The sign above the entrance has no text, just five parallel horizontal lines. A vertical line crosses from the top line to the bottom; a thicker vertical to its right covers the same distance, and the horizontals reach it and stop. The entrance itself is unimposing and unimpressive, an unadorned wooden double door. It is tall enough for anypony to pass through — even Princess Celestia herself, should she desire — but this is common among Canterlot businesses, as she has developed a reputation of dropping in unannounced to seemingly random establishments over the centuries. The building, too, blends in well among the shops and restaurants lining the block, many of which are multi-story buildings of which the upper floors are living space for the owners. Beyond the double doors lie two sets of stairs, the one on the left going up and the one on the right going down. A trip up the left stairs leads eventually to a large, brightly lit room with a well-stocked bar on the right wall, a smattering of tables and chairs, and a stage at the far end. Microphone stands are distributed around the stage, and a grand piano sits in one corner. On any given night, the stage might be occupied by anything from a solo piano recital to a country band to a jazz jam session with audience members invited to join in. And the patrons are some of the most musically literate ponies in all of Equestria. A keen observer might spy, in the audience for a string trio, the drummer from the previous night’s heavy metal headliners in conversation with the principal oboist of the Fillydelphia Symphony Orchestra, or might realize that the violinist is going to share this stage with a piper next weekend — and this would not be an unusual week here. The downstairs area, separated from the space above by a shared kitchen and a heavily soundproofed floor/ceiling, is more of a club, dimly lit, with blacklights, strobes, and glowing decorations on the walls. Here, too, a bar lines the right wall, but the stage is smaller and set up to hold turntables, synthesizers and effects pedals, leaving more of a dance floor for the ravers who come to listen to the latest sick beats spanning the various flavors of electronic dance music. Trance, house, dubstep, and electro-swing are all common sounds here, mixed and manipulated by a different producer every night. This is the Double Bar, home to the best live music in Canterlot. And the drinks aren’t half bad, either. [hr] Brindisi looked up from cleaning glasses behind the bar at the sound of approaching hoofsteps and saw Octavia Melody wandering into the otherwise empty upper house, looking like her mind was anywhere but there. “You’re here early,” she noted, glancing out the window to the sunny afternoon. “What’s on your mind?” Octavia sat down at the bar and reached into her saddlebag. “This came in the mail today,” she said, pulling out an envelope stamped with dark blue wax. “What is it?” asked Brindisi. Wordlessly, Octavia slid the envelope over to her. She opened it, removed the paper inside, and began to read. After a few sentences, she looked back up at Octavia. “Princess Luna herself would like to commission a piece from you?” “Shh! Not so loud,” Octavia frantically whispered, glancing around the room to see if there was anyone else there. “We’re the only ones here,” Brindisi observed. “Fine,” Octavia relented. “The thing is, I had no indication that this was coming. None at all. I didn’t even know she’d heard of me.” “You’re the best cellist in generations, and that recording of [i]Quartet for the End of Time[/i] you were on was amazing—” “She’s been returned for less than a year!” Octavia slumped forward. “I’m not ready for this. I’ve written music for a general audience before, but I’ve never written music for royalty. And since it’s Princess Luna, I don’t know what she’d do if she doesn’t like it. I don’t even know what she might like!” “The commission didn’t say?” “Look for yourself,” Octavia said, gesturing to the paper that was still in Brindisi’s hoof. Brindisi looked. Indeed, there was a distinct lack of anything resembling details or terms of the commission. “So go ask her,” she said. Octavia looked at her like she’d just sprouted a second head. “Are you crazy?” she asked. “I’m sure she has much more important things to do with her time! And besides, she might have expectations of behavior that I won’t know and won’t be able to meet!” “I hear Night Court is usually pretty sparsely attended, it’s not like you’ll be wasting her time,” Brindisi said. “And if you’re worried about protocol, then get there early and ask the court officials. That’s their job.” This seemed to calm Octavia down. