Rehearsal at the Wilsons

A Tuning the Air Journal

Monday September 14, 2009 – Rehearsal at the Wilsons

Five in the living room for the morning sitting today. I’ve had Saturday sittings less well attended. Very nice. The AAD began today, and I concluded by sending good wishes. My own participation I am describing as “doing the AAD, AAD.” I have several small commitments that I will use to work in parallel.

Evening rehearsal at the Wilsons. Members of the House Circle were on board as well, plus Pablo who was in town for work.

We began by meeting all together, and began to take a fresh look at “Eye of the Needle”. This is a group task we are taking on to prepare for the course in October. The idea was to go back, literally, to the drawing board and get inside this piece.

First we simply played the piece. Jaxie put a piece of paper up on the wall, and we began to sketch out the form of the piece using descriptions. I provided the broadest “broad form” of the composition: there’s an Intro, then the main body of the piece, then an Interlude that brings back the theme from the Intro, then a short restatement of the main body, then the Coda. From there we went on to filling in a kind of first level detail: key signatures, time signatures, number of bars, and some general descriptions of what is happening, such as entrances of the various parts. From time to time, one or more players would be called upon to demonstrate something under discussion. For myself, and I dare say a number of members of the performance team who took themselves through this process some years ago, the biggest challenge of the evening was to resist simply pouring out pat answers. For me that was largely accomplished by keeping my mouth shut (with only marginal success, I fear) and listening to the less experienced folks in the room reason it out. We came to a first level map of the entire piece, and then played the composition once again before moving on to the rest of the rehearsal.

A short break. The House Circle moved to Jaxie’s office to continue their work, and the Performance Team to the living room. With only about 45 minutes left, we focused on a number of zither and circulation issues that need the full team present. Began with the closing zither from “Scorched Air”. The circulation, now vectorized, at the end of the Zeppelin medley has been a sore spot, so we dug in and dealt with the timing and flow. We did the same with the timing of the opening zither in “In My Room”, and then went on to play the entire piece. Also touched on the flow of the F Harmonic Minor zither when it has the returns and reverses.

Ended the evening with one more runthrough of “Eye of the Needle.”