Page 55 of Crescendo

It got her to relax a little, a small smile playing on her lips. “We got into fights with bandmates because she’d keep stealing the show as the drummer.”

“That, I believe.”

She laughed, and she settled into the stool, plucking a few strings on the guitar. “You know what makes rock, rock?”

“Vocals, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”

“That’s such a you answer. Outside the bloody instruments. It’s the groove. The rhythm. The energy. Lemme give you a bassline and you can do some classical shit on top of it. If you’re worth your reputation, you’ll see what I’m saying.”

I guess I was worth my reputation, at least a little bit, because it was obvious right away. I wasn’t one-dimensional—it wasn’t like I hadn’t used every instrument under the sun in compositions, wasn’t like I hadn’t layered heavy rock influences into songs before. I scored a cyberpunk-adjacent action movie once and got so into synths in the process that I’d started crafting my own sequences in the crunchiest plugins, and I’d especially used big, punchy rhythm sections in scores when I’d been on a stint of video game soundtracks, back when a franchise I’d scored for had a run of wildly successful video game spinoffs.

But it was never like this—always surrounded by geniuses and people in suits, with professional time pressures and high-quality equipment and sampled instruments. Jamming out with someone I barely knew—and didn’t actually get along very well with—in a tiny room scattered with random pieces, not trying to accomplish anything but just seeing what happened—that was rock and roll.

Helped that Hannah transformed from Eliza’s reverb track to a human being when she played the bass, some character shining through. Simple chord progressions on the keys suddenly felt like it wassomethingwhen it was on top of a punchy, groovy bassline, and when I got into it enough to flourish and add some character, some ornamentation, I feltlike a punky teenager in a garage band with thatus against the worldfeeling.

Jamming out in secret, sneakily seeing a hot girl for mind-blowing sex, new beginnings in the big city. I mean, what could get more rock and roll than that?

“You’re not terrible,” Hannah laughed once we finished a few rounds of music, grabbing her bag and fishing out her laptop.

“I can see why you’re coming onto me so strongly, but I’m afraid I’m not interested.”

“Fuck off,” she said cheerfully as she opened the laptop. “I got my program here. I wanna show you how I’m trying to get that sense of groove in a kinda… classical, symphonic context.”

“FL Studio?” I said as she launched her DAW. “There’s a choice.”

“I did the production for our band and all that crap, and I’m just used to it. Don’t feel like grabbing a new one and having to learn it just ‘cause FL Studio isn’t posh enough.”

“Hey, I made my resolution that I wanted to try something new. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

We went over the composition piece she was working on while she showed me what she was talking about—the pared-back musicality, focusing on a strong, memorable chord progression, and the lower range focusing on groove over harmony. I found myself pitching in a little—guiding her to the gaps she’d left in the composition by focusing on simplicity and how she could use them to supplement the contemporary flow, even if we butted heads with me trying to figure out how FL Studio worked differently from Logic Pro. We opened up as Hannah thawed out a little, and we took a break popping out to an out-of-the-way pub far from the stomping grounds of the other Crescendo students, a place she said whereLondon actually has some decent beersand got me to have a stout withher that, after I got past the first few sips that felt like I was choking on smoke, settled into tasting like being wrapped in a blanket in front of a warm fire in a log cabin. She told band stories and talked shit about old bandmates, listened while I told my stories and talked shit about movie directors and symphony conductors, and when we got back to the practice room, she had an expectant look my way.

“So?” she said. “It’s your turn now, bigshot. You wanna show me what you’ve got, or what?”

“Aw.” I put my hands on my hips. “You’re invested now in seeing me succeed and you want to help out. Aren’t you a sweetheart?”

“Fuck off with that. And don’t go getting used to me helping out.”

“Just figured I’d need some help to keep up with your idol?”

She looked away. “It’s more complex than all that. You wouldn’t get it anyway.”

More of this dynamic Hannah and Eliza had that I couldn’t figure out. I guess it wasn’t that important. I was just nosy, but I could get nosy another day. “Well, let’s… let’s start with the cello. I think I’ve got something in mind. Give me one of your late-Beatles chord progressions and I’m going to go rockstar on this cello.”

She rolled her eyes with a laugh. “You’re so fucking corny,” she said, but she dropped onto the piano bench and got to it, and I went rockstar on the cello.

Which turned out to be a little bit of a mistake, because playing cello now just made me think of Ella. Although—playing something from the heart inspired by the incredibly hot girl your body was yearning for right that moment, that was rock and roll. Andthatwas new territory for me.

And somehow, it kind of worked—I settled in with the cello almost like Hannah’s bass guitar, channeling a groove that didn’t feel like anything I’d done before in an electric way, and I was riding high on the adrenaline when I got a call I wasn’t expecting. I saw my phone lighting up with a call, and I would have ignored it if I weren’t already wrapping up a melodic segment, so I rounded it out and set down the bow to pick it up and stopped at the sight.

A video call from Natália. Her face on the screen didn’t look cheerful.

“The woman I handed off the score I was working to,” I explained to Hannah as I picked up the phone. “The director’s fickle, so if she’s calling on a Sunday, I should make sure she’s not sprawled on a couch half-drunk on cheap scotch considering throwing herself off a balcony with a cello and making it look like an accident.”

“That’s really bloody specific.”

“I know.” I answered the phone, standing up, starting for the door. “Natália, darling, love. What’s wrong?”

Natália, a five-foot Brazilian woman with dark hair that fell straight down the very short distance to her waist, was squidged up in the corner of Melinda’s couch. I’d told Melinda to take care of her as she would of me, and I guess she was being a good friend and carrying through, because Natália’s big dark eyes looked like she’d been crying lately and she definitely had a fancy drink on the table next to her that I could only imagine was helping.

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