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose that could work. Thank you.” “Glad to hear it. Now, since you’re here, anything I can get you?” “Manehattan on the rocks, please.” [hr] “What’d she say?” Brindisi asked Octavia the next night. “She didn’t give me much to work with,” Octavia said, dropping onto a barstool and looking out over the audience for the night’s postmodern saxophone quintet performance. “She seems to expect me to be the primary performer, so that’s a bit of a hint for instrumentation, and she felt that five or six minutes was a decent starting point for length.” “Did she say anything about style? Genre?” “She admitted that she doesn’t know enough about the various styles of music since her banishment to give me a useful direction there, and told me I was left to my own devices.” Octavia listened to a few measures of the piece being performed, and winced at some of the unresolved dissonances and cluster chords. “Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what she’d be looking for.” Brindisi went to go mix a few drinks for other patrons, including a refill of Octavia’s Horse’s Neck. When she returned, she asked, “Could you do some sort of ‘music through the ages’? Show off a number of different genres?” Octavia shook her head. “That’s an interesting idea, but it might take more time than I have. I do like the idea of an old-meets-new approach... Oh! I could take a melody from her time and transform it into something more contemporary.” “That sounds like a good place to start,” Brindisi agreed. “Do you have any thoughts on where you might get a melody like that?” Octavia frowned. “A few. But the Symphony’s music library isn’t terribly well organized, and I don’t know how long it would take me to find something useful there. There’s a music historian’s conference in Vanhoover next week, but travel there on short notice isn’t cheap.” “We’ve got a folk singer playing here this Thursday,” Brindisi said. “Maybe you could ask her.” Octavia nodded. “That might do it.” A particularly out-of-tune [i]HONK[/i] from the tenor sax player drew both their attentions back to the music being performed. “I honestly can’t tell if that’s how the piece is supposed to go, or if he’s just having a bad night,” said Octavia. “He did it in the same spot when they played this piece during sound check,” said Brindisi, “so I [i]think[/i] it’s probably intentional. Or that could just be a bad note for the horn.” [hr] Two weeks later, Octavia entered through the door at the base of the lower stairs and made a beeline for one of the tables against the wall. “Didn’t expect to see you down here,” remarked the lower-house bartender, Bar Line, from his spot behind the counter. “You take the wrong stairs on accident?” “My roommate’s the DJ tonight,” Octavia explained, sitting down. “I promised her I’d come and listen, and I figured if I got here a few hours early, I’d have some time to work on this piece I’m writing.” She reached into her saddlebag and pulled out a pencil and several pages of staff paper, some of which already had music written on them. Bar Line nodded. “If you’d like a keyboard to help you hear what you’re writing better, I think we’ve got a spare floating around here somewhere. I know upstairs has one or two that aren’t being used right now.” “That would be wonderful,” Octavia said. Bar Line stepped out from behind the counter and went over to a side closet. His horn lit up as he opened the door and started pulling things out until he found what he was looking for. He levitated the keyboard over to the table next to Octavia’s and set it down. “Don’t have to hook it up to anything to make noise, just if you want it amplified, and I don’t think you do.” “Thank you,” Octavia said, and began to write. Occasionally she reached over to the keyboard and played a few notes, testing the sound of some fragment of melody or some chord progression, but for the most part she was silent. So when, about an hour and a half later, Bar Line heard her playing the same phrase with slight variations over and over and grumbling unintelligibly, he knew the creative process had hit a rough spot. “Having trouble?” he asked. “Somewhat,” Octavia replied. “There’s this bit near the end that isn’t quite coming together, and I don’t know what to do to fix it.” “May I take a look?” asked Bar Line. “I suppose.” Bar Line walked over to Octavia’s table and took a look at the music. “Is this the spot?” he said, pointing at a location on the page. “That’s the one,” Octavia confirmed. “I assume, since this is near the end, you’re trying to tie everything back together.” At Octavia’s nod, Bar Line continued, “What if you tried this?” He played a phrase that was similar to what she’d been fussing over, but with a couple of rhythms and a couple of pitches changed. Octavia listened. “Hmm... no, that’s not quite it either, but maybe this?” She played a passage that took his edits and made two more, then continued for a few more measures. “Yes, that should work.” “Happy to help,” said Bar Line. “By the way, you’ve got maybe an hour before your roommate shows up and we have to set up for the show tonight, and when she does, I’m going to need to put that keyboard away.” “Of course,” Octavia said, and returned to her work. By the time Vinyl Scratch arrived to set up her mix tables and recordss, Octavia had more or less finished the melody and had a harmonic outline written. She was still of the opinion that the piece wasn’t quite finished, that there was something missing that would make it what it wanted to be, but she wasn’t sure what. Bar Line saw the exact moment she figured it out. It was about five tunes into the DJ’s first set, during a more atmospheric piece. Octavia’s eyes widened, and she said something that probably wasn’t meant to be heard by anyone but herself before coming over to the bar. “I think I’ve got it,” she said, and ordered a shot of Cutie’s Mark whiskey. [hr] “And this establishment has existed for decades?” asked Princess Luna, as she and Octavia ascended the stairs to the upper house, where the commissioned composition was set to be performed. It was early afternoon, so the bar was almost completely empty — which was probably for the best, since the Royal Guard were still not entirely comfortable leaving Princess Luna unsupervised in public. “So I’m told,” Octavia said. “The basement was turned into a second performance space during a renovation about fifteen years ago, I think, and I don’t believe it always had its current ability to draw performing talent, but it’s been around for a while.” “Good afternoon, Your Highness, and welcome,” Brindisi called out. “Octavia, you and Scratch can begin whenever you’re ready.” Vinyl Scratch was set up on stage next to Octavia’s seat, with her rig and a set of speakers ready to go. "Yes," Luna said. "I am very much looking forward to hearing what you have created for me." Octavia walked over to her cello, picked it up, took a breath, and began playing. She’d chosen to write a theme and variations, and the theme was one of the folk songs she’d learned from Roan Baez after her performance the previous month. She played the theme unaccompanied, but when she began the first variation, the reason for the DJ’s presence became clear. The cello could cover the lower register just fine, but adding an electronic background on top and a tasteful dance beat fleshed out the auditory landscape and added color to the piece. The first several variations turned from fast to slow to fast again, to a modal shift from major to minor and back, to a metrical change so that the piece was three beats to a measure instead of four. The last few instead added more and more ornamentation to the melody and more complex beats, making it harder and harder to play each new variation at the same tempo as the last one, but Vinyl wasn’t slowing down for her at all. Which was fine; it was what she’d written, after all, and she could keep up — if she couldn’t, she had no one to blame but herself. She did notice a few wrong notes slipping into her performance and tried not to wince. The wonderful thing about a premiere was that no one knew how it was supposed to sound, so if she didn’t let on that she’d made a mistake, it could slip by unnoticed. The final variation was the most high-energy of all, and Octavia felt herself breathing hard by the time she finished her last sixteenth-note triplet run and hit the final chords. The empty room was acoustically live enough that the last note took a couple of seconds to fully decay. “So,” she asked after the echoes had worn themselves out, “what did you think?” Princess Luna looked her straight in the eyes. “It is a pity that ‘court musician’ is no longer an appointed position,” she said, “or I would hire you both on the spot. Miss Melody, I may not know much about music in this day and age, but what you played sounded surpassingly difficult and very well crafted, and I am certain that few could have performed it as well as you did.” Octavia nodded, not trusting herself to speak. “And Miss Scratch,” Luna continued, “your contributions no less enhanced the piece for being in the background. Support roles are often the most important of all.” Vinyl, too, nodded silently. “I may not be able to personally sponsor you as I once could, but I will speak to my sister and strongly recommend that you be first on the contact list the next time we need music written for a momentous occasion.” “You honor us beyond words, Your Highness,” Octavia said shakily. “Thank you.” “Princess Luna,” Brindisi spoke up from behind the bar, “would you care to stay for tonight’s performance? We’ve got a Zebrican percussion ensemble, and I’m told they are not to be missed.” [hr] The musicians that come here are a varied lot, but they all recognize quality when they hear it in any style and are willing to help each other out if asked. A popular cellist can get a melody from a folk singer. An operatic soprano might take a duet with a country fiddle player. A mixologist can ply her trade at both alcohol and sound balancing, and be equally skilled at both. Any of these things and more might happen, and do, here at the Double Bar.