Rehearsal and House Circle

A Tuning the Air Journal

Saturday August 22, 2009 – Rehearsal and House Circle

Full house for the morning sitting at my place. Impossible to overstate what a difference this makes.

From there to Fremont Abbey Arts Center for rehearsal. We had kind of a rolling cast from the Performance Team there, as the Wilsons were tag teaming. Jaxie there for the first half. Bob joined at the mid-point break and we had the full team there long enough for a short photo-op necessary for a bit of promotional material. After the photos, Jaxie left to take up the childcare duties and Bob remained for the second half. Then Taylor needed to leave 30 minutes early for a work-related social obligation.

We began the rehearsal with a circulation in C Harmonic Minor. Then on to the creation and construction of a new zither that had been knocking on my door since last week’s rehearsal. The room really lends itself to some sonic stretching out, and this zither in F Harmonic Minor definitely qualifies as stretching out; certainly stretching out our capacity to hold a pattern. Jaxie noted that with something new like this we have a little window into the audience’s experience. A kind of mind-boggling wonder at the simple sound of the beast that we tend to lose once we have figured out how to execute it.

Beyond that I had no particular plan for the day. The truth is that we just need to play in the room as much as possible in order to figure out how to play in the room. What works, what doesn’t work, what needs to be reconsidered. We have very specific tempos for the pieces we play, but these may need to be reexamined for this room. So we played. Some very specific work on a couple of bars of the Shostakovich prelude, and then a couple of runthroughs with and without the metronome. We touched on the Zeppelin medley, “The Wig Maker”, “The Bus Artist”, and a bit of retooling on a revibrated “Voices of Ancient Children.”

Some circulation at the end of the day highlighted just how quietly we can play in this room and remain completely audible. That’s the good news. The bad news is that everything else is audible as well. Today’s reminder of that in the form of my intensely squeaky drum stool and someone else’s creaky guitar strap (Ian, I think, but I couldn’t tell for sure).

Back to my place for 90 minutes with members of the House Circle. Four onboard for this one. We focused on circulating diatonic arpeggios through specific sequences. It has been my observation that as players transition from the Gee Whiz Innocence and Magic of the early circulation experience into learning to take responsibility for the note choices, the significance and repercussions of specific notes within a particular tonality is the most difficult thing to grasp, and even harder to hear and respond to in real time. I always begin these circles with a circulation with little or no direction or precondition, other than possibly suggesting a particular tonality or scale. Then we work through what are often pretty grueling exercises in directed circulation designed to both strain the available attention and to highlight some aspect of musical organization. And then we end with another “free” circulation. What I always notice is the change in the quality of listening between the opening and closing circulations. The opening one is generally kind of rambling and random, occasionally blessed by the undeserved appearance of Music. At the end something different is going on. Sometimes it is merely self-conscious. Often in fact. But there is always a palpable listening happening, and where the early circulation might have moved into moments of grace and/or luck, these tend to be highlighted by moments of real group intelligence and intention.