Unlikely influences (electro/house/techno)

My newest piece for 2 pianos is coming along nicely. Deadline for score and parts is tomorrow, monday 31st, but I have a chance to polish it until the end of november (wich I'll need to do, no doubt).

This weekend I cancelled all my social plans, wich I had been looking forward to to say the least, in order to meet the deadline.

This blog post would probably not exist if it werent for my dear 1-floor-down neighbours. Like clockwork, they started playing their club/house/electro wich I normally dont mind, except when Im trying to sleep or, like in this instance, compose.

"Well its saturday night and they want to have some fun" I thought, so I decided to suck it up, put on headphones and listened to Rachmaninov, who kindly helped me through this ordeal.



I struggled with a section in my piece that just would not obey my wishes or orders. After about 2 hours of trying to squeeze a certain motif in, I realised that my neighbours bass drum had somehow sneaked its way through Rach's fingers, mixing into the music and into my ears and had probably been there for awhile. Rather than getting annoyed by that I decided to use it.

You know how those bass drum beats go right? Steady tempo crothcets (quarter notes) on 120 beats per min. approx. ... Very "never-changing".

That gave me the idea for a bass note pedal of C2 (2 octave below middle C) in 3/4 and I threw away the chord progression motif I was trying to work into the music.

And now it works so much better. Absolutely not a very advanced bass line composition but it gave the harmony the boost it needed to drive the section onwards to the ending (the diamond notehead represents a tambourine beat).

So, sometimes ... less is more ...

Thank you noisy neighbour.