Over the last four days I worked on two demo pieces for a film I am being considered for. (I am not sure if I can say the name of it, so I won’t.)

These demo pieces do not represent underscore but source pieces written by the main character, who is described in the script as a composer of genius.

No pressure, right?

The first piece was, according to the script, to be written in a Goth Rock genre. It had to be fast, intense, head banging stuff that sounded like it had been written by a genius.

So I thought, Bartok with distorted guitars! Party time!

But I was advised to not stray too far from the confines of the Goth Rock genre. (Which makes complete sense. My original intentions would have surely resulted in music a bit too …different, for a movie.)

I thought it would be a walk in the park, but it turned into a bigger challenge than I expected.

You see, even though I started out playing classical like most kids do, it was heavy metal and hard rock that got me practicing up to 10 hours a day during my teenage years.

But that was during the eighties and, since I don’t play much anymore and didn’t know the first thing about Goth Rock, I had to do some catching up and get aquatinted with the the mainstream Goth bands.

On Monday, after a half day of listening I had the gist of it down and was ready to go.

Then I had to come up with a musical concept that would make the style seem like a genius composed it without resorting to dissonant harmonies, odd time signatures or weird instruments.

My solution was to make the music flashy and virtuosic and more harmonically active, to write it in a driving 6/8 rhythm rather than the ubiquitous 4/4, to give it some smart-sounding counterpoint and an epic, orchestral feel with only guitars, bass and drums. (And a little bit of piano.)

And here’s the result!

Yeah, that was fun. I emailed it to the writer/producer and he was pretty jazzed up about it. (Or should I say “Gothed up”?)

The second piece was a bit easier for me to write. In the script there is an opera and this demo piece would be the climactic scene, an execution, also written by the genius composer of the story. Instruction was to blend the dark elements of Goth with a romantic-period lyricism.

So I wrote an epic, heroic march to the scaffold.

It’s big.

I delivered both pieces to the producers and director yesterday. Wish me luck!