Tuesday, 29 January 2013

The Girl Downstairs

The Girl Downstairs is somewhat jaunty 3/4 time waltz piano piece I was inspired to compose after hearing a short story.


A while back I came across the great website called LibriVox http://librivox.org/ which provide free downloadable audio-books of various public domain works.  These are read by volunteers who a great job and I thank them all for the time they put into it.  I encourage you to go and take a look at their catalogue   I've been listening to a lot of short stories lately.  They are to go to bed to and suit my short attention span!  One of the stories I participially enjoyed was 'The Man Upstairs' by P. G. Wodehouse which can be listened to here; http://librivox.org/selected-short-stories-by-p-g-wodehouse/
The story concerns a young woman who writes songs on her piano.  She is disrupted by a knocking on the ceiling from the man upstairs who is a struggling painter.  I won't go into what happens in the story, I suggest you listen to it yourself, but when I thought about the woman trying to write a waltz I was inspired to experiment with a 3/4 style on the piano.  The piece is a mix of sharp stabbed chords with gentle piano sections in between.  I felt like these highlighted the mixed feelings the woman in the story experiences throughout.

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