauty. Colour combinations or patterns can transfix me and there's a depth to the perception I didn't have before. And I think the same is happening audibly now as well. Two notes played together, in a sequence with other notes are breathtakingly beautiful. I think I have mild synaesthesia.

It's a bit like those 3D optical illusions or stereo magic eye pictures that were all the rage a few years ago, where you had to stare cross-eyed at a flat series of lines and suddenly the bottom would fall out of it and a 3D shape would emerge.