Dear Music Diary, I've already reached the point in this string quartet piece I'm writing where I wanted to transition out of the lugubrious intro and into something peppier. I blocked in this sort of Euro-country dance thing but it wasn't working in 4/4 time and it was way too slow. I counted the beats to make it work--could something possibly be in 23/8 time? 23 is a prime #, I'm already feeling the math in this piece. (Googled and sure enough Genesis worked in 23/8, for the "chase sequence" in "Robbery, Assault & Battery"--Tony Banks called the rhythm "insane.") So I went with it, added another bar with 23 beats where the pizzicato strings come in, gradually increased the tempo from 120 bpm to 200, and used a slow volume fade to diminish the bass and cello parts still grinding away in 4/4. Now I'm ready to embellish on that "dance."

Final version here.

- tom moody 2-21-2006 8:45 pm

Your string quartet piece makes me think of a horror movie score done by Phillip Glass ... cool!
- Thor Johnson (guest) 2-21-2006 9:19 pm


Thanks. Glass did a good horror soundtrack, for Candyman--very scary. Mostly piano, as I recall.
- tom moody 2-22-2006 1:45 am





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.