Rehearsal

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday August 31, 2009 – Rehearsal

Working in the Wilson living room. Chris was out due to his job, and we had an out of town guest sitting inside the circle.

We began with some full group work on an exercise that RF presented to us at the last Raft Island course.

I described a few things that I felt needed our attention tonight, and we began with “Cultivating the Beat”. Ian, Howard and Travis went to another room to work through Ian’s new part. The rest of us ran the piece together with the metronome. Very quickly Ian returned and requested help from the composer (Bob), and a little while later Taylor was drafted to help as well. It turned out that there was a passage in which the players and the score disagreed, and the conclusion was that the score was correct. Consequently there was some rapid re-learning going on. During this time, those of us left in the circle ran a number of other pieces as well, including “My Precious Dream”, “The Bus Artist” and “Twilight.” After everyone rejoined the circle, we ran the corrected “Cultivating” several times.

From there we moved to the Shostakovich prelude. The melody limping again, but differently, since one of the circulators was missing. We brought Bob and Jaxie up to speed on what we had observed on Saturday regarding dynamics, and did a bit of drilling on one particular transition.

A short break.

In the remaining time we simply ran “King for a Day” – which was overdue, but sounded very solid – and worked out the reorchestration of the zithers at the end of “Scorched Air”.

Next rehearsal will be on Saturday afternoon at my apartment, after the Monthly Open Circle which will take place at Fremont Abbey in the morning.