The neighbours are coming

They are coming to Hive indeed today. :))

The cat, Luna, with her beautiful blue eyes, is also a part of the story; however, when this little "accident" happened a few days ago, I immediately remembered one initiative we had here at the Q Inspired by music community. It was called "From the neighbour's point of view!".

The purpose of that prompt was to share our experiences with the music or noise in general coming from our neighbours, how we react, and whether we like it, what kind of music you hear from the other side of the wall, etc. You could write about it from your point of view - as a neighbour.

However, it was also an invitation for musicians! If you are the one who makes the music while practising your musical instrument or playing just for pleasure, how do your neighbours react to that? Do they complain, or are they happy with having a free concert and free rehearsals with many errors, repetitions and all?

In that post I wrote several questions that could serve as a guideline, as an inspiration, as an idea of what to highlight in your post... Maybe you were not at Hive at that time, and you haven't seen that initiative. In that case, feel free to check out the end of the post, ie the questions and if you find them interesting, or have a story to share about this topic, I will gladly read about your "musical troubles". 😋

These are two drawings from that post, about my neighbours and me. In that moment, it was more just a joke that they would be happy if the pianist moved out... In the end, this became true. For the relief of my neighbours!! 😂

Back to the cat 🐈 and my little story from two days ago. I went to the apartment of a musician friend to practice as we are preparing a concert together. She plays the mandolin, which is not a very loud musical instrument, so she has never had problems with her neighbours while practising. Luna, her cat, is also used to her music and usually sleeps while there is music. But when we were taking a cup of coffee, she was asking for attention and jumped onto my lap, then asked to be petted, then walked between my friend and me a few times.

She was full of energy - you see from the photos it was not easy to take a photo of her! All blurred. 😂

Then we started with the work: studying the pieces by parts, in slow tempo, then polishing several passages, adjusting the coordination between the two, learning not just our own parts but also the pieces as a whole, in duet. There is a lot of work to get used to the other musician if you want it to be perfect. For all that time, Luna was fine with our music! She calmed down and went to sleep. 😁

We need to record two videos in a few days... I calculate it would take us the whole afternoon to record the two pieces successfully (La Paloma variations by Tsygankov and one Tarantella). Just to have an idea if we made any progress in the previous almost two hours of studying together, we wanted to record an audio of Taranetella, to check the tempo, the balance between the piano and mandolin and see what we have to improve. I pressed the "record audio" button and we started...

Ding-dong - we heard the doorbell and stopped. Los vecinos vienen 😱 (the neighbours are coming) said my friend hahahaha. It was the next-door neighbour, an elderly lady (ok, not so old but not so young either) claiming silence for her siesta!

Oops...

...

My friend apologised and let the neighbour know we need to practice for another 15 minutes (at least 😅). And that is what we did, we played much, much softer in those next 15 minutes, to respect the neighbour, but still work a bit more on Tarantella. At least we made some compromise so everyone was "happy". (The neighbour lady will get a bar of chocolate as well 😉 )

What would you do if you were this neighbour?

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