Moods musingsMusical TEXT Corinne Schneider I’d closed the fallboard of my piano once and for all, months ago: what the black and white keys had been emitting sounded like a grayish blur—the color of the lead in my pencils and the eraser marks covering the staves. Thinking about the movement of the music, its accelerations, shifts and silences, its leaps and surges, while being restricted to the keyboard, reduced to the space of some 88 keys, had grown meaningless, even though for so many years all my works had come from this limited status quo. Indeed, stasis had been a requisite for the sounds I set in motion to find expression and flourish. Sitting at my desk, I traveled to lands that you won’t find on any maps. From these imaginary worlds without borders I’d bring back an experience that became real, thanks to the performers who then brought them to life. But the music I had been carrying within me these past weeks seemed to be of a different nature; it was even more foreign to me, and the awareness of having to turn this ideal into actual sounds crushed all hope of seeing it emerge and of setting it free. Even my usual passion for work, which nothing could disturb, no longer functioned, because the colossal images of the oeuvre I was supposed to be composing dissolved into a total mental blank. I was engulfed in chaos, and at the same time exhausted by these imaginary voyages. I needed to travel for real. I had to take a train, a boat, a plane. It didn’t matter where; all I cared about was the duration, provided it was long. So the airplane window became my study. From here, blue is never entirely the same: it is in sync with the movement of the harmonic spectrums and the architecture of sound that I have in my head. Suddenly, up there, I was able to reflect. 30