Sound, Stone, and Light

Spending a week in London as a classical musician is like walking through a living score, one composed over centuries, full of shifting harmonies, grand cadences, and quiet counterpoints. I arrived with no particular agenda beyond curiosity. I carried a notebook, my camera, and a few staff paper sheets, hoping the city would speak. And it did, through its skyline, galleries, and the spaces in between.

Walking into St. Paul’s Cathedral for the first time, I felt the same awe I do when hearing a well-voiced fugue. The layering of space, the sense of structure built from repetition and variation reminded me of Bach. Each column, each arch felt like a phrase; the dome, a soaring climax. London’s architectural contrasts: Baroque beside Brutalism, glass beside stone, echo how composers juxtapose themes across time and genre. A minimalist building along the Thames feels like a Satie Gymnopédie. Tower Bridge, with its gothic revival grandeur, is pure Mahler.

I started sketching motifs based on the rhythm of walking across cobblestones, the Doppler shift of double-decker buses, the bell chimes from nearby churches. Architecture, like music, is about space and how we move through it. I spent an afternoon at the Tate Modern, overwhelmed in the best way. Rothko’s color fields felt like extended chords, vibrating silently. Monet’s Water-Lilies at the National Gallery glowed with the subtlety of Debussy, light filtered through harmonic mist.

There’s a direct line, for me, between visual and musical art. Where a painter blends color, I layer tone. Where a photographer frames shadow and light, I think in conflict and resolution. Art galleries slow me down. They remind me to listen with my eyes and to compose with a sense of space, silence, and breath.

Photography has long been a companion to my music-making. In London, I found myself taking photos not of landmarks, but of textures: brick walls in Camden, puddles in Soho reflecting neon signs, the shadows cast by wrought iron railings at dusk. Each photograph became a visual chord, capturing not just an image, but a mood. I started thinking of them as études: studies in light, color, and time. Much like composing, photography forces me to frame a moment, to decide where the subject ends and the negative space begins. In both, what you leave out is as important as what you include.

By the end of the week, I had filled half a notebook with musical sketches and fragments of thought. I hadn't written a full piece, but that wasn’t the point. The city gave me rhythms, ideas, and sensations that will linger, slowly unfolding into music over time. London, in all its layered beauty and tension, reminded me that creativity isn’t always about producing. Sometimes it’s about absorbing...walking the line between listener and observer, composer and explorer.

As I boarded the plane home, I wasn’t sure what would come of those sketches. But I knew something had shifted. The city had spoken, and I was ready to listen more deeply: to sound, to stone, and to light.