Juxtaposition

I came back from Rio to my hometown hoping that nine hundred meters over sea level would mitigate the heat, but I found it very stuffy and gray-skied. Moments later, it shouted ICE STORM! and in full Brazilian summer we had hail falling down from the skies. My grandmother said she had seen that happen some other times, but when the sun began to shed its weird white light through the storm I knew I was before something that was there to teach me.

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Often when I compose, I recycle old tunes from my extended library of unused roleplaying game tracks and such. When I bring those pieces with recycled parts to fellow composers, they tend to think of the recycled parts as variations or natural continuations of the original material. The composer might know the themes were composed at different times and didn't have a relationship to each other, but simple juxtaposition is enough to convince people they were made that way.

Is it?

When you are talking about contemporary classical music, it is true that anything goes and there are actual techniques of digression. I even remember once submitting a videogame music demo reel with crossfaded tracks to a friend and his compliments about 'the way the piano came in the song' (the piano - and a completely different instrumentation, functional harmony, anything you can think of - everything was from a totally different tune).

I usually don't do 'experimental', 'concept', 'contemporary' classical music per se - what I do is mix techniques I find useful to compliment my personal style. So my themes are supposed to be linked in a logical way, that's what I mean from the beginning - and I found out that my process of juxtaposition is a kind of composition itself.

Creating a relation between two previously unrelated tunes is a form of composition. First, you normally won't take any tune to correspond - having the right idea first is essential to the whole process and comprises half of the composition process. The other half is the way one inserts the new part on the work. Think mashups, pout-pourris. People look for structural similarities which are many times out of immediate sensory reach.

I tend to put all the blame from these complex processes on my subconscious composer.

The conclusion to this is that I strongly believe Teresópolis had this hail storm up its sleeve for a long time and, seeing itself in a composer's block, decided it was time to use it regardless of we being in Summer and all. Counterculture showed up in ternary form (ABA) with the glorious return of the sun still mid-storm. We had two or three really loud thunders, and one of the thunderbolts hit a building two blocks away from where I was. Good thing we don't have any active volcanoes.