Part of the pleasure of Venice is the infinite angles of the streets to each other, being unable to walk in a straight line from one place to another, getting deliciously lost in the maze of pathways and small plazas (definitely not squares). Wherever you're going, whichever pathway you choose will yield who knows what interesting surprises on the way -- and the mystery of what lay along the other path. And all choices yield the sounds of church bells, and water.
Too early one morning, two weeks after our 2011 trip to Venice, I found myself composing in my sleep, a rare event for me. I saw the entire first page of a new solo piano piece along with its title, Venetian Mazes. I got up, wrote it down, and kept it intact as the first page of the finished piece. The operative word for me was Mazes, the pleasure of getting lost, winding, choosing directions blindly, ending up someplace totally unexpected, or perhaps back where we started, as in Venice, City of Water, City of Canals, City of a Thousand Angles